skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For workaday engineers (e.g., not people attempting to build distributed libraries), the appropriate question about dependency management is, "under what conditions is it appropriate for a person or group outside of your org to publish code into your project?"

Note that this isn't a cost-benefit approach. It simply asks what needs to be the case for you to accept third-party code. Every project is going to answer this slightly differently. I would hope that running a private repo, pinning versions, learning a bit about the author and some sort of code review would be the case for at least most, but apparently many folks feel OK about the unrestricted right of net.authors, once accepted into your project, to publish code at seemingly random times which they happily ingest on updates.

A lot of coders seem to see only the "neat, I don't have to write a state machine to talk to [thing]," or "thank god someone learned how to [X] so I don't have to." But that, combined with folks who don't manage their own repos or even pin things, leads to folks who's names the coders probably don't even know essentially having commit privileges on their code.
0.19% of mobile users have "more money than sense".

99.81% of users don't see the point in buying the $5 "valu-pack" of [insert contrived currency here] to unlock an extra few hours of playtime every day.

Mobile developers get angry and post rants about people being averse to spending as much as a cup of coffee on their abusively designed time sinks.

And other gaming industries are starting to follow suit. There are AAA console/PC titles with microtransactions now, it's ridiculous.
Can Citus handle geospatial sharding?
What's new in SAFe 4.0? New roles and levels
> This is not true. NPM locally caches every module the first time it is downloaded.

This is literally coming from the npm website. Presumably that number is what it says: downloads.
Yeah but why lock in with Microsoft when you can have a cross platform app at the same abstraction and difficulty level?
Good question...I threw in some median numbers here:

https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/a0b69c84ebc00c54c94d#perfo...

Basically, about 2 seconds for the road signs photo. 6+ seconds for the spreadsheet image (with occasional timeouts). So, probably not optimized/ideal for reading large amounts of text
Spring Cloud debuts stateful patterns, better telemetry for Java microservices
What we learned from 3 years of sciencing the crap out of DevOps
https://github.com/braydie/HowToBeAProgrammer/blob/master/en...

This one weird trick has helped me solve so many problems that I thought were impassable in my day-to-day development. Bonus points if you couple it with purposeless walking.
"Although, perhaps restructuring or ditching the freemium model might be the safest bet"

Sadly there wasn't room in the article to elaborate on what form this might take.
First Pokémon Go Screenshots Revealed
+1

I used something like this before a presentation in front of a crowd recently. It almost felt like I wasn't giving enough room for any of the anxious thoughts that would've forced me into anxious mode. Any time I thought any anxious thoughts, they got pushed out by "I'm going to do well and that's that." I was completely shocked afterwards at how well I'd done (from my pov), but it's definitely been great in learning just a tiny extra bit about myself for self improvement purposes.
> Every line is another line that maintainers have to read and understand.

Seriously? This is what you're going with? We're talking about very simple, elementary programming. To be worried about maintaining code that you learn how to do in the first few classes of any programming 101 class is absolute insanity.

> Disagree. If there are issues with npm shrinking not working then you absolutely need to resolve them

Can't resolve them if the module disappears or is replaced with a malicious module. Nor if you or npm are having connectivity issues (which, on the npm side, happens very frequently).

> Just like if you've already written a good general-purpose sorting function, there's no point writing a separate integer sort routine, even if the implementation could be simpler than the general-purpose one.

Not sure what you're getting at. If you need a sorting function you can probably use whatever is built into the language unless you need to sort across a distributed data set in which case write something or find a dependency to use.

> You already depend on your packaging/dependency tools, so you might as well use them all the time.

Absolutely, unequivocally, no. What you're saying is you should install and use dependencies, from third parties which you do not know anything about, for every single, possible thing just so you can use the tools "all the time". That's so irresponsible and backwards.

Use the tools for the job they were meant to be used for. Need a dependency because someone can do it better / faster / cheaper then you? Then grab it by all means. But don't use it for every tiny function and for loop just because you want someone else to maintain it.
I don't really have a lot to say about this article, but I do really love my Pebble watch. 99% of the time, it's just a watch -- who needs all the other fancy crap? But it has the nice features that make it worth it, the best of which is just the vibration when I get a text or call.

I dunno. I think Apple Watch is overkill. But Pebble is just right. I hope they don't go out of business.
No quiz needed, the actual answer should be just "Whatever language you know and can get shit done with".
Same story submitted three times. Isn't there a mechanism to prevent something like that from happening?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11354581

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11351826

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11351665
>> In addition to the stability argument, there are also energy requirements. It turns out fusion (stars) only gives energy up to iron, then it requires energy to make bigger atoms.

