skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Taking a week off to decompress in and around SF, any tips?
I'm taking next week off after finally rolling out a fairly major code change at $WORK. I've been hovering on the edge of burnout recently, and so I'd like to break up my existing routines as much as possible, spend some time away from my computer, have some fun. For me that probably means some hiking, a little climbing, hitting any tourist sites I haven't seen yet, maybe renting a car and getting outside of the city for a bit. I have a few ideas, but I'd like to see if the HN community comes up with anything.

After all, I'm sure I'm not the only person here working in or around SF who could do with a week away from work to decompress.
My bet: http://www.aliexpress.com/ :)

An example:

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/10pcs-lot-Mobile-Phone-LCD-Di...

US $215.00/lot 10 pieces/lot, US $21.50/piece
My favourite bits in this release:

1. Fix of the repeated-tries of non-idempotent requests bug.

2. Dynamic modules.

3. HTTP/2!!

4. reuseport in listen.

5. SSLv3 disabled by default.

6. UDP Load Balancing.
HDMI does have nice features, like ARC and CEC.

(I'd rather use DisplayPort though)
When we need a device, we just walk into the store. We don't order online and wait around. To be fair, it was ATT & Best Buy where I ran into the limited colors, but that doesn't change the validity of my experience.
It's recently occurred to me that the prolificness of the 3.5mm audio connector is something to revere. Wikipedia tells that it's been around since 1964, with its fame really coming with the Walkman in 1979. So, a connector introduced over fifty years ago is still in wide use today. How is that even possible? RJ11 phone jacks I think were introduced around the same time, but they seem archaic and old-fashioned in a way the 3.5mm audio jack doesn't. It just astonishes me that the audio connector has been a solved problem for this long, and with all the other advances in tech we've seen.... audio connectors didn't need any improvements.

It makes me very skeptical of any replacements. If a fifty year old connector has been essentially flawless all this time, it's gonna be a tough sell to convince me that something else is really needed now.
From everyone who has invested heavily in high-quality audio equipment over the years and understands the dangerous path to DRMed digital, I say "Fuck you Intel!". We don't want your USB-C. We'll happily stick to 3.5mm stereo analog outputs.
> They need the booters to be alive to sell their service.

Well, I think this blog post clearly demonstrate that people are willing to pay for DDoS protection even without any attacks.
This is pretty much a conspiracy theory way of thinking.
They'd actually lose money, because the Bitcoin is worth less than the electricity that they spent. There is no free money.
to create a business model like airmail, but for the android counterpart. It would be cool!
If you didn't yet, try http://concourse.ci

demo: http://ci.concourse.ci
In the UK it's changed and it's not so much that they disclose it as that you can buy them separately. In my case it's like £37/month for iPhone, data and minutes for a 2 year contract or £15 a month if you use your old handset. The latter option wasn't always there.
Agreed, this is the exact reason I went with a Moto G. It was under $200 and I tend to be very clumsy. It runs the latest nearly stock Andriod and is a very smooth experience. The only fault I can find is it's camera. So for someone who finds that very important this may not be an option.
And Netflix and your AAA-titles-producing company both have no moral right to legally harass people who can't possibly buy your things and have to copy them for free, of course. What "damage" they are bringing to you, if you can't get any money from them anyway?
For us it was the 90s/2000s.
Ahh the good old days of having to visit friends to see a PC running Windows 95.
Don't you just feel blessed?
Yeah, we slowly "outlasted" the coworkers and now it's just us over here. Management is happy, we're happy, old coworkers have jobs elsewhere. Side note: we only brought the good parts of the "gang" over, left the deadweight behind.
growth for the sake of growth

Working at a small shop now, and seeing this same behavior, it's a little frightening. In our case, and from my perspective coming from a couple of startups more recently, and large enterprises prior to that: terrifyingly frustrating for a number of reasons.

