skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is captivating indeed.

As a software engineer who creates things that in a sense aren't 'real' - I have always felt the need to have another outlet in which I can create something real, something tangible. Watching the "Alone in the Wilderness" videos and seeing Dick create everything from his house to tools to utensils from hand is just simply astounding.
I often like to fantasize how would I fare if I found myself suddenly transported into medieval times or earlier (spoiler: poorly).

Articles like this make me appreciate even more how little difference there is between us and humans thousands of years ago. I wouldn't have figured out how to make a working wheel, and I've seen one. I have no idea where I picked up the idea that "ancient civilizations were dumb", but the more I read, the more I appreciate how little difference there was.

BTW, if you haven't, you should definitely check the "Primitive technology" channel on Youtube.
If you use a laptop a ups can power your router and modem for quite a long time.

Or you can buy a huge ups for a lot less than 3000 and power a desktop machine too.
Twitter to End Vine, Joining Seesmic, 12-Seconds,  in Micro-Video Graveyard
I think you are smart to consider your developer skills as a separate thing to improve. One way to objectively measure this might be to explain a technical concept to someone.

For example, could you read this article and then give an overview of the main issues of web site performance? Could you then come up with one recommendation for a performance improvement in a code base you're familiar with? Could you justify in practical terms why your recommendation was the best bang for the buck, vs. other other possible improvements?
https://medium.baqend.com/building-a-shop-with-sub-second-pa...

Now, how do you judge yourself?

1). Have the conversation with a dev whose skills and opinion you trust.

2). Record your answers on audio, and ask someone on HN to give you fair and constructive feedback. Many here would be glad to do this (feel free to ping me as well).
How do you convert VA to kWh?
js;dr: the page doesn't render without javascript.
I know that's snark, but I just went and counted them anyway. There's at least 413 individual different settings in macOS Sierra's System Preferences, excluding Flash Player.
This means that you believe AirBNB will never ban a host for racism?
It is likely that you will never be in a car crash with your current car. It is likely that the money you spent on crumple zones, airbags, and seat belts was entirely wasted.

But if we conclude from that that we should remove these things from cars, we would be wrong, because we have to reason at scale about these things. At scale, the extreme events happen with some frequency.

It should also be pointed out that we are now living in a world where we are not hypothesizing that someday IoT devices may have serious insecurities that lead to real problems for people, but one where we know it is true because it happens. When the Internet basically went down on the east coast and some other places last week, plenty of people who were affected by that were also the ones who owned the devices that caused it. At scale, they made a decision to buy something that ended up taking the Internet out for themselves and others. It does no good to reason that each of them only took a small risk individually when what affects us all is the collective risk of those actions.

Just like in the automotive case, where we must consider the effects of various safety interventions on society as a whole and at scale, we must consider the effects of this security on society as a whole and at scale. Unlike the automotive case, computers have extra concerns about their ability to interact in ways that physical devices can not. And at that scale and with those concerns, no, there's nothing unreasonable about this analysis, especially in the face of the existing Mirai botnet. It's not just the visual-imagination compelling stories like burglars breaking into your house because they saw you weren't home from your camera (and then, presumably, remotely shut it off); it's all the possibilities.

You shouldn't buy a device that is open to the internet with a default root password that can't be changed and has no firmware update mechanism even available. It's not hard to take the Kantian imperative and actually show that to be unethical of you. (While the Kantian imperative is philosophically controversial, I think this is one of those cases where it applies pretty well.)
Download that course
The website is indeed horrible. Also, why does every PC maker try to get you to do a survey within five seconds of arriving?
Also, some context for the blind person when designing their own pages. If they're aware that website X is considered to have a good design, they can get a description of it and know what colour schemes, positioning and placement, etc might work for them.
LawBot: Were you caused physical harm?

hmm, 2 comments in and I'm confused...
Crazy US shit, never heard of it anywhere else. Basically a group of your neighbours who say what you can and cant do to your own property.
Average American spends $150 per week on food. Among young adults, this number is $173. That comes down to $21-24 per day.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/156416/americans-spend-151-week-f...