That's actually a common misunderstanding. If you fuse hydrogen (or even lithium) with iron, you can get a higher numbered element and some excess energy. See the chart on this page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_binding_energy

While iron is at the top of the curve, that just means you won't see iron-iron fusion. There really is no reason the lighter (common) elements can't fuse with the heavier elements.

This is also the idea the LENR (low energy nuclear reaction, formerly known as cold-fusion) guys are considering. If you fuse Hydrogen with Nickel62 to produce Coppper63 you could get some energy out. Notice that Nickel is already heavier than Iron. Some claim to have seen this copper production in hydrogen-nickel cells. The claims are not really relevant - the math supports it as a possibility. Weather it can happen on earth or in a star is open for debate. One key question is how the excess energy would get out as heat, and there are ideas about that.

I for one find it amusing that people don't think something like this is where all the naturally existing heavy elements came from.
It's about maintenance and testing. Who is going to be responsible for maintaining functionality X? The module developer or you are going to be responsible for everything!

The main question is about caching. Why not just have signed versions of everything floating around?
I can't help but agree, though I think the fall started much before Friends with Baywatch, Howard Stern and MTV.

All of which (including Friends) I enjoyed. But I always have this uneasy feeling, that this "let's give them what they want" culture, which has spread into everything from politics to tech, has all kinds of costs and consequences. Or maybe I am just getting old.
> * To give me at a glance directions when Google Maps is navigating for me, rather than walking around staring at my phone.

This one is actually the killer app for me. I use it while on my bicycle where pulling out my phone and unlocking it to monitor my progress is quite unwieldy. I used to use a bluetooth headset for this, but not having anything covering my ears is both safer and more convenient.
Be careful! If there is no universe in which EUR/USD = R, you are destroying every universe.
Theory != practice.

In practice, you need to balance the overhead of an extra dependency with the benefits from sharing versions with others. When you add a dependency, you also now have a larger attack surface. Any extra dependency adds some amount of friction. Sometimes it is negligible. But, if you look at the overhead across all of your modules, it can add up quickly.

In some cases, the benefits from a dependency outweigh the overhead costs.

In other cases, you just write your own leftpad function and move on.
Which doesn't mean much when a nontrivial amount of ISPs out there don't respect the TTL settings.

Source: Days-long service degradation caused by customer ISP's caching bad DNS information well beyond the 10 minute TTL we had set.
npm has a similar feature, it's called a shrinkwrap.
Clickable: https://doclets.io/
It's not all virtual currency. Sometimes it's extra levels. The ones who don't pay must just uninstall then try one of the other forty million free/freemium games.
The Food Industrial Complex
I'm interested in details. Idaho showed up in comments so many times before, but every time I research it by myself, I can't of don't understand what's so appealing.
I dislike that the filters are strictly defined. What if I wanted to create a category for 'rape' or 'animal-cruelty'? I should be able to add those notes, and have them be silently ignored by unsupporting clients. Even better though, I don't see why the client wouldn't include those new categories in what can be filtered for this specific clip.

Edit: Also, it seems like the severity levels (low/medium/high) are arbitrary, meaning they will vary from film to film. It might make more sense to give categories sub-categories or tags. So for swear words, it would have the sub-categories of all the various words which might be used. For violence, it might have the tags of ('simulated', 'on screen', 'bloody'), etc. That way the viewer could decide what they want to see, and it would be somewhat consistent.
Less common now than it once was. Social norms around random acts of childhood violence have shifted pretty dramatically. Back in the day, nerds were shoved against lockers, given wedgies, or just randomly beaten on in my high school (c. early to late 1990s). From what I've heard from my parents or folks their age, this was even more common in decades past.

I don't know if we're more enlightened now, or if we're simply more protective of, and involved in, every aspect of our children's lives. Either way, I doubt physical violence against nerds is as common as it may have been. Psychological violence, however, hasn't gone away. Bullying is alive and thriving in the US.
You don't own the copyright. You don't have the right to download it on to your hard drive (aka "reproduce the copyrighted work in copies"), except to the extent AGPL allows you to.
You might be right, but the language certainly isn't designed around not having garbage collection.
I really don't understand where GP's comment comes from...you don't even need to look her up; Robin Murphy's byline in the article itself makes it clear that she is a CS professor who directs a center for robotics. How could you possibly compare somebody with that set of credentials commenting on robotics to a "physicist speaking on literature or history"? As someone who's typically a bit skeptical of such allegations, the only explanation for GP's comment I can come up with is sexism... (But I'd be interested to hear any more charitable interpretations or an explanation from the comment's author -- I'm really pretty baffled by the comment.)
From the article:

"The city lawyers brought in a Taser expert whose official testimony seemed to favour them, but when he was asked by Pointer to look at the crime‑scene photos, he said the Taser was off and that it was not something easily or accidentally turned on or off. The light is only on when the Taser is on. Officer Morse had testified that when he arrived to kick it out of Nieto’s hands there was no red light or wires coming from it. The Taser wires are, however, visible in the police photographs documenting the scene."

