jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
I have a Fire Phone. I couldn't resist, when they were $199 and include a year of Prime (which I already pay for), it's $100 for a quite high end piece of hardware. And, the hardware actually is really great. Camera is great, display is great, touchscreen is great. 2GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage. It's very high end phone hardware at a very low end phone price.

That said, it's an awful phone. The OS feels clunky and old. The 3D stuff is, as mentioned in the article, gimmicky and pointless. Firefly is just annoying (it seemingly pops up at random, as if to say, "Hey, wanna buy something? You should totally buy something."). The interface, where it has diverged from Android, is confusing as hell. Menus pop up when you rock the phone, or shake it, or something, I dunno. It just randomly pops stuff up sometimes and I don't know why or how to replicate it. The status bar is disabled by default and the launch screen is more limited and frustrating than the original launch screen on the G1 (the first Android devices). Camera comes up every time I try to adjust the volume because the buttons are right next to each other. This also seems to be a trigger for Firefly...maybe. I honestly don't know how Firefly is called into existence, but it's popped up dozens of times since I've owned the phone, none of which were times I wanted it.

Amazon built the phone Amazon wanted. It's not a phone designed around customer needs/wants, at all. They even pulled out a bunch of functionality for seemingly no reason other than they want people to buy more things from Amazon. For example, you can't use your music on the device as a ring tone or alarm (a feature that has existed in Android approximately forever). But, Amazon will sell you ring tones.

It is possible to sideload the Google Play Store, which is one redeeming characteristic of the phone...so, I have GMail, Firefox browser (which is not in the Amazon store, but can also be sideloaded), calendar, docs, etc. But, it's still not a pleasant phone experience. The UI is needlessly opaque, and the unique features of the phone are pointless or annoying. The unique features are also not at all discoverable. I didn't know Firefly could recognize music and art, that's kinda neat. I don't know how to use any of the buttons and movements to make the phone do things. They seem nearly random when I try to use those features, which is quite frustrating.

I gave it, I think a 3 star review, at Amazon, on the strength of the hardware, the very low price, and the fact that Google Play Store can be sideloaded relatively easily. But, I would never recommend it for someone who isn't a tinkerer. It's just too confusing, and the native apps (for email, maps, etc.) are weak.

Edit: And perhaps the most frustrating thing is that there is no back button. You have to do a swipe gesture from the bottom (the very bottom, or it scrolls instead) of the display. I sometimes find myself having to attempt this a half dozen times to make it work. It is incredibly frustrating; and worse, I find myself doing it on my Nexus 7 (which has a back button and doesn't respond to this gesture). It's training me to be their kinda stupid.
Actually, the parallels are striking. All sorts of dangerous idiots on all sides are heading for the big trapdoor erected over the completely and utterly predictable power vacuum we left in Iraq.
When I attended the launch, they had a hands-on period where I noticed a few of the issues people have pointed out in reviews. But every phone has issues.

More worryingly, I asked about a few things that the unique tech in the Fire Phone could be used for - nothing groundbreaking, just little suggestions: "It'd be great to have the tilt controls do ____ here" or "Do you have plans to allow users to turn this on/off?" Things like that. Almost all were met with a "wow, no, I don't think so, we haven't looked into that at all."

I don't mean to suggest I'm some sort of UX genius or anything, these were just ordinary features one would expect to have been considered (and possibly rejected) based on everything Apple, Google, and Microsoft have done to advance the state of the art. Amazon hadn't given a moment's thought to any of them! Combined with the other stuff they tend to do in their original hardware, it cemented my thoughts that there's some kind of weird naivete pervading their entire hardware process, and no one to even recognize it, much less address it.

I was pretty sure from the second I was given the phone to hold that it would be a dud, but felt it was possible that ingenuity might save the day. Unfortunately not the case, and it's too bad because there's so much cool stuff in there!
I read "network attack specialist" as more general than that. I imagine there's a lot of demand for network penetration testing. When it gets down to individual programs, such as email clients, etc, (this is what I think you are implying above) then yes, I agree that it's likely harder to sell the idea of those skills being useful in a consulting context to companies. In that case, I would guess your best path would be to join an established security firm, but I imagine that market is small and highly competitive.
It would be considered old if it was an article in today's New York Times that was originally published three months ago.

This site is called Hacker News and a lot of the submissions here are in fact new or at least news-y.

I welcome older articles here but it would be better if they were marked so.
If that product doesn't get certified, there's probably an opportunity to integrate that feature in existing glass cockpits. I mean, why not a "Land Safely" red button on the passenger board? The reliable autopilot/GPS/software is already here and certified, + then you don't need an iPad for it!
How about cloud9 (http://www.cloud9ide.com), Bespin (https://bespin.mozillalabs.com/), Codemirror (http://codemirror.net/) or Ymacs (http://www.ymacs.org/).