I'm in a great spot to make suggestions from my accumulated past, but the team and management seem terrified to make the jump and have nestled themselves nicely in the niche of "let's just do what's easy for now" while still telling themselves they want to grow grow grow, but I don't think management is quite aware of what this growth is going to mean internally for our ability to solve problems with the toolsets we have (both for support and project management).
Yet another form of irritating DRM which won't actually prevent piracy.

Take apart any device which supports the copy protection, connect to output of DAC, bypassed.

/facepalm
Parquet is the Open Source implementation of Big Query's first generation columnar storage format. It is based on record shredding and assembly techniques described in Dremel paper (Google's internal name for Big Query). What they are talking here is the next generation (second generation) storage format.
Other HN discussion about this from today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11574705
A virtual reality web is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. As in, how do we make the 'Metaverse' a reality. In particular, I've been thinking about how to best handle distributed identity/look. It's definitely an interesting problem, and it's cool to see tools like this already being built.
Do you have a link for this? I've never heard of it but it sounds cool.
And how do you not consider this innovation?

Innovating isn't just about inventing new technology wholesale. It's also about packaging that technology in a way that makes it useful and desirable.
I had my first bad experience yesterday. There was a big traffic accident and my order ended up taking over an hour. A cs rep called me to apologize and explain the situation and gave me the whole order for free. I didn't expect that at all. Plus, the sandwich was extra delicious and still warm. They pretty much won my lifetime loyalty with that one $15 gesture.
You're a wise man my friend.
The two names we're floating are Makemakemake and Minimake.
Even at that, it isn't just about making a profit, it is about making more profit (or often just revenue) each quarter. Your business could be operating at a 40% profit margin that but be called a failure and run against on the stock market when that doesn't become a 41% margin next quarter.
Apparently this person was not using technology any time before the iPhone?

Quirks, useless error messages, website rendering problems... they've been around forever. Has this person even tried to install software packages on Linux 10-15+ years ago?

Have software developers given up?

I'd argue the vast majority never cared.

And really, why bother caring so much that you take to the web glorifying others glitches?

We hear about data theft stories, companies shutting down due to data loss fuckups... life goes on. It's shit that many people are burned because of these things, but really our society does not care. The loss is absorbed for the most part and we move on.

Stop being so dismayed with the world, or how other people aren't as good at things as you are. Move along.
NixOS is by far my preferred distro as well. Was rather disappointed to not find it mentioned anywhere in the article...
The Erdogan Insult Mess Gets Worse
Wallace Stevens has always been my favorite poet, and also somehow a strange counter-model to the modern "desk job" existence. He was an introvert who worked a whole career as a mid-level executive. And he also created incredible linguistic and philosophical gems, over and over, for thirty years. (Also, he was first published at age fourty-four.)

The disconnection between going to work every day at Hartford Insurance, and writing, say, this, is something that I have spent a lot of time thinking about, and still find fundamentally mysterious:

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
Thank you. I'll watch this now.
Since when does innovating really mean making something new? I think that already has its own word: inventing.

"Innovating" is a business buzz word. Its not meaningless, but I think that its meaning is far from inventing/creating.
I never knew what that port was for, thanks for clarifying, really, I'm not kidding.
I thought Bluetooth was supposed to eliminate the need for the 3.5mm jack...
Why? I don't see how a d100 in a bowl would make it easy to cheat.
My iPad v1 still works. Not great, but it's still around.
Oh, thats nothing. Just today Firefox managed to freeze up the entire X server with some WebGL content. Gedit become unresponsive several times, also had rendering faults (just 640kb file with autogenerated html and js).
SublimeText2 crashes daily. (it's faulty plugin)
Office outlook for Web is a general usability horror and has many features that do not work. Win10 has number of bugs that I encounter almost daily, Edge is generally very buggy.

