jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
If there are different preferences for arrangement of keyboard layout, then my vote goes to: it would be amazing if there were a laptop where such things could be customized.
Then the people who want niche 40% or 36-key layouts can go with that, and those who prefer more keys can go with that.

IMO, the row-stagger is an unergonomic, archaic skeuomorphism. This is also a niche opinion.

Unfortunately, I'm sure there are practical reasons why "modular keyboard" can't happen (not enough market interest, strength of the laptop hull suffers if the keyboard is a separate module, laptop couldn't be as thin, etc.).
Doesn't every computer have an acceleration setting for mouse speed, on touchpad and physical mouse?

Conflating novice users with mac users seems a bit unreasonable, especially given how many people have used both at various times.
> then what's the purpose of HTML over web sockets?

Because you can do things stateless HTML alone cannot do.

No one is trying to re-implement HTTP, or even remove it from the equation.

What people are trying to reimplement (or rather, replace) is the HTML + JSON:API + React + Redux mess. Websockets is a means to that end.
Twitter (and FB) would be 2x better if they just removed the retweet.

yeah, sure, it can be gotten around, but

misinformation or sensationionalist crap shared so easily, so cheaply, has a lot of unintended consequences.
I've used both (albeit the Mac was a 2010 Macbook Pro so they may have changed - the Dell is a 2019 XPS13 and is my current travel laptop) and I'd rate them roughly on par. The Macbook had slightly better accidental touch rejection iirc (eg. if you brush the touchpad while reaching for the keys to type) and slightly nicer build quality. The XPS is really nice though.
Role-play GTA is what you're seeing. The gaming industry is that stale these days.
Too funny. That appears to be exactly what they are doing.

Some exec thinks this makes them look like they are on top of things... when in reality everyone knows it’s stupid but just doesn’t care to say it.

Gives me corporate-think flashbacks.
Speaking of fridge platforms, does LLVM target any PIC ISAs?
On unix its a Thompson shell script that pipes an ELF binary to 'exec', I believe
5G is going to be right up there with the 3D TV crazy of ten years ago with worst marketing whiffs of the century.

I may eat my words but bandwidth isn’t close to the top of the list of the average consumer’s concerns. Everyone can Facebook, Instagram, tinder and Uber just fine with LTE.
I think what you mean is that it would be useless for people who need a full SD ports. A MicroSD slot is not useless for MicroSD cards.
Perhaps this one is costing them a lot of money.
I think sscanf is subtle because when you think about what it does (for a given format string), it’s reasonably straightforward. The code in question did sscanf("%d", ...), which you read as “parse the digits at the start of the string into a number,” which is obviously linear. The subtlety is that sscanf doesn’t do what you expect. I think that “don’t use library functions that don’t do what you expect” is impossible advice.

I don’t use my own json parser but I nearly do. If this were some custom format rather than json and the parser still used sscanf, the bug would still happen. So I think json is somewhat orthogonal to the matter.
Overpriced collectibles were around in 2008 and well before. Beanie Babies anyone? Tulips? A fool and his money are soon parted. Only difference here is “digital”.
I enjoyed GTA online but haven't touched it in well over a year, and the insane loading times are definitely a big reason why. For those who haven't played the game it's important to emphasize that it's
usually in the 5minute range, and even then you'll regularly end up with
connectivity issues or other problems that will kick you out of the lobby for
yet an other ~5 minute load.

When I played it wasn't uncommon to spend 30 minutes mostly looking at the
loading screen while you were trying to set up a play session with a couple of
friends.

If you're an adult with limited playtime it's just a complete dealbreaker. You
can't just decide to have a quick 20minute play session if you know that you'll
have to spend at least half of it looking at loading screens.
Aha, thanks. I had found some docs that indicated that clisp supports TCO, but it wasn't clear to me how to make that work.