It would be just lame to have another editor on just OSX only, considering that most people have used some script-able code editor (like emacs or vim) that are openly script-able (or compilable).
If it is just for OSX, then there is a specific scripting language called AppleScript which is OSX only and should be even more integrated to the OSX APIs.

Well at least the "Chromium-like" part triggers my thoughts on web based editor.
I agree with most of what you wrote here. One point I would like to add though is that there were massive amount of military investments that went into plane development during both world wars and the cold war, allowing complete new features.

Also, it's not like no ones tries to bring new technologies on the market. But the number of planes sold is nowhere near the number of cars sold, for instance. So new investments are pretty risky. Look at the Dreamliner or the A380... Both delayed and still with major design issues. In the general aviation, a European motor maker introduced diesel motors for plane, which allows a much lower mileage, and an economic flight of even 2-props planes (see DA-42). There were so much technical issues that the company got bankrupt. It's not a compelling argument for new customers tempted to buy such a diesel plane. When you buy a plane, you don't want the company to go bankrupt in 3 years, so you take a Piper or a Cessna, even if these are massively inefficient.

Finally, look at a C172 glass cockpit. The outside design may still be the same as it was 40 years ago (as is the motor, almost), but the cockpit is totally different, with brand modern software, complex GPS & autopilot capabilities, etc. Flying has become quite different in the last 10 years because of that.
"If I was forced to pay for a television station out of my taxes, like the BBC."

If you don't watch live, then no licence is required.

Minor point, but the licence isn't a tax. It's optional.
I doubt that most people even remember uuencode, or what it was used for, or, where the name originates from... But: very oldschool.

Maybe there should be a smartphone app to import tiny apps by snapping pictures of uu/base64/ascii85 encoded archive files?
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine is a very good book on the crisis. The Economist calls it "One of the best books on the recent crisis". I very much agree with this assessment. It's written by the former investment banker Michael Lewis who is the author of Liar's Poker and Moneyball.
That is good developer advice. But from the perspective of a user there is no harm in assuming the website your using stores your password as unsalted sha1 and go from there.
Modern Hinduism is natural evolution of Buddhism and Jainism? Buddhism and Jainism branched out of Hinduism, not the other way round. Buddhism and Jainism are "relatively" new religions. Hinduism is older than even the Abrahamic religions.
Well there are ways of presenting a personalised link, and a link containing a total number, without resorting to iframes, or even client-side code. I'm not seriously suggesting they be used, merely pointing out that the multiple-iframes functionality is not a default requirement of every page on the web, as the article suggests. Some studies have shown that articles with facebook like buttons receive fewer likes than those without.

FWIW, on a site I work for, we use a plain facebook like link without any personalisation because that's all we require, and we recognise that it respects our visitors' privacy more than the full-on iframe variant.
I would think that economists would be good for the 'big picture' in judging what makes for effective deterrents and attractive targets, going by the incentives and disincentives.
I found this a little disturbing (having just put a new app on a node there - fortunately pre-production), but then I remembered that the last two places I worked paid the premium to be hosted at 365 Main in SF, with its flywheels and diesel generators etc, and that didn't turn out to be magic:

http://www.365main.com/status_update.html

The moral of the story for me is;

* These things are complicated

* Failures will happen

* You have to be prepared to deal with them
Thanks for sharing. We're you able to identify with Linode the outages for each datacenter or do the stats include any false positives?
Adagio is a great tea shop in general, and tea is particularly well suited to mail order. Their tiny sample tins (usually ~1oz for ~$2) are a great way to try several varieties out.

If you've got a good local tea shop, definitely give them a try though. They should be able to steer you towards varieties you'll really like.

I particularly like lapsang souchong (smoked Chinese black tea), sencha (Japanese green), and Assam (Indian black).
What makes it even more exciting is that some of the companies were a bank and a hospital. Lesson learned - a bank gets far more anxious than a hospital when their servers go down.

I'm pretty sure there were Zombies roaming the aisles of servers where the power was out, that might help the box office sales.
I've often wondered about the reasonableness, or otherwise, of the popular fear that one's baby might be smothered by a pet cat. When my daughter was a baby I was careful to keep the cats out of her bedroom, because I wasn't sure, but I suspected the risk to be overblown.

Are there any data on how often this actually happens? This article from the British Medical Journal http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1499543/pdf/bmjc... suggests it has happened at least twice in recorded history. If that is representative, the real risk is presumably rather small.
Great eye! I'll fix this and push it out.
We use isort[0] for this. It even has a "black" compatible profile that line spits along black's defaults. Additionally we use autoflake[1] to remove unused import statements in place.

[0](https://github.com/PyCQA/isort)

[1](https://github.com/PyCQA/autoflake)
> on long term projects

Aren't frameworks harder to use in a long-term project if the codebase is not constantly updated to match the new framework standards?