I think generally all these problems are indicative of several factors combined. Laziness, general lack of attention to detail and pure developer incompetence, general need to push out stuff too fast (marketing decisions policies) and then finally complexities in the software systems itself. Today any given software system is enormously complicated to a degree that nobody really understands the systems completely. In fact it's a more or less a miracle that things work as much as they do considering all the billions of bits that need to be just right for me to even write this comment. That being said, I don't think there are shortcuts here. Better quality can be achieved but it requires the mindset for doing things that way. And it's going to require testing. And a lot of it, unit tests, regression tests, automated test suites.

Personally I find that when I write code I often need more unit testing code than the actual code to cover the system under test functionality properly. I'm talking about a ratio of up to 5 lines of testing code to a 1 line of real code. Sometimes I can get close to 2:1 or 3:1 if the function/class/method is not very complicated. Anyway even if you now take that conservative ratio of 2:1 and go look at any random open source project I'd be surprised if you would actually find that much testing code there. Good luck.
Why does it act like this?
Well, they had a good run. I wonder what's next.

I don't think anyone was surprised though, around 2014 we saw the writing on the wall. I mean take the Nexus 5, I have plenty of friends who have one and it's basically like they bought a microwave. It just works, it's fine, and they're expressing 0, and I really mean 0 interest in upgrading their microwave. They'll keep it for as long as the battery lasts and they don't break it. And that's really a last-generation phenomenon, before two years ago I was looking forward to new mobile tech. Now the changes aren't meaningful anymore.

And now people are openly expressing it, too. Like the CEO of sony, who spoke about the end of innovation in smartphones a few months ago. I mean take my dad, he just bought an LG G3 for $8 a month on a 2 year contract. Now this phone is 2 years old, not top of the line... but it's $8 a month and it comes with a nice screen that's almost double the PPI of the latest iphone, 3gb of ram, a nice snapdragon 801 chip, 3000 mAh battery, it just works fine and it's just really cheap. In two years, the latest G5 will be $200 too, and you'll buy G3 like phones for $100. What can we innovate in smartphones that's worth $700 to most people? That used to buy you a magical device that could do things nothing else could, in your pocket just a few years ago.

Anyway, I wonder what's next for Apple. There's no rumours of anything happening except its car. Wearables will expand. But they're all late or super late to market in these product categories. That's not a bad thing, they'll obviously make money, but it's not comparable to creating a real smartphone industry.
But if it's stopped, why would you expect it to be more likely to move suddenly (and without the doors closing) because it's not level?

I've often seen (and used) lifts with notices up like:

Warning: does not level. Wheelchair users use other lift.
I wish the industry had moved to 2.5mm back then. 3.5mm is great, it has survived the test of time (introduced in 1964!) because it is so good, but 2.5mm is only better than 3.5mm (except for the manufacturing and migration costs).

If the industry had moved to 2.5mm back then, Apple and Intel and the DRM-lobby would have had one less excuse for phasing out analog audio ports today.
Profitable bitcoin mining is all ASICs in places with favorable energy costs. Regular computers in schools are not going to make any profit.

Here's a story about a man who installed SETI@Home on a bunch of school computers without getting correct permission.

The extra electricity bill caused some consternation.

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/300

And here's someone who lost their job because of it: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20041010/2225204.shtml
I was at a small bookstore in Palo Alto and they accepted Apple Pay without even knowing it themselves. It really depends on the retailer and if they upgraded their POS terminals.

That being said I use it at trader joes and sprouts, and when Starbucks finishes rolling out Apple Pay I'll use it there too.

It's just very convenient and fast. It makes chip and pin cards seem like five steps backwards.
Mitsubishi is a bad one to judge by. Aside from this, there's:

In what was referred to as "one of the largest corporate scandals in Japanese history", Mitsubishi was twice forced to admit to systematically covering up defect problems in its vehicles. Four defects were first publicised in 2000, but in 2004 it confessed to 26 more going back as far as 1977, including failing brakes, fuel leaks and malfunctioning clutches

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_Motors#Historical_t...