(I am nominally familiar with Common Lisp, but have never used it in a serious capacity.)
It is alleged that Tencent was formed with funding from the Ministry of State Security[0](Chinese equivalent of KGB). They make propaganda games for the CCP as well[1].

[0] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/23/china-tech-giants-proce...

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-06/tencent-h...
Ironically, this piece which criticizes pages with no regard for the reading experience cropped off the right 20% of every single line, thus making itself unreadable. Worse yet, when I tried scrolling right, I still didn't get the missing text. Instead, it was a solid wall of dark pixels.

I really wish I had Safari 5's reader for sites like this!
No politician ran a campaign on enforcing lockdowns. Nothing was put on the ballot, no votes were held. Where is the consent of the governed to all you who worship democracy?
IANACW, but for me, something energetic and concise like "Help support bringing the world's leading graph DB to Django" helps me get my head in the game a lot faster. I'm closer to "he's making a DB interface for Django" instead of "what is neo4j".

Or even just your opener in your README "neo4django is an Object Graph Mapper that let's you use familiar Django model definitions and queries against the Neo4j graph database" is useful for identifying the players.

Considering the HN audience Django would be known but I'm not sure how many people would know about neo4j. (I hadn't heard of it)
Static typing is normally about "the types are known at compile time". With modern JIT compilers, the difference between compile time and run time isn't so clear, so the question loses its meaning.
SourceHut, maybe? https://sourcehut.org/
Let's not sugarcoat it. If you need to verify trust then it's not trust.

"Oh hey honey, mind if I look at your phone? Oh it's not that I don't trust you, I just need to verify my trust."

eyeroll
Question for anyone in the know at Stripe ... does this make a iPhone work like the existing BBPOS WisePOS terminals and able to interact with a web app _without_ any code running on the phone itself (other than Stripe's)

Or is it more akin to the BBPOS Chipper readers and still needs a custom mobile app to interact with?

ie: can a platform built on Stripe use this for their customers without needing to supply a mobile app?
This old chestnut again. Look, this is really simple. There are 10x people in EVERY endeavor. Why should programming be any different?

My favorite example is Tom Brady. Even among the 32 best quarterbacks in the ENTIRE WORLD, he has stood head-and-shoulders above them for DECADES. It's an extreme example, and I hate sports, but it neatly shows that people CAN be THAT much better than their peers, and NOT necessarily carry the baggage that people want to automatically ascribe to such talent.

A few years back, I started working at a Fortune 250. The manager wanted me to rewrite, from scratch, a database application that kept track of "tuning" changes to ECM software. He had written a program to do it, but it was slow, and falling over as he added features and new groups to it. It took me about a year and half to understand the process, prototype the database schema, and get a beta version up and running, and then a few more months to get all the bugs worked out. Call it 2 years.

At the same time, another group -- who was SUPPOSED to be the ones responsible for writing this kind of software in the company -- restarted a decade-long, lapsed effort to do the same thing. (If they had written proper tools to begin with, this entire class of problem wouldn't need to be solved in the first place, but I digress.) They off-shored the whole thing to a team of 10. It took them another year longer to get to beta, so 3 years.

So 2 man-years vs 30. According to this one project, I'm a 15x programmer.

Their program is so slow, they brought in Microsoft to try to fix it, and failed. My program can display a calibration in 6 seconds. Theirs takes 2 minutes... to get the FIRST PAGE of hundreds. It's so counterintuitive, they've only managed to cajole the smallest engineering group into using it.

My program is still being used by thousands of engineers, and has run with only a few tiny patches for 4 years now.

Our reward for this outstanding success? We were forced to give our application to the other group. My boss was officially reprimanded, and forced out of his position. I was put out to pasture with a boss who buried all of my efforts with bureaucracy. An inquisition was held by the CIO about all of this. The boss that did all of this retribution was promoted.

My old boss got a new position. I left the company and came back in 3 months to work with him again.

