skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't help but feel as if the author can't make the distinction between a platform and the software written for it. People have been misusing platforms ever since they existed. Its not because someone used Electron to build a console that Electron is bad in and of itself, it just means someone used the wrong tool for that specific job - or maybe that fitted all their requirements in which cause the author is just dismissing the work with no clue about its context.

I also can't help but feel as if the author is a beginner developer lacking a huge amount of context and experience. Saying "Electron enables lazy developers to write garbage" displays a huge misconception about software development in the very first place - garbage will be written no matter the language or platform.

Alls the article did was remind me that those who can, do, and those who can't, blog.
He is doing the same thing to NPR, and by extension NPR's listeners, what he was doing to low-info right-wingers: telling them what they wanted to hear, whether or not it's true. He's good at it.

He wants you to believe that he tried, but he just couldn't get the left wing to fall for it. But anybody who has used Facebook as seen how popular AddictingInfo-org is, and it is an overtly left wing fake news site. It's not remotely the only one.

The fake news reporting is itself filled with fake news. And it's easy to find marks because after the election, many people need to find a scapegoat so they are turning off their critical faculties. The current complaining about fake news is a mirror image of the right's disrespect of the "mainstream" media. For instance all the reporting on the Trump-Russia covert email server communication matches the formula for fake news, it took a nugget of truth, twisted it, and tried to ride the lie long enough that by the time it was exposed as nothing, the election would be over and the "damage" done. But it wasn't fake news I guess because the outlet has to be small and the target and victim were reversed. Anybody looking at that should reasonably be upset about "fake news" but it's categorically ignored by the left. You are not inhumanly wise and immune to the effects of incentivized bias.
This article, like many similar to it, makes the (imo flawed) assumption that a dev tool ought to be evaluated on only a few variables--e.g., code quality, performance, package size.

If writing software is about making users' lives easier, happier, or better, though, I think we ought to optimize for that and that alone.

I say let the market and communities of users decide which software they want to use. I use Nylas b/c I like the UX better than Ubuntu's Evolution, despite its flaws. I use Caret (electron markdown editor) because I wanted a cross-platform tool and I have > 4 gigs of ram. Hell, millions still use the Facebook Android app, despite the fact that it sucks down battery juice like your crazy uncle sucks down Miller Genuine Drafts before lecturing you on how terrible millennials are (happy Thanksgiving, btw).

Of course, it's important we know the trade-offs of the decisions we make, so we need critical pieces like this. But to be as prescriptive as this article is to miss the forest for the trees. Love it or not, JS is a point of entry for a hell of a lot more ppl than C++ is, so expanding its reach into new arenas is not only net-good, but I'd argue also inevitable.

That said, the article does skirt an issue I've thought about a little, and I'm interested to hear others' takes. If software collectively moves more towards higher-end systems, e.g., with SPAs and electron apps and all their cpu-intensive renders, are we further limiting a great web UX to those with the money to afford the latest laptops? We spend a lot of time thinking about accessibility standards for our products (A11Y, etc.), but when should we begin to think about accessibility from a socioeconomic perspective? Or are performant computers now so accessible that we needn't worry?
It's a few thousand dollars of additional dev effort versus the whole project failing; classic small certain initial cost versus large possible future cost...

We in hindsight, now know that a little extra development could have avoided the problem.

The trick is trying to figure out where to spend your limited resources as the project is going.

There are lots of areas that might have caused problems. There may well be other flaws in the system that would also have caused a failure on descent.
TTK. It's got bindings in pretty much every language (because it's TK), but unlike plain-old TK, it doesn't look like absolute garbage, and instead takes on a vaguely native appearance on each platform.
OSTIF are the ones that audited VeraCrypt
> Like you want some stranger to temporarily live with you for a day or two and invade your privacy, all for just a few dollars.

It's not just a few dollars. Some stays are easily in the $1000+ range, for less than a week's stay. Idk what salary bubble you're in as a software dev, but that's a lot of money to some people.

> Who the hell would actually rent their home out to a complete stranger

Everyone on couchsurf disagrees with you. Oh and they usually do it for free. And as a short term landlord you do have some control over who stays at your place. In fact the more you charge, the higher end clientèle you will typically get.

> Airbnb is everything that is wrong with SV, so disconnected from the real world. I just don't understand who would let totally random strangers from the internet live amongst them or even just their possessions.

There are many issues wrong with SV, but Airbnb is the least of its worries. This says more about you than SV or Airbnb. Not everyone is misanthropic to this degree.