Real contradictory evidence?
Explosives Detectors Aim to Go Nose to Nose with Sniffer Dogs (2012)
A couple of weeks ago I read a more compelling theory, that also is an interesting solution for the Fermi Paradox. It said something like this IIRC:

The normal evolution of a civilisation of smart species is to arrive to a point where they experience an Intelligence Explosion [0]. (or how Elon Musk puts it: Chances are we're the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence) [1].

In a cosmic scale, given the fact that the timespan to go from industrial/high technology civilisation to a SuperAI is like a drop in the ocean (1000 or 2000 years), it'd be impossible to establish contact unless they co-exist at the same point of evolution, in the same (or near) star system, and in the same period of time.

Something far from probable...

I think that this is the most plausible solution for the Fermi Paradox, we haven't been contacted by Aliens for the same reason that we haven't "contacted" with ant colonies or microbes. We simply can't, we're in a different state of consciousness.

We are probably living among Aliens, but they're too advanced for our reasoning and live in a different dimension/cosmic state.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_explosion

[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/496012177103663104
Ask HN: Is there any open source effort to track locations of public figures?
I googled for this and could not find anything. I think it would be awesome if there were an API where you could request the name of a public figure, and it would respond with all known locations of that person in the past 30 days.

e.g. service/get/tony-blair would return a list of geocoordinates of where he was known to be the past 30 days

This could be useful in aggregate, enabling journalists to compare the locations of networks of people and see when they're overlapping (e.g. to expose corruption, or further an investigative piece).

Does such a thing exist? Presumably it would need to include some amount of crowdsourcing, as full automation would be difficult. But there are so many datasets out there, that an "open source intel" effort could get the data looking pretty complete.

Also, it would be nice to give some of the anti-privacy politicians a taste of their own medicine. ;)
Does NPM is weak?
Thanks for your question!

The README tries to explain a lot of the things, but I can answer questions here, of course, and give an overview.

All in all, the idea is quite simple and the project doesn't really do that much, yet.

As an alternative to commercial providers for content filters, family filters, etc., this project tries to establish an open format that can be used to describe any video source. The filters are split into several categories where each has "severity" level.

This way, you can adjust the filters to your personal needs and wishes when using them. Example: You are terribly frightened by fire because you have some childhood trauma. But you don't care about violence and blood splatters at all. For me, this might be the other way round. So if we can adjust the filters to our needs, they can be useful to both of us.

Since nobody supports this format today (nobody even knew of it until today), a web tool is provided that lets you "transpile" the filters to three popular playlist formats.
Making Competitive Pricing Intelligence Work for You
> They almost have to teach it good vs evil (morals)

Be careful what you wish for.

The same group of people who taught AI to troll will find a way to turn the morals upside down.

With logic.
I really don't understand npm Inc. line of thinking here.

> In this case, we believe that most users who would come across a kik package, would reasonably expect it to be related to kik.com

By this logic a trademark will automatically be awarded to the largest company regardless of all other factors but this is not how Trademark law works.

Is Azer's use of `kik` disingenuous or misleading in any way? I would say no. His use of `kik` is in reference to "Kick starter" which has nothing to do with Kik.com [who has a Trademark registered](https://trademarks.justia.com/858/93/kik-85893307.html) with the following description...

> Computer software for use with mobile devices, namely, computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones for downloading, displaying, transmitting, receiving, editing, extracting, encoding, decoding, playing, storing and organizing text, sound, images, audio files and video files

Azer's `kik` package is clearly not infringing on kik.com marketshare and his use of the term "kik" appears to be valid as it relates to "Kick starter" and has nothing to do with "downloading, displaying, transmitting, receiving, editing, extracting, encoding, decoding, playing, storing and organizing text, sound, images, audio files and video files".

npm Inc. should return this package name back to Azer. Kik.com is overreaching here and I see no case law to suggest that Kik.com should get this name handed to them just because they are the larger entity.
Indeed, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HL_Tauri and http://www.space.com/31497-exoplanets-direct-imaging-next-bi...
>I am surprised the baby boomers aren't downsizing in droves at this point.

Based on people I know, I think a lot of it is that if you own a typical suburban/exurban house and you have the house like you want it, you like the location, you have friends in the area, etc., for many, it's just not worth the trouble/expense of moving even if they could potentially downsize. The exceptions that come to mind are a few people who wanted to move to a warmer climate and/or adopt an urban lifestyle with their kids out of the house.
Great point. On a similar note, I've gotten a lot of use out of stepping through Python algorithmic code using PythonTutor [1], which maintains a visual dashboard of stack frames/variables and heap objects. Very useful, was just using it earlier today.