Soylent costs $1.93 per meal, which comes down to $5.79 per day. In other words, about a quarter of the average daily spend.

I'm also not sure where you came up with "horrible quality." Care to qualify - or better yet, quantify - that claim?

As for eating out, another survey in 2013 showed that 58% of Americans eat out at least once a week. That's way higher than you claim.

http://m.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/gener...
Have a look at Karabiner-Elements. The author recently open sourced it and kept up his brisk development pace. Every year he updates I'm lockstep with macOS releases and every year, I donate. Amazing project.
Chronobank: a decentralised marketplace for real world professions
Eve places the source of truth clearly in the document surrounding the code. The code disagrees with the description, the code should be changed unless there is some evidence in git that the code functions as intended.
If you really want to save money, buy them second hand. I snagged a Maxwell Titan X for 400 USD on eBay as a buy it now option.
I didn't read it as a moral judgement.

The important characteristics of the companies he's talking about is that they're in an unstable equilibrium dependent on wage ignorance. Meaning that wage info itself would destabilize them rather than any of the mentioned toxicity.

I think he's excluded "companies that underpay but are stable in the presence of wage info" from the class that "should [be expected to] crash and burn".
It's unfair to compare European and American heat pumps. The market is much larger more mature here in Europe and the differences in how you think about heating are large. I've heard that american heat pumps are quite noisy, mainly because you place them away from the living area (there's no reason to lower the noise). In new-built houses here in Europe they are most often placed directly within the living area so the heat pumps must be very quiet.

Disclaimer: I work for one of the heat pump manufacturers in Europe (albeit with connectivity solutions and not actual heat pump technology)
> For web apps you can install the tota11y [1] browser extension and use its experimental Screen Reader Wand feature to get an idea of how a screen reader will interpret elements.

An idea, perhaps, but that's all it would be rather than real-world data. Blind people don't actually use these tools.
To be fair, if I repurpose a term that is widely used in one way to mean something else, the confusion that ensues is kind of my fault.
How to Make an Oozing Pumpkin for Halloween
Also worth mentioning Bruce Artwick's Flight Simulator - 1982 on PC, 1979 !! (albeit vector only) on AppleII.
As a programming instructor the Eve demo video gave me goosebumps. The emphasis on prose+code, world=data, and the discoverability afforded by the inspector are of particular interest to me.

Our current learning stack for folks with zero coding experience is Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu) to Processing (https://processing.org) to Java.* I'll be watching the Eve project carefully to see how it might fit into our intro to programming path.

*If these intro students continue to our full program they learn C#, SQL, PHP & JS/HTML too.
Agreed, the chatbot facade slows it down, it's a simple decision tree that could be handled with a few checkboxes and conditional display.
Do you believe that?
Because i5 and i7 processors are exactly the same silicon. It's just for i7 they turn on hyper-threading.
Hacking back the Mirai botnet, technical and legal issues
Isn't that a problem with Twitter, Instagram, etc, as well?
I'm guessing that would be below peak day usage for me--i.e. two window AC units running (which isn't common)--but 14600kWh/year seems pretty close as an average based on my $100 or so monthly electrical bill. That's for a 4BR house, albeit a smallish one, that uses oil heat almost exclusively in the winter and runs fans, and only sometimes AC, in the summer.

My electric company sends out a comparison statement periodically and says I'm about average for similar-sized neighbors. (Albeit, it thinks my house is a bit smaller than it is.) So I'd say Tesla's calculator is about right for the US although it's going to vary a lot based on AC and electric heat.
So you can come here for information a few others cannot?
Sounds nice but masses dont care that much.
Lynda free course downloader
It shouldn't be an option. So yes, they are accountable.
I actually find neighborhoods with HOAs pretty desirable. Protects me from people moving beside me and destroying my property value.
Replace "south of Italy/Napoleteans" with "Latinos", "Germans" with "whites", and "gipsies" with "blacks". Do you still feel okay saying that?
One problem with solar traditional roof mounts is that they are heavy, and many houses aren't rated to carry that much additional weight. In addition, they can affect the water flow on the roof, and then when you need to replace the shingles, you've got all of these panels in the way.

