skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You have much better experience with your utilities than I do with mine.

Two days ago, we found out that our gas had been shut off because Nicor's billing system forgot about our auto-billing. Someone came out, shut our gas off, and locked the meter. We paid them, and they informed us they wouldn't be able to roll a truck to turn our gas on for more than a week, despite the fact that the dude they sent to turn our gas off could have knocked on our door (or, for that matter, they could have called) and worked out the billing SNAFU.

Erin go so fed up that she picked the lock on the meter; when I called to inform them that I was holding their meter lock in my hand, they sent an "emergency" crew out. The new dude had an account note instructing him not to turn our gas on, despite the fact that our account was current and the billing SNAFU was their fault.

He made fun of them and turned our gas back on.

Have you ever called to have your electrical service changed? How was that experience for you? I've had that pleasure, too.

The other great thing I'll say about our electrical is that only goes down for 12+ hours at a time a couple times a year. Depending on your expectations for electrical service in one of the largest US metro areas, that might be good!

I don't like AT&T or Verizon. But I would gleefully hand them my billing and field service work for every other utility I have. I haven't had an AT&T outage I noticed in years. I have never once waited more than a day to get them out to address a problem.
This is nonsensical. Upgrades to both water delivery, electric grids and other utilities are in fact a thing, and they happen all of the time.

Funny enough, in keeping with the BC, Canada example, the BC Hydro had every customer upgraded - ie, the ENTIRE CUSTOMER BASE - to smart meters a few years back - the equivalent to running fiber to every last mile residence in the province.

Upgrades and enhancements have no bearing whatsoever on the corporate governance of the service is structured. The simple fact of the matter is that I don't need 5 companies to provide 5 different physical data delivery methods to my end point. I don't need a cable line, a phone line and a fiber line connected to my home concurrently any more than I need a 220V line to run my washing machine and a 120V line for my lights.

I need a single hookup for water. A single hookup for electricity. A single hookup for internet (or rather, communication). Any more than required is just inefficient and not cost effective.
I have been waiting for this to hit 1.0 and more importantly get popular so that I can use it everywhere. I am really a fan of Yann Collet's work. These are extremely impressive work specially when you consider that lz4 seems to be better than snappy (by google) and zstandard from LZFSE (from apple). I think he is the first one to write a practical fast arithmetic coder using ANS. And look at how his huffman implementation blazes past zlib huffman though compresses less than FSE [0]. I also like reading his blog posts. While a lot of them goes over my head I can generally make a sense of what he is trying and why something's working despite the complexity.

[0] https://github.com/Cyan4973/FiniteStateEntropy
As a point of contrast, I have posted questions about Chrome extensions that weren't answered anywhere and had people help diagnose the quirks with me. I didn't create a bounty.
I wouldn't really call buffets a coastal phenomenon.

I mean, there's the odd one here or there, but compared to the last time I was in Kansas, they might as well not exist.
Not for borderlines, sadly.
[pdf] Ninth Circuit Decision on AT&T Throttling
That's certainly your argument. But you're doing a better job of losing it to 'tptacek than to me. Please don't let me distract you any further.
I do not really measure how often this happens, just rename as soon as name does not reflect exactly what function does.
So? What's your point?
Brotli is available in this graph - https://github.com/facebook/zstd/blob/master/images/DCspeed5...

This seems to be slightly old doc - from April.
Internet is a public good -> regulatory powers are voted on and enacted by public bodies who are transparent and can be voted out.

Internet is a private good -> a tiny group of unelectable, unaccountable corporate leaders decide in secret everything about how it works, and are ethically required to make decisions which are bad for you and me but good for their profits.
One set of my grandparents ended up on assistance in a $2500/month home. It was like a state prison. There were actual bars.

The other set is 98 & 95. They pay more than 14,000/month! It's like a cruise ship.

The difference is hard to put into words.
So unless you can prove that something you read in the paper is a lie you must accept it as absolute truth? Seems healthy..

He had a good argument I think. Not sure if he's right but good argument.
+1

I had seen this video of cars in a circle without any bottleneck, it was quite an eureka moment - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wm-pZp_mi0
For the first six years of my professional career I worked for a combination of small design firms, web dev firms, startups. Averaging a year at each. All, essentially, were client service companies. From that, I learned how to pursue, land, deliver, and re-land projects across a bunch of different industries. Then, I moved to a new city and found working out of my home office more enjoyable than being hired. Once I realized I could land projects & get paid w/o being an employee - I stopped interviewing for jobs and started pursuing project I found personally interesting.
I see it more like the immune system. Greater (self-)awareness looks like a good thing to me, just due to the way this whole world works. This definitely depends on your philosophy in a wide sense.