For example, a code-base written in React (pre-hooks) is probably pretty hard to understand for a developer that has only learned React recently and uses hooks for everything.
Schwin IC4 spinning bike $700
New Kindle tablet $40
YouTube $0

Has been working like a charm for years now. Feel fancy, just BT to connect the Peloton app to the bike if you want to attend an actual class.

Note, that's a nice bike, you can get no name bikes from Amazon for $150.
Personally, I liked Laravel when I was first investigating it years ago, but was always a touch put off by the pervasive "I am beautiful, adore me" undercurrent throughout its design, documentation, and even comments. I'll be the first to admit that's not a rational critique.

Having said that, though, Laravel is relatively unusual among major frameworks in that it doesn't seem to have been developed in tandem with a real-world project like Rails and Django were (e.g., BaseCamp and the Lawrence World Journal's internal CMS), but rather developed just to be "a better framework." Each successive release of Laravel seems to push even harder at tying you up with other Laravel add-ons, some of which are paid services. Rails and Django are open-source projects, but Laravel is an open-source product. Again, not necessarily bad, but there's an increasing feeling that the Laravel commercialization model is "give us sufficient money and you'll barely have to write any code."

My other nitpick with Laravel is that learning to develop with it is often learning to develop specifically for Laravel rather than learning to develop for PHP. This is a charge leveled against Rails and Django, too, but Python and (perhaps especially) Ruby are just better languages for developing DSLs in. Laravel has to jump through a lot of hoops behind the scenes to do what it does, leaving you with a framework that isn't particularly nimble and design patterns that often aren't particularly applicable to the rest of the PHP world.

If you're willing to hop fully on board with the Laravel train, none of this may be an issue for you. But at this point I'm not convinced that smaller PHP projects, at least, might not be better off without frameworks at all. Use Composer to pull in specific packages that you really need, and ask "if I can get the functionality I need from this package with an afternoon's work, is the package bringing anything to the table that I still want" before adding them. (Sometimes the answer is "yes," but not always, and I tend to be wary of packages that primarily just wrap other packages.)
Why would someone choose this over Microsoft's Power Platform or Salesforce's platform?

Interesting tool, but it seems like it doesn't have a clear audience in mind. The end user seems to be "everybody" and that's a hard sale to make.
The only part I disagree with a bit is the one where he exempts books. I think it is possible to buy too many. I've probably engaged in this behavior myself. I find it hard to resist buying a good book, but I have a bunch of them now piling up physically and electronically which I find it hard to find time for.

Books piling up exert pressure to be read, but simply succumbing to the pressure to read them all might result in falling victim to what Einstein talked about:

"Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking."
Makes me wonder if the world will turn out like wall-e in the future or if we will recycle. It also makes me wonder if the central banks outcries that we need to consume more to boost economics is good for the environment?

You don't own stuff your stuff owns you. That's why you need a larger home when you can't fit your stuff anymore. You also worry about your stuff, home burglary somebody taking it's, car some taking it or damaging it, dropping your phone or computer etc.
I don't think you need that; I'm trying to find any proof of what you say and cannot really find. If you have a company in HK/SG and live fulltime (6 months + 1 day) in Monaco for instance, I believe you can do business with US companies/citizens while not paying taxes. The hell of living in Monaco doesn't really make it worth the while imho however I know plenty of people who do this.

No proof here but I cannot find the reason why you would need to do what you suggest?
He wrote about gvisor here (July 2020):

https://fly.io/blog/sandboxing-and-workload-isolation/

>As batshit as this plan is, it works surprisingly well; you can build gVisor and runsc, its container runtime, relatively easily. Once you have runsc installed, it will run Docker containers for you. After reading the code, I sort of couldn’t believe it was working as well as it did, or, if it was, that it was actually using the code I had read. But I scattered a bunch of panic calls across the codebase and, yup, that all that stuff is actually happening. It’s pretty amazing.

>You are probably strictly better off with gVisor than you are with a tuned Docker configuration, and I like it a lot. The big downside is performance; you’ll be looking at a low-double-digits percentage hit, degrading with I/O load. Google runs this stuff at scale in GCE; you can probably get away with it too. If you’re running gVisor, you should brag about it, because, again, gVisor is pretty bananas.
> I don't believe it's YouTube's job to make it a completely safe space for kids

I would say it is if the product is literally YouTube Kids... [1]

[1] https://www.youtubekids.com
I imagine the next few years will be quite interesting for the British monarchy.
I think Google still innovate in that, as other commenters have noted, they're creating some interesting file system and database solutions. However, these (among others) are infrastructural contributions to the backend. I think the article is talking about innovation from the average consumer's perspective.