However, some people do think some solar panel installs are ugly:
http://www.greensunnj.com/SolarHallofShame
Throw in charging a Tesla in your figure..
A Letter to the Blockchain Community
What did you feel was bad about Smalltalk?

As for Perl, it was hacked together to automate some work Larry Walls was doing on BLACKER VPN at TRW.
My 2300 ft^2 (210 m^2) house in NC uses 11000kWh per year. I needed less than half my roof (the southern half) to be covered in solar panels to generate almost all my electricity (I do have gas air and water heating, however).

I'd like to build my next house to PassivHous or similar standards. I think I can get the energy usage to 5000 kWH anually. With the whole roof sloping southward, I think I'd be able to generate more than what I need for the house, even accounting for electric transportation.
Yes, the public key is just attached to the outgoing messages and automatically imported by p≡p-capable software.

That's kind of a TOFU (Trust On First Use) approach, but you can verify trust by comparing the fingerprints, in p≡p by default represented as dictionary words in your natural language (somewhat similar to Signal). That's suitable for comparison by phone (=> quickly done).
That sounds like a false dichotomy. Recent Apple keynotes are more polished, but the content is often cringy too (that whole "courage" thing will go down as one of the most ridiculous things ever said in an Apple keynote). Not a good counter example.

But Louis CK sounds human and real and he can deliver something without stuttering, bad comic timing, and awkward pauses. You might say it's his job — but that's the point. It's a job. It takes skill.

Musk is just not a good public speaker, that's all. I don't think even he would disagree with that.
Exceptional Speakers Have 7 Behaviours in Common
What's the running cost of a huge ups?
I think the decision to pre-filter was based on the fact that kicking someone out was extremely difficult. Police had to be involved or some really bad thing had to happen.
So the approach "ok we let anyone in, these are the rules, if you don't respect them you are out" is for sure more fair but it just wouldn't work.
Theory vs Reality.
And when you have 2000 people in a tight space you kind of want to avoid these situations.

I have no statistics but we can safely assume that 30 years of experience have taught the camping managers what works and what doesn't.
I think it was in their right to decide who comes in and who doesn't.

I'm Italian and if you won't let me into your crystal shop because I wave too much my hands when I talk and you're afraid I'll break something (I personally don't wave hands), I'll understand. I will be angry sure, but not with you: with the other hand waving italians.
I tried the Zenbook for a year, but the GPU didn't listen to sleep/lid close events even after trying several fresh kernels, the Wifi wakeup on linux sucks compared to macos (even with the mDNSresponder desaster), the trackpad was much worse.
In the end it burnt/overheated because of the overheated GPU.
The casing was also too edgy, I constantly did hurt myself with the right hand.

A fully upgraded MacBook Air is still the best. (i7, 500GB HD, 16GB RAM)
I got several of them.

Lenovo is too heavy to carry around. Even a MBP is too heavy and bulky for me.
The Elitebook has no 500GB HD available and also only 16GB RAM.
Two really good literature treatments of your fantasy are Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and Jules Verne's Mysterious Island. They both have as major plot elements a character who has a lot of knowledge of fabrication techniques, and recreate their technology in a primitive situation (one involves time travel, the other is stranded on a primitive island).

On another note, I've heard that the first thing you need to fabricate (beyond basic hand tools) is a lathe. Once you have that, you can make a better lathe, which can make various other machine shop tools, etc. until you have a whole workshop created. Although this probably assumes that you still have access to modern (as in the last couple hundred years) materials to work with.
Would it be helpful for a news site or blog to call out software that won't take easy steps to improve accessibility?