On a practical note, reputation works in this circumstances: if I read a piece about, I don't know, fruit jam industry in NYT, it's likely not a blatant paid ad. This is what they monetize when selling subscriptions; should they stop, their reputation, and with it the subscription revenue, would go down.
I'm sure if the government had retained full control of the Internet as a regulated public utility, the US would have the finest Department of Streaming Video in the world.
I wonder if this is the kind of thing Ben-Hur thinks about to pass the time.
IIRC encryption and decryption is done on the client side and the server only stores encrypted data.

Dropbox was not encrypting passwords they were hashing them.

If you stored already encrypted files on Dropbox nobody can decrypt those files provided your encryption key is good.
Zstd
I think you should look at the author's blog [0]. There is lots of in depth explanation of not just what he is doing but how he got there, the failed steps, the intermediate steps.

[0] http://fastcompression.blogspot.in/
I can't imagine it is. The benefits appear to be:

1) Initial marketing testing through Amazon storefronts.
2) Fulfillment and logistics.
3) Promotion on the same level as other Amazon products.

This doesn't seem valuable to pure-software products.
A 747 Jumbo Jet Is Burning Man's Mobile Nightclub
Since you're only working 3 months per year & assuming those are consecutive, how much time/effort do you need to queue up another 3 months of work after being out of the game for 9 months? Having to keep your profile/reputation fresh and letting existing/new clients know seems nearly impossible.
Ask HN: Any tools/frameworks to read and comprehend articles?
Looking for a tool/framework I can use to read and comprehend articles, any suggestions?
I've done this, and it works well.

I used NSS-PAM-LDAPD [1], and openssh-ldap-publickey [2] with OpenLDAP

If you want more info about the setup ping me (email in my profile).

1: https://arthurdejong.org/nss-pam-ldapd/
2: https://github.com/AndriiGrytsenko/openssh-ldap-publickey
Court Costs Entrap Nonwhite, Poor Juvenile Offenders
No it's not, like with anything it's a trade off.
I'm using password with spaces for Dropbox without any problems. Must be something else is an issue at your side... Have you tried resetting it ?
Brian Fung's piece covering the decision https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/08/31...
> something that could write encrypted files with obfuscated file names to several backends

Did you check out Duplicity? http://duplicity.nongnu.org/
Found the CMU grad! I think this is very different from a splay tree, though. Open-address tables take advantage of the cache by removing linked lists from the data structure, which is why I think they tend to have good real-world performance.

Splay trees, on the other hand, can only really be implemented using pointers and a linked structure (splaying a tree that's been implemented with an array sounds absolutely miserable). They don't have good cache usage, which is why they generally perform poorly outside of big-O notation.
> The fundamental difference is that there's no way to get rid of bloated and ineffective government organisations.

It may be practically difficult to do so, but there is definitely a way to do so, and its usually quite obvious from the manner in which those government organizations are structured and chartered in the first place.

Plenty of government organizations that have been viewed as "bloated", "inefficient", or otherwise undesirable have, in fact, been gotten rid of.
FiniteStateEntropy
*broken record

But again, no sign of WebRTC in Safari's release (even though it's in Webkit, no?)
Indeed ANS is difficult: it is the biggest innovation in compression in the last 20 years. Its author has some nice but dense slides about it.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12405967/ANSsem.pdf

Not sure exactly when repcodes were invented. Igor Pavlov has already used them in 7zip.
Ask HN: When to settle down (as a guy)?
So here's the thing. I have an online business is doing $xM/y. I have lots of friends and I travel a lot. But I just turned 30.

Now I know time is limited etc. But I don't feel like starting a family or anything like that yet. I have the freedom to do anything, go anywhere. On the other hand, I don't want to miss out on the window of opportunity and be 50 and childless and lonely.

I kinda just wanna keep doing whatever I want. Meanwhile all my friends are moving in together, getting babies etc. Am I fucking up here? Hasn't time changed though?

Or do I have severe Peter Pan issues? It's not like I'm not responsible though, I take care of myself, my finances, my friends and family (that is, my parents!). I feel like if you don't do it, society sees you as a failure but I don't think I am?

I hear so many nightmare stories from married friends with babies etc. Divorces. Breakups. Also good stories. But mostly it seems people around me aren't that happy with the choices that "happened to them". I'm like rationally wondering if that's really a smart choice when I'm in a pretty ideal situation now. It doesn't seem like a choice for most, and it also appears like it's mostly women making the choice for them (if I ask my guy friends).