Doing this manually with a pencil and paper is arguably even better for learning purposes, although significantly more arduous. I should try it.

1. http://pythontutor.com/
These practices may not be as widespread as I assumed, but this is how I've been doing npm dependencies for the last few years.

Originally we used to simply check in the node_modules folder.

Now I check in the npm-shrinkwrap.json (sanitised via https://www.npmjs.com/package/shonkwrap), and then use a caching proxy between the CI server and the real npm.

There's a bunch of choices available for this proxy, I've used one called nopar, but sinopia is also popular. Both Artifactory and Nexus can also be configured to do this, as well as act as caching proxies for a number of other package systems too.
Hmm, interesting thought. Where I take this is that the War Games scenario might be more likely. Given that AI will not just wake up one day fully self-aware and aware of its externalities, I'll assume it learns about things as it needs to know. Needs to know where the opponents nuclear missiles are stationed. Needs to know the major population centers, which are just ints stored in database rows. Needs to nothing about "people" because those aren't parameters worth knowing for the task.

So, yeah, I've always been a Terminator/Matrix kind of guy, but your comment moved me to wonder if I've considered all possibilities.
I would love to see a next & previous arrow for navigation after i complete each section.
The Best 5 Packing Hacks
And yet, race is still today a factor that can be quantified wrt housing:

https://portal.hud.gov/hudportal/HUD?src=/press/press_releas...
If I could use cython everywhere I'd probably use cython.
You can set the environment variable GOGC=off [1]

There doesn't actually seem to be a way to explicitly free memory though so I doubt this is actually used.

[1]: https://golang.org/pkg/runtime/
The difference is that Idiocracy is deliberately criticizing the phenomenon, whereas Friends was unintentionally promoting it.
In Newly Created Life-Form, a Major Mystery
As you can see on the picture yourself, the inside/outside zones are very close to each other. Locating a key with such a precision based on the signal strength alone does not seem possible for following reasons: the key's transmitter is too small to provide stable signal level, the key is located in very anisotropic environment, the car itself changes its shape and hence RF loss from different directions.
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11353287
I graduated from a large public high school in middle America about 5 years ago. There were quite a few fights/acts of physical violence, virtually zero of which was directed at "nerds". If TV show style bullying ever existed it's mostly gone at this point. (Of course this is my experience - others may vary)
I'm sad this doesn't support the canon of having syntactically-functional text colors (and multiple parallel colored "documents").
Targeted Mobile Traffic – Cheap Mobile Traffic
Attack Pattern Is Hiring Developers – Seattle/Bellevue
That is unfortunate. There's been a long history of provinces just screwing each other (Sask just recently put two homeless men on a bus to vancouver).I wonder why the federal govt doesnt have full jurisdiction on immigrant visas.
> I come to this community for every week is to read about new developments in our industry

That's what slashdot is/was for.

Here you come to find highly opinionated and more-often-than-not wrong commenters.
Serious question; why are people willing to seriously entertain the idea of aliens, but not gods?
This is pretty common knowledge within the industry. In fact, more than 4 years ago, they were already calling these users "Whales" (as a fishing metaphor) and actively catering to their interests.

There are people who will spend well over $10,000 a year to fulfill their compulsion for their "chosen" game. The advice in the article is actually rather asinine unfortunately:

>"Game creators should begin to look at pushing more sales after install. Swrve suggests this should be done one month after the game has been downloaded. Another way to keep keen players coming back would be to reduce the privileges given in purchases so they will need to buy more to play more."

It's implying that game creators haven't been carefully playing the analytics game since before freemium was a word. Any of these proposed changes will typically have catastrophic effects on the casual user base which could reduce game popularity and then tank the whale usage (depending on how much the game depended on network affects). Freemium games face the problem that TV networks do, there's too much alternative content out there.

>"Although, perhaps restructuring or ditching the freemium model might be the safest bet."

This is the right answer if you want to make good games. Freemium is an excellent model to optimization profit but it typically is directly counter to what can be considered a "good" gaming experience. The freemium games that have been largely successful (Clash of Clans, Hearthstone, Candy Crush, etc.) were all successful because they were easy to play for free, this garnered more popularity, which brought in more "whales" to support their creators.

I see mobile gaming as a race to the bottom, the margins are razor thin for the company, the pay is mediocre for the employees (as well as growth opportunities). Occasionally King comes along and wins it for a year but there are hundreds of these companies out there and the odds aren't good for them.
Oh, sorry. Then read about MK Ultra.