My sight issues are not comparable to being blind, but as an example, I've asked Pandora for simple accessibility improvements for years and they never take action. Have even offered to write (less than a page) the code for them.

Would they (and software tool vendors) feel the same way if this were highlighted on a high traffic web page?
Accusations like "racist" mainly flow towards pre-approved victim categories and are commonly used as a blunt weapon in oppression olympics. In those cases, there is no acceptable defense against it, because the reply will be along the lines of "omg, this racist is trying to excuse their racism". Guilty until proven super-guilty.

That's why this gets people's bristles up, because it reeks of the "reverse racism isn't real" and "racism requires structural oppression" dogma that has jumped the gap from post modern academia to tech by way of HR departments, always enforced by carefully worded but unmistakably our-way-or-the-highway totalism. If someone wants to be an arbiter of what is right without considering what happens when they are wrong, it's not justice they're after.

Outside of the Anglo Saxon sphere, this isn't such a big issue... Yet.
In the UK a lot of people are on tariffs which pay them above market rate for the electricity they generate regardless of whether they feed it into the grid or use it themselves. A battery like this will allow them to both sell and use 100% of what they generate.
"A fun but largely pointless exercise in setting up a Linux distro."

When it comes to using C keep in mind a lot of developers are interested in lower-level interactions--perhaps at the hardware level. There is probably value in creating simplified, isolated environments that can test certain features in a VM.

"For educational purposes it's acceptable but still less effective than simply creating an educational environment on an existing distro."

How is it less effective? If anything the author now knows more about setting up a full environment and can tailor make a minimal setup to showcase some specific features. These minimal setups can then be hosted in a VM preconfigured for students.

Just some thoughts. I've never done LFS or taught C programming. Though I do use C often and enjoy the language, warts and all :)
I think it you are not from the U.S. You realize racists in the U.S. consider black people _the exact same_ way you consider Roma? You believe the distinction is that the racists in the U.S. are incorrect in their beliefs, but you are correct in your beliefs? Okay...
Smiley – Python Application Tracer
Can you tell me the name of that book that is coming out?
I heard the story differently. Wheels are only really useful if you have good enough streets to use them on and building streets is a huge upfront investment. It is also a chicken egg problem - wheels are only useful with streets and streets are only useful for wheels. Without streets you are better of carrying your stuff around than trying to push it around on wheels in natural terrain. That is also why the wheel first appeared in toys, because you can push them around on a flat table. So the wheel was probably well known before it saw widespread adoption for transportation which additionally to the lack of streets had to overcome the engineering problems mentioned in the article that come up when you scale the wheel from a toy to a wheel burrow.
Show HN: Download course 4 free
Just imagine if they wrote encyclopedias in your communication style.
Completely fictional example:

From Ye Great Book of All Scottish things, 856 year of the Lord, page 17:
- yepswatter : a very commonly used household object, just ask anybody around to show you one.
What could go wrong????
What a sweeping generalization.

Furthermore, unless you're in an area of the country that requires the use of a lot of AC--or you have electric baseboard heat--insulation doesn't even play that much into electricity usage.
There's a wonderful full hour-long dramatic reënactment of the hacking incident Cliff Stoll was involved in (the one ChuckMcM was referring to), with the actual people and locations: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kgb+computer+an...
That's exactly how I do it. Play around with the problem, and once I've messed with it a bit, take a step back and plan out the right way to do it. Sometimes my "proof of concept" doodling will have salvageable bits. Very rarely (or if it was an easy requirement) the play code will be close to ready. Sometimes, I have to throw it all away. Such is life.
Sure you can. It's standard in embedded software. Called WCET analysis. There's also real-time GC's. Go team has simply not done either of these in their design. So, they can't give a worst-time estimate.
The most fun thing to say for a successful researcher is stuff like:

(1) "I wouldn't have been able to do my awesome work in today's research climate"

(2) "Nobody believed me, but then I showed them all..."