Even after 40 years of programming being a thing, large manufacturing companies still want to try to treat programming as though it were production line work, and it's just not. I would guess the situation is better at companies who understand that software is their primary product, but blue-chip companies are going to have to realize that EVERY company is a software-first company now.
The thing is, if you need a really good advisor, you don't give away 6% of your company to do it. That's unheard of in Silicon Valley. If you want to bring on a great advisor, you'll probably only need to give up 1% (or a fraction of it).
It's definitely a challenge to discard your old mental models if/when they start to become hindrances, but far from impossible.

I think this is actually the most important skill one develops by constantly reading up and playing with new technologies and languages. Just as mathematics is as much about learning to reason about things as it is about the particular theorems you prove, learning about technologies and languages and ideas is constant exercise for your brain to absorb new models and reconcile them with ones it has already internalized. Discarding old ones isn't a big deal, because you've been doing that almost continuously anyway. But, like everything else in this discussion, it requires a certain amount of willpower and ability not to take one's own comfortable position for granted.
bpedro, hi there. I have added a link to my portfolio (it's an older version made with weebly) to my profile.
The study does address that possibility:

>Even more intriguingly, they discovered that people's feelings of happiness had much more to do with where their mind was than what they were doing. Only 4.6% of a person's happiness could be attributed to what they were doing, but 10.8% of it was caused by what they were thinking about at the time, and people consistently reported being happiest when their minds were on what they were doing.

However, what I'd suggest is that the happiness associated with an activity isn't 100% a function of the activity in and of itself, but whether or not you're in the right mindset for that activity at the time. Thus it would be possible for the wandering mind to be an effect and not a cause and still be more strongly correlated with happiness than the nature of the activity itself.
I can't believe how many books I've read written by so-called "accomplished writers" that use the exact same language as exampled in the article.
So yeah, the move to the cloud is hurting IBM's traditional core business. But as to the criticism of the current CEO for "doing nothing", the partnership she just inked with Apple seems like a step in the right direction. It's exactly the thing they should be doing to adapt themselves to the cloud era.

Look at this stuff. It's fucking beautiful: https://www.apple.com/business/mobile-enterprise-apps/

Enterprises don't need as much help setting up and running their disappearing data centers. But they do still need help building better software for their business. And more than ever before there's a focus on the ROI of better designed software. Definitely most enterprises don't have that kind of software expertise in house.

I think it would be mistake to advise IBM to try to just focus on competing with Amazon. The margin in enterprise services has moved up the stack and that's where it looks like IBM is moving. Definitely some pain along the way though.
> You even didn't notify the customer about it in the first place.

No customer was ever aware that there was a redundant sensor. To me the 'they didn't tell customers' part of this is really odd, since it's not like it's part of the sales pitch. It's not like when they just stopped adding USB-C ports.
I don't know of any 11" screen computers with giant trackpads, full aluminum casing, around 9 hours battery, backlit keyboard which go for less than $ 899. I'd be glad to be shown one, though!
But how many "Covid" deaths would have been attributed to something else if we hypothetically had never become aware of it? Hopefully we are able to answer this someday, with more reliable data, and a thorough analysis of the events that are occurring at the moment. I could see the answer ranging from "all of them" to "much less than the majority currently think". I just hope we can answer it with confidence, so we are better prepared in the future.
To a certain extent, yes. However, with a binary protocol, at least the syntactic level tends to be fairly solidly locked down, simply because you have to. Two bytes bing-endian unsigned integer of that, four bytes big-endian signed integer of that, etc. The confusion happens at the semantic level. With text protocols, the confusion starts in the parser (see other comments about continuation lines in HTTP, for example).