Basically, I don't trust them further than I can throw them.

Besides, this latest scandal goes back 25 years, and we definitely have made large strides in fuel economy over that time. (Though much of the gain has been offset by things like increasing vehicle weight for safety & comfort)
An interesting piece about the 3.5mm audio connector from the BBC:

The 19th Century plug that's still being used

"The 3.5mm headphone jack is essentially a 19th Century bit of kit - it is a miniaturised version of the classic quarter-inch jack (6.35mm), which is said to go back as far as 1878."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35253398
Now? Next month? Next year? People have been saying that (and betting on that) for quite a while.
Pardon me, but I don't get the relation between AMD's Zen and USB/non-USB audio...
Software development is still young. 30 years ago it really wasn't an industry and 50 it was pretty much an academic venture.

We have better procedures and tools. The groups not using version control, unit tests, peer reviews and other common means to increase quality will be out-competed by those who do.

Just write the best software you can, with the best group you can in the mean time and in the long run this will sort itself. Of if you think you can sort it out, try to.

I don't know what "sorted out" looks like but I would not be surprised to see apprenticeships like plumbing and HVAC or certifications like medicine and law. Sorted out could look like just about anything, perhaps we will be drenched in shitty software until unit testing is taught to second graders along-side basic arithmetic.
No, Apple doesn't sell parts, though it would be nice if they did.

The main way screens appear in the repair business is from companies in China that buy back screens with broken glass but functional LCD. They then replace the glass with new glass. Most of the screen is OEM, but not the top glass. They then ship these to repair shops and distributors, who use them to replace screens.

That's why I mentioned in a previous comment that it's all about the warranty with a repair shop. No shop will warranty a cracked or broken screen, but most decent shops will warranty digitizer (touch) issues as long as there's no physical damage to the screen. That type of warranty is a must-have--there are only a small percentage of screens that go bad after a few days or weeks of use, but it really sucks if you get one and the shop refuses to replace it.

> The whole electronics repair business seems rather immature and shady compared to something like car repair.

Well, both are shady (plenty of YouTube exposes on oil change places that upsell services, charge for them, and don't perform them.) Honestly, one of the reasons I came into this industry was I was aware of the huge need for a non-shady repair shop in Austin, TX (where I live.) We're the highest-rated independent repair shop in Austin, and we take that pretty seriously, since there are so many horror stories of bad computer/game console/phone repair shops out there. We do our best to do right by our customers.
Are we golfing text messages?

SOS stuk in our lift
EU will pay for online shopping translation mistakes
They basically had no effort in their security, no idea how long they were compromised, and couldnt even respond effectively. I was a big fan of Mint usability who reluctantly had to ditch it.
"have to copy them for free"

Man, i didnt realize they HAD to copy them... i swear they have the option to just not watch.

Oh, but again, they feel entitled to watch.
Being liberal in what you accept is fine, iff strictly define the variations in the grammar.

Meredith and Sergey's outstanding talk about properly parsing all input discusses this update to how Postel's Law should be interpreted.

https://media.ccc.de/v/28c3-4763-en-the_science_of_insecurit
Here's a screenshot of part of the relevant section from the USB-C spec: https://i.imgur.com/y6xCS9u.png
WeDo – A todo list and chat app for teams, projects, and personal life (Code: HN)
They can buy any +/- any bank
Calculations with fractional numbers are done for many mathematical and scientific purposes as well, where arithmetic system obeying clear set of mathematical rules, designed with correctness and reliability of results in mind, would be useful and liberating. Even engineering calculations would benefit from faster and more economical operation that unum hardware can possibly provide.
/s ?
And just like Apple TV[1], enjoy getting HDCP errors requiring restarting playback several times.

1: Might have been the Toshiba screen it was connected to.
It sounds like you have given up.