I remember speaking to a friend of mine when Google released Wave. He said Wave was the first real home-grown "product" since GMail and it was his opinion that it was developed in Australia because the office there was a kind of skunkworks plant with little bureaucratic oversight compared to the other Google offices around the world (whether this is true, I don't know). He said Google were at the stage where they are big enough for middle management to stifle real innovation because the individual managers don't need to take the kind of risk required with greenlighting a project like Wave (and look how that turned out!).

To Google, buying an early-stage startup is a cost-effective way of outsourcing the risk-taking and that kind of acquisition is the closest they can now get to serious innovation and staying competitive.
This is an excellent resource for learning parallel programming, on several levels. Don't miss these related tutorials from the same source:

* Pthreads: https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/pthreads/

* OpenMP: https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/openMP/

* MPI: https://computing.llnl.gov/tutorials/mpi/
Would hardly call it asinine. There is a difference between illegality and corruption, and many would argue that us lawmakers have legalized bribery in the financial sector. You may disagree, but that doesn't make the viewpoint ignorant.
Ethically, these doctors are supposed to get reassure themselves that their patients are compos mentis. In practice, though, actually doing so effectively would devastate the plastic surgery industry, especially this sort of fringe stuff. Note that there seem to be about three doctors worldwide who do this as a cosmetic procedure. (It is worth noting that the doctor in the article says he's turned people away, so some sort of screening is presumably being applied.)

There was an amazing Channel 4 (UK TV channel) documentary a while back about penis enlargement surgery. _Every single person_ who appeared in it should probably have been referred to a psychologist. One guy had it done about 10 times.
Then you know you've had covid-19 already, are immune to it, and can't pass it on to others. (For the short to medium term, at least.)
> if everyone on earth just sat still for a couple of weeks, this thing would just vanish.

Actually that in itself would cripple economies, despite being a really good idea (sitting still for a while I mean).

The whole world is operating under an economic paradigm that requires infinite growth forever; the model is decoupled from reality. If we all sat still for a couple weeks, everyone would be better off, but the economy would tank. Better get back to work!
3 inches probably isn't enough to notice disproportion.
Rice and beans have been gone here in the USA at my local stores.
Would the body be out of proportion? If somebody is tall everything thing else is big/long too.
pdr2020’s spelling-correcting comment indeed didn’t add much value, but as it was three words long, it also used up very little time and attention. I think such spelling-correcting comments don’t deserve the criticism you implied. The (minor) benefit of preventing mattlutze from making that particular spelling error in the future was well worth the (minor) effort of making them read a three-word comment.
A population’s physical health is very highly correlated with their economic health. [1]

If COVID-19 has a significant impact on carbon emissions it’s because it caused significant economic depression.

A significant economic depression dramatically increases poverty levels, and increasing poverty would cost significantly more lives even than will be lost to COVID itself. [2]

The life expectancy gap between the poorest and wealthiest Americans is about 15 years. [3]

[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/poverty-vs-life-expectanc...

[2] - https://twitter.com/ballouxfrancois/status/12388371731111403...

[3] - http://news.mit.edu/2016/study-rich-poor-huge-mortality-gap-...
Wow. Really cool.
The password requirement just to fetch IDs from the console feels a bit of a stretch.

Won’t it be better/safer to just ask the user for PSE IDs instead?
I'm not saying their abilities aren't "extraordinary" or at least very impressive compared to what one might naively imagine. I am more saying that people who spend endorsement efforts in other areas also tend to gain enormous abilities and so these are "normal" extraordinary abilities.

The point others have raised about these people not having abilities in other areas goes beyond this "unique talent" "not transferring". The point is that the people with these "abilities" spend a fair portion of their waking hours maintaining them. The memories may be accurate but they're "honed", time is spent codifying them.

Most specifically, the memories are clearly very different anything "photographic".

Just consider, if a person actually a video tape of their entire life, using said tape to answer questions about "what happen on day X" would take a few hours of mental processing. These people answer such questions instantly.

They've made themselves "experts" on one subject, themselves, and the ability give instant answers on that subject is a clue to this...
Do you think people would be interested in a full git workflow (i.e. you maintain the docs via a git branch that you push to the service)?
Maybe your co-workers and clientele are all skilled typists who never make transposition errors. But I've dialed enough wrong numbers due to simple transposition (mental) errors (and made analogous typing errors) to know how easy it is to make them. If 'persons unknown' had to move my personal investment account number around via data-entry, I'd feel much better knowing they were copy-pasting and not manually transcribing.
great talk. inspirational!
1) Read everything written by PG:
http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

2) Find a co-founder.

3) Apply to Y-Combinator:
http://ycombinator.com/

4) If you don't get into YC, apply to one of these:
http://launch.is/blog/2010/12/16/complete-list-of-incubators...
That's a relavent point. High marginal tax rates would create the incentive for people in the higher taxed brakets to seek non-pecuniary benefits. Things like company cars and free jets.
This would suggets we have an incomplete picture form this article.