And I forgot to say in my first comment: If you design a text-based protocol that can carry textual data, make sure it can handle any text you throw at it (and preferrably any byte sequence), i.e. decide and implement a good quoting convention from the start. I have seen a text format, initially used to store config data, but later extended to other things in the system because it was there, that used <<< and >>> as string delimiters. Then some client named something <<<foo>>>. (This was early 90:s, so JSON wasn't invented yet!). And yesterday I spent a large chunk of my working day sorting out problems originally caused by a system exporting semicolon-separated almost-CSV, and an enterprising tester putting a semicolon in a text field.
There is always room for improvement. I get what you're saying, and I used to think that way...

What changed my perspective was getting into meditation, and embracing the idea of awareness and deliberation in every moment, trying to do well every single thing I take up, and not just in programming, but also in cooking, eating, sleeping, walking, speaking, thinking, seeing, peeing, pooping, etc.

There is always room for improvement, space and time to do it "just right", what is in Russian called "sovestno", meaning "without shame and in good faith". The closest approximation I can think of in English is "consciensiously".

Once I started thinking this way, my perception of banality and repetitiveness fell away. No task is banal, no task is a repetition, but each one is unique, and must be perceived as such. Once you see it that way, you'll begin to find room for improvement everywhere.

I think it has helped me a great deal in becoming better at programming.

(See also: Bruce Lee, 10000 kicks quote.)
I love the concept. Finally someone gets what matters in a laptop. Other companies have made similar products (I have an ultralight Samsung that I love) but they always seem to lose interest and the next year's model comes out bloated and heavier.
Check out FatFractal (http://fatfractal.com). Disclaimer: I'm on the FatFractal team.
Agreed, plus I believe they split 1:2 in 2003, which has to be accounted for as well.
> He will not be remembered for transforming Microsoft into one of the most important enterprise software companies.

Windows NT/2000 and Exchange had already killed the established leaders in their fields, and SQL server was pretty close to #2 database already, in 2001.
Yep. I just want to actually see you plop some if-else and for/while loops on the board in any Googleable language. I'm the one with the laptop/phone and I can learn that language on the spot if I need to.

It's basically "find the first string in an array of string that has the letter 'b'" difficulty of questions. Anyone who actually codes can whip something up in a minute and we can move on. But it's always surprising how many people spend half an hour on that and still don't get anything workable.
Unless it's actually, say, rape. In which case by all means bypass HR and go to the police.

Though you should probably report it to HR as well.
DabbleDB isn't an obviously fit with twitter. Was the acquisition primarily for the talent?
I thought Erlang was quite old?
Nope, not if you aren't coming up with the ideas.
It is very important to differentiate between House and Skyscraper. You can't build a skyscraper (currently) without blueprints. But you can, and it has been generally done, build houses without blueprints. It was even common to build cathedrals without formal blueprints, by the way.

You can apply the same metaphors to software ;)
You don't get people to use your search engine by spending on advertising.
> Public transportation needs to dramatically improve. In a lot of places public transportation is expensive, takes longer, isn't as convenient and still stuck in the same traffic jams that other cars are. Setting aside single lanes for HOV or transit seems incredibly inefficient.

And sometimes it is just a really bad experience. When I first moved to the Bay Area, I would always take BART into the city. Now, I'm willing to deal with the traffic and drive into the city.

I don't need something as posh as the Leap Transit solution, but it would be nice to ride public transportation without worrying about dealing with antisocial people urinating in train cars, etc.
Does that work on anything other than Linux?
Out of curiosity, what are the quagmire-ish aspects of scons? I've been using it for a while, and it hasn't seemed too bad, which probably means that I haven't run into them yet.
Informed arguments for increased immigration are the exact opposite of climate-change denial primarily because they're based on actual evidence. Falsely equating the two is the height of folly. Economists have spent enough time considering the issue to suggest that the anti-immigration concerns (they'll take our jobs) are largely incorrect. As for long-term implications, when you start to consider the impact of second-generation immigrants, the negative costs of the first-generation are balanced out. I'm thinking of a couple studies in particular, but I don't have time to track them down at the moment before I run out the door (though those keywords ought to help you find them).