I mostly wonder how long I should prolong it before I do it to optimize my usage of (life) time.
There's a cautionary aspect to this in that simply adding parameters and making configuration data(e.g. much of the Java XML ecosystem) is not enough to squash out "coding". It takes some carefully thought abstraction to make a difference. In some places we've made progress, in others we've churned through tech without going forward.
That kind of reminds me of the computer in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
Well, seeing how GitHub does it...

https://rubygems.org/gems/git/
FSE decoding: how it works
In most states now you can claim sexual harassment even as a contractor.
>The literature I've seen does not purport that no conceivable change in the minimum wage would have any effect on unemployment levels.

That alone demonstrates the answer in the above linked DOL "mythbusters" to be false, or at least deliberately misleading. Let's break down their response:

>with the weight of evidence now showing that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum-wage workers

They point to past increases in minimum wage which, according to their selected studies, had "little or no" impact on unemployment, but never has any past increase tried to more than double the minimum wage as some strive to do today. The DOL's answer does not address the question posed.

Regarding the aforementioned studies, even if we take their conclusions to be accurate (which I do not--their methodology is deeply flawed), using them to justify today's "fight for 15" is comparing apples to oranges.
It might actually be federal, I'd have to check though.
I thought that brotli was tuned for typical web workloads, that it contained a dictionary tuned for web workloads. Our internal testing shows that it performs very poorly for binary 3D vector data.

So a test between zstd and brotli would show brotli in a poor light if it used a mixed corpus, but a test between zstd and brotli on a web corpus would give an advantage to brotli...
Asking good questions is hard (but worth it)
Can't believe there are no comments already.
(Spaces by the way).
I had an 8-4 job one summer, when I worked temp jobs for an agency at various factories.

But the rest were 7-3, 12-8 or something in order to make multiple shifts fit.
If anything, it seems like they would make sharing the road more common, because a reasonably reliable self-driving car would be safer around impromptu crosswalks and the like than many human drivers.
I was a fan of DDD back in the day (long ago, when the Motif based UI was OK), but that was because I really didn't know how to use plain gdb.

I'm actually surprised that DDD continues (somewhat, there was a release in 2009).
can i run cloudron on my home server? how?
I just don't get it. No one would argue that there clearly are different preferences in terms of the preferred indention width among different developers. So who on earth thinks: hey, I like an indention of 2 spaces. Let's just require that for every person on earth who will ever have to deal with my source code. Just indent with tabs and everyone is happy.

Furthermore, when people are asked why they prefer spaces, the answer very often is along the lines of "because then my code looks the same on every machine and no matter where I look at it". Which, in my opinion, is totally misguided. Indenting code is not about looking the same to everyone everywhere, it's about gaining the best readability for everyone, and there just can't be a sane default for that intrinsically.
Do you know if this situation of figuring out the LB ourselves is going to change anytime soon? We are happy to wait if you know there is something on the works.

I believe it is possible to wire up service discovery system to add the ips of the backend webservers to the haproxy/nginx but it requires knowing the kubernates internals/api a lot more than now.

However I was looking for a lazy/ just works kind of solution - haha may have to wait or get hands dirty.
Safari is a fairly lightweight holster around the WebKit engine. The same technology is used in other components eg web views. So in order to demonstrate/test the new engine, it needs a placeholder to do that.
He's just better at dodging my questions than you are :). But please, keep erecting your straw man.

The entire point of this is that the internet would be fundamentally different if it were democratically controlled. That does not mean we would miss out on innovations like streaming video. It does mean that average users would have faster speeds and more control over their data. This of course assumes a political environment geared towards the average citizen. Sadly, in the United States, that is not currently the case. But it is achievable, and we used to be much closer to that ideal.
Kafka Streams and Flink: a comparison and guideline for users
this is so weird; http://john.je/hKnG
The downloads are all GPG-signed, so that shouldn't be an issue. You have the issue of the initial trust, but that applies to HTTPS too to a lesser extent.
> Yeah, if you want different and (more or less) independent between them personas you still need different accounts. What the parent is trying to emphasize is that the transition between them has become really easy and seamless,

Thanks for helping out here. Actually I can switch without using multiple accounts, explanation here: http://android.stackexchange.com/questions/30701/how-to-swit...

I just verified it works by switching from my personal profile to my moonlight consulting company "page" that is just another profile of me and I can post, follow and add comments from it just like my main, personal profile. There is also a third, non-commercial "page" that I sometimes use (because I have a embarrassingly good taste in music : ).

> but the circles mechanic is so muddled that I wouldn't really recommend anyone to actually use it if they want airtight separation.

If I undersstand it correctly I should post family photos to a circle (since I decides who belong in what circle).

Technical stuff I post into one collection or another so people can decide for themselves if they just want to see my post on vegetables, the one on IT or both.