You know what at least one problem is, I bet you have ideas about how to fix it too.
According to Wikipedia, in 2010 almost 6 million crimes were committed in Germany. Don't know the equivalent number per capita in Singapore, but I'm guessing it's a lot lower. In fact ( if we exclude homicides ), I believe that's an even worse crime rate than US
Live chat software for Marketplaces where seller talk to customer
In the past this has been true because their exceptional design skills. But companies learned that skill, it's not unique to Apple anymore. So for example, the Apple watch isn't objectively significantly better than Google's Watch OS.

But Apple still has a lot of resources and capabilities it can deploy to make something a sucsess, like any other big company, so maybe that's what we should except from the current Apple - altough considering the circumstances - this can be very lucrative.
Clearly there is no free money.

Their computers are already on running bloated windows os. Sure it would be an increased load, but can you really write it off as a complete loss without such much as taking even a cursory look at the numbers? If the state's school districts switched to Xubuntu and then did so..?
How about Moony McMoonface? :D
Cixin Liu's The Dark Forest has the alien enemy ship solve the traveling salesman problem for a moderate n in real time as a way of demonstrating the aliens' superior level of science. That must upset the original poster almost as much...
This beautiful little tool was what let me do contract work over a (frequently >10s roundtrip with >50% packet loss) 1-2kbps mobile uplink in rural West Africa. It's indispensable in such situations.
Larry Page's dream of building a 'Google Island' could be coming true
Not to worry, by the time USB-C headphones are ubiquitous all that battery tech we keep hearing about will have made it to phones. :)
Google, Ford and Uber start coalition for self driving cars
Brooks' Law: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%E2%80%99_law
Sweet, ty. That puts it in proper perspective.
How JPG Works
Weird. https://docs.npmjs.com/misc/semver#prerelease-tags

I guess the argument is that, if you're going to use ">=6.0.0" to choose a version of node.js, and your options are 6.1.0 and 7.0.0-rc1, you don't want a random release candidate. But if you're going to use it to verify an existing version of node.js, a 7.0.0-rc1 that someone else chose should be considered acceptable. Their semver rules can't distinguish these two cases.

PEP 440 seems to handle this by decoupling the prerelease rules and the version-comparison rules: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0440/#handling-of-pre-re... "Pre-releases of any kind, including developmental releases, are implicitly excluded from all version specifiers, unless they are already present on the system, explicitly requested by the user, or if the only available version that satisfies the version specifier is a pre-release."
SyneRyder's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11569891) was specifically adduced to demonstrate the dangers of logging in with Facebook, and mentions that doing so was an accident, so explaining the dangers and suggesting that he or she not do it again seems patronising.
Ask HN: Why can't I comment on old Apply HNs?
When you go to Apply HN, it show a random sampling. I clicked one, and then clicked through to their site. I liked it, but had some feedback I wanted to give. When I returned to the HN page, I couldn't comment.

I assume this is because the page is 20 days old. I think it makes sense to close an old new story, but not for Apply, especially with the random functionality. As a founder myself, I would definitely want to continue to receive any feedback people were willing to give. Can that happen?
The other big problem with Postel's law is that it makes enforcing security guarantees a nightmare. When each component in a system is "liberal in what it accepts", it's very easy to fall into a trap where component A thinks that component B is performing the security checks and component B thinks that component A is performing the check and as a result the security check is either never performed or trivially sidestepped.

A good example of this was the vulnerability with null characters in SSL certificates [0]. In that vulnerability, both the browser and the certification authority interpreted the domain with the null character as "liberally" as possible, but their differing interpretations of what constituted "forgiving" made it trivial to spoof SSL certificates merely by including a null character in your domain.

Another example is with guarding against XSS vulnerabilities. Browsers try to be liberal in what constitutes valid Javascript, and will attempt to execute even the most malformed scripts they encounter. This makes it unnecessarily difficult to shield against XSS - one must block a whole range of vectors, rather than just script tags.

[0]: http://trevorjim.com/postels-law-and-network-security/