In any case, suggesting that people are advocating for "unlimited" immigration is a bit disingenuous as it implies a practically infinite supply of new immigrants. Setting aside the question of where the lines would be drawn under any systematic reforms, there are a number of factors that affect whether a person chooses to immigrate (time, expense, tradeoffs of moving, etc.). The simple fact that the entire population of Mexico hasn't already absconded for the United States would suggest that the fears of an endless horde of immigrants are as unfounded as worry over the population of the Ukraine running for Germany because of European border laws.
* Note the conspicuous absence of ctype macros in these definitions. On
* non-ASCII hosts, we can't depend on string literals or ctype macros to
* tell us anything about network-format data. The rest of the BIND system
* is not careful about this, but for some reason, we're doing it right here.

Well that is only a problem if the charset is converted to something else. Are there still systems out there without a C compiler that can be told to use ASCII?
Biology is based on complex interactions among proteins and genetic material. There is no way to construct generalities about such systems that bypass careful observation of their inner workings. Just look at how long it took to discover DNA after the discovery of heritable traits. You can't hand wave your way around knowing how these molecules are assembled and transcribed.

Mathematics is an invented tool that can be arbitrarily defined to suit a problem space. There will never be a Grothendieck of biology because the mechanisms of life aren't so neat and ordered that they can reduced to first principles.
Great tweet I found from Cabel Sasser (via @davehayden)

"Gizmodo not invited to the WWDC keynote, and wants liveblogging help? What, they can't just "find" a WWDC badge in a bar?"
Exactly.

Either he needs real "bare metal" experience (whatever that means in this domain :-) or the ability to pick and then absolutely trust one person who does.

Without one of those two no one is likely to end up happy.
I think they must put an alert in the download page.
Steve Jobs may be acting like a 5-year old here, but the thing I like about him is at least he's direct. It's the two-faced liars that I really despise.
Hi everyone:

Very exciting to see this posted here.

I'm the maker of dataquest. I'm a self-taught data scientist/coder, and I wanted an easier way for people to get into the field.

I've been working on it for the past three months, and I'm really excited to see people learning with it.

I chose to teach python because it's one of the best first languages to learn, it's useful outside of data science, and a lot of production data science work is now done in python.

It's missing advanced content, but I'm working on it. Let me know if I can help, or answer any questions!

Vik
Some might also find js-git interesting: https://github.com/creationix/js-git
Less dangerous than a car? Perhaps. Although I'd point out that we require licensure and insurance for cars, and the threat of life in prison if you injure anyone through neglect while operating a vehicle

Baseball? No. These are injuries from 450mm sized quads.[1][2][3]

warning some blood / injuries

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji3Hii_LZOc#t=20

[2] http://static.rcgroups.net/forums/attachments/7/5/2/8/2/a300...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocqB6_y71xE#t=6
Not disagreeing with what you said, just want to point out that Microsoft needs to deal with even more driver from proprietary manufacturers :-)
750k seems like a lot to me as well, however I have done startups that are very lean and all the investors are people that are working on the product.

35-70k of my own money was more than sufficient. The problem is once you're live, trying to get enough income while growing the company and having other jobs so you can fund your own needs makes it very difficult (have failed 7 out of 7, just to varying degrees, 3 made multiples of money back but died off, 4 went down in a flaming pile of dung).

I've done all but one of my startups in the midwest though (one in SF, SF failed out of the gate).

I don't like the money game, so I'll probably never have a startup take off, but trading away too much seems like it's not worth it. I don't do startups to get rich, I do them so I have clients/customers to answer to instead of asshole bosses.

My most successful startup was the one I regret (first I ever did alone 100% on my own dime). I should have gone after money 9-12 months in once I had a stable (although needing lots of work) product and 13 clients.
See also: https://github.com/creationix/js-git

Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/creationix/js-git
That moment when you finally get it that CFG parsers can be implemented using push-down automata... :-)