And stuff that needs airtight separation I only share with /dev/null ;-)
Hey thanks for the response, will look into it.
In general, this is one of the most frustrating things with trying to secure yourself online. I have gone through like "I WANT TO USE PASSPHRASES" then gone to places like PAYPAL and had them have an upper limit on password length. It's absurd that they all have slightly different requirements. I am switching to a password manager now.
There are plenty of MD's which are utter charlatans and sell considerably worse things than snake oil and they aren't being called out by physicians everywhere.

Both physicians and attorneys are held to the standards of their profession both of them have code of ethic they have to follow, and both of them are liable for their actions.
Just like physicians lose their licenses over gross misconducts attorney are disbarred all the time.

If an attorney can be proven to have acted not in the interests of client, not in good faith, was negligent etc. they can be sued for legal malpractice even if the bar does not investigates them directly.

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

People can be selfish assholes regardless of their profession, there is nothing inherently more just or ethical in the actions of physicians over any other profession.
insightful. this question has been asked (at least) since i've been a professional programmer, which is 20+ years.

start of my career, >80% of my code was directed to memory management--allocating it, re-pointing it it, and de-referencing it under what seem now like impossibly tight optimization boundaries. I still work in compiled languages, but that fraction is now about 5%. Compiler & os optimization, hardware, etc. are the obvious reasons. Plenty of other challenges--some new some old, some completely contrived quickly occupied that attention vacuum.
Non tech savvy? Everyone does this. It's practical.

Sure most of us have a few passwords we reuse, but I know less than 5 people with truly unique passwords.
PG's heuristic for this is 'write like you are explaining to a friend.'

The problem is that that kind of clarity is rarely achieved on a corporate website because Conway's Law applies as much to marketing as it does to software design.
Saying that an investment strategy has averaged positive returns over 40+ years may be true, but is not necessarily useful information. Over very long periods of time, there are many strategies that will provide an average positive return. In this context (retirement spending), investors have to weigh long-term growth with the need to withdraw money from the portfolio every year to live on. Volatility is thus an important consideration.
Ask HN: Specializations within IT
Lately I’ve been looking for jobs overseas (US/Canada) and I’ve noticed that unlike my home country, over there IT Jobs are very specific.
They look for people with very specific/unique skills but not for well-rounded IT Professionals that “know a little bit of everything”.

Given this, I would like some advice on how to become more specialized considering that I can’t switch jobs right now.
I would also like to hear about what areas of IT in your opinion don’t have too many professionals so I can evaluate specializing in those.

Thanks!
Invalid Username Password for the Demo.. Please Fix it.
Chicago becomes first city to launch Array of Things
The way I figure it when some people LARP, they just go all the friggin' way with it.

BS aside, making the world safe for oddballs seems worthwhile so long as they are of mostly harmless varieties.
Using loglan[0] as the primary language of interaction. Addressing the issue (in theory) of ambiguity in other human-oriented languages.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan
'tuned' for the brotli dictionary is a bit generous [1], but yes, it contains a smattering of strings [2] you'd find in plain text and web documents.

Because of its seemingly haphazard dictionary, I wouldn't rule out zstd outperforming brotli, if trained on a good dataset.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12010313

[2] https://gist.github.com/klauspost/2900d5ba6f9b65d69c8e
> worst healthcare in the Western world - and they don't even have your records online.

One does not imply the other. In many ways I'm quite happy my medical information isn't all over the web. As a resident of BC myself, I don't see much of a difference between our heath care and ON or AB; other provinces I've lived in. You can argue that the Canadian system is flawed, but I have the Cambie centre that I can pay for and receive care on par with US quality right now.

>Also - you are gouged on pricing.

Demonstrably False. Your made in ON problem isn't shared by everyone else, thanks.

https://www.bchydro.com/accounts-billing/rates-energy-use/el...

http://www.hydroquebec.com/publications/en/docs/comparaison-...

>Unless there is a big 'build out

There should be one, right now. The entire country should be getting fiber to the door. That will be the last required physical infrastructure upgrade required for a long time. A national not-for-profit entity should own all of that, and the carriers can then compete/lease it to provide services.
Doesn't work very well for people who don't want to live in the US. For every topic there are exponentially more American meetup groups so even if I insert tons of topics related to my country and only my country the top picks are still in the US.
The Pill, the Condom, and the American Dream
No, I've pretty much given up on SO, it's been years so there is evidence but I cant find it now easily. I believe you can the sentiment is true based on the number of other people with similar experiences on the site.
Well, for one thing, settling down isn't something you can go out and buy or manufacture. Finding the right person and the right time is hard and also a bit of luck.

One thing I would consider, though, is that the older you are, the harder kids become and the less of their life you'll get to see. I was 37 when my kid was born and I wish I'd had her a bit earlier.