(3) "I was a destitute street magician until I discovered probability theory and then won a MacArther"

(4) "My first 10^5 experiments were failures, but I persisted."

(5) "I almost failed high school trig"
(a) ...because it was too boring for me.
(b) ...because i was a misguided pothead back then.

Take these stories as "the set that gets published" because a wide audience feels better about themselves after reading them.

On the other hand, the same public votes for lawmakers who are intent on cutting research funding because they think it is useless (e.g., they randomly pick some funny-sounding grant from NSF, read it on TV in some sarcastic voice, and then declare that all research is bunk).

I see the NSF become less exploratory because of the pressure to "have practical impact," and I believe that is driven by one particular political party in the US.

When so many people present well-conceived ideas that will at least have some payoff (at least in terms of publications), it is hard to justify supporting wonky ideas by people who don't show evidence of mastery in the new area.

How many of you have a total-crank uncle who thinks he has a better idea for solar cells, electric cars, or XYZ?

Well, the same holds if you substitute "uncle" for "professor at a tier-one research university."
Airbnb provides a lot more information about a guest than a picture.

You can be skeptical for your safety on Airbnb but it wouldn't be empirical.
It's much better from a self-esteem perspective to assume your project was a victim of its own incredible success than it is to have to confront the idea that your project was/is just plain written poorly.

That way you can blame github for a lack of patch review instead of being forced to reconcile with the fact that parts of your project suck.
The+best+top+11+Free+IDE+for+Java+Coding,+Development+&+Programming+with+PDF
I feel to make programming easier, we need a assistant (intelligent in whatever sense you call it :-) that can figure out the 'intent' of the code by reading it and be able to point out bugs by learning from millions of source code in Github.

I wrote in this article

https://medium.com/@thallukrish/debug-assistant-2aa37ac13ca5...
Twitter, you can at least follow people that you already know are interesting. Network effects and retweeting expose you to interesting content that they stumble across, and previously unknown accounts that produce interesting content.
I don't think its socialism though. Modern life has isolated us eg: I am a single guy and I can't go to the park and hang out there and hope to talk to people because I am scared to be branded a weirdo/pedophile. I don't like going to bars which are usually the spot 'for adults'.

I use airbnb to see how locals live, when they wake up, how they get to work, what kind of breakfast they eat ect.
Do people who buy hay for horses actually have this problem? Do they really care about the highest quality? If they do then maybe it is a good idea (there are other things to consider like market size). If they do not have this problem, then it is a bad idea by default no matter how good it sounds on paper.

The first test of this idea is to interview a dozen or so customers of hay for horses and determine if they really care about quality. And be careful, sometimes people say one thing and do another so you can't necessarily trust their answers to your questions.

If you were an expert in the hay for horses field then you would already know the answer, and that is one reason, among many, why it is hard for non-experts to break into the field.
I think you way overestimate how clever or diligent criminals are. If you have the skills and persistence to pull something like this off there are almost certainly more profitable (and quite possibly legal) avenues of work available to you than breaking and entering.
Show HN: Adhokku – a toy PaaS powered by FreeBSD jails and Ansible
If AirBnB is able to dictate what it's landlords can and can't do that makes them disguised employees no? Something else the government is good at sniffing out!
A few years later I worked in Benidorm and I know what you mean :)
Only it turns out those Germans in the camping were a different sort: zero problems, ever.
I'm sure we would have been told to refuse Germans if they had been noisy/impolite.
I'm also pretty sure 90% of the south italians we refused would have been nice and polite and more friendly that the average German.
That's why I said I didn't like it.
But it's the other 10% they were trying to avoid.
10% bad guys can easily spoil the holiday to 90% good ones.

Not an easy business to be in, but sometimes you don't have a choice.
I'm very impressed by the solar roof shingles, especially the French slate style.