> The site was clearly meant to look one way yet allow people to run illegal hotels. The only people I've ever heard renting out on Airbnb are ones who buy homes specifically for Airbnb.

Maybe in the US, where credit is so easily available. This is definitely not the case for a lot of less fortunate places in Europe and 3rd world countries.
I'm an ArangoDB team member. We are starting with our own Jepsen tests. But we will ask Aphyr as soon as possible to do an official test. In the meantime can the community check our implementation.
At this point it's like somebody saying "English is a terrible language". Yeah sure but what else are you going to use?
I love Airbnb when it was small and largely just people who wanted to share a spare bedroom. Now, it's just as commercial as any other listing website.

In Toronto, it's not uncommon to see tons of lockboxes outside some condos which are largely for short term rentals, as well as have tenants deal with experiences like this (copy and pasted from Toronto's subreddit):

"Have you ever wanted to live in a hotel, without the actual service of living in a hotel? You can at the Ice Condos! When walking through the lobby on any given day you're nearly guaranteed to see a few wide eyed, suitcase towing AirBNB guests standing around. Don't except to be able to speak with the concierge for anything - the AirBNB people will be arguing with them over the fact that the concierge won't just give out the keys to suites because people say they're supposed to be allowed in. Shout out to the guy last week who yelled 'This isn't a fuckking hotel!' to the woman doing just that last week."

It's particularly why I find their branding and messaging deceitful. They advertise in Toronto in a way that makes it seem like the company is merely a benign platform that helps citizens fund things on the side (one of their ads uses an Asian family with a kid, an appeal to emotion which I see through as an Asian Canadian). Except it's disconnected from a reality where people buy properties for the sole purpose of listing them on Airbnb as short-term rentals.
I have to disagree, Firefox is in a much better position than a few years ago. RAM usage is lower, e10s works nicely. Tab Groups was spun out into an addon; a sensible decision for a feature extremely few people used. Test Pilot is a better solution for testing features like this.

Very relevant to this thread, addons and plugins are a huge cause of poor performance - I ran into this a while back, where an addon was leaking memory via zombie tabs. Have you tried disabling addons?
I've lived with crap neighbors. Not in an AirBNB setting. But I've read more than enough about rotating, crap AirBNB neighbors to have more than a bit of sympathy towards the anti-AirBNB side.

Zoning and regulations exist for good reasons, built up over decades.

AirBNB and its like "break" the paradigm by, in "crowdsourced" fashion, sort of "flash-mob" overwhelming the existing system.

Yeah, those existing systems may have some faults and inefficiencies. But I am not for throwing them out, wholesale.

Nor for neighbors shitting all over their neighbors for the sake of their own profit.

Like Uber with its discrimination and "dumping" via investor dollar subsidized rides. These "sharing" businesses have turned into parasites arbitraging the limited resources to enforce existing law and regulation.

Unfortunately, more and more people believe that "government is bad", so, instead of digging in to fix and improve what we have, it's left to the crooks to break the paradigm.

Again, as someone who's suffered under bad neighbors, repeatedly, I say... well, a pox on your house.

(Not to mention our return to piecework labor with no benefits and no insurance.)
Is there a good resource to learn the underpinnings of P values and T-tests?

I feel like everybody says these are important, show a formula and then arguments ensue about what p=0.95 means, and nobody seems to know this.
>> performance decline, RAM usage ramp up

Thats what they want to fix by getting rid of XUL, among other things.
What's in it for them?
Most capacitors are measured in "micro"Farads.

Supercapacitors are measured in Farads, and the capacitors mentioned in this article are likely reaching kilo-Farads.
The question makes more sense in context, but I'm not familiar enough with the WAL to be able to answer myself. When you're back on dry land, maybe you can join us in the Community Slack: https://slack.arangodb.com

We have a dedicated #cluster channel were you will probably have better luck getting detailed answers to technical questions. :)
> I can never see the point of comments like these. Not one person who reads that will have his mind changed.

I wasn't expecting to change anyone's mind with that. There are more robust programming languages that don't have the same inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies and encourages better practices in general (even though it is true than you can write terrible code in any language).

> No it doesn't. Either the developer benefits or doesn't benefit from "refusing". There's only so much time in the day. I'll refuse to to learn Qt or gtk+, unless there is some overwhelming benefit for me to learn it.

That is true, but consider that the end product is not necessarily meant to be most convenient for the developer. Keeping the user in mind when making these decisions may make you consider more native and less resource-intensive alternatives. I have read in the past that Electron also posed some difficulties for screen readers, for example (although I'm not sure if that is still the case), which might not be something that impacts you as the developer, but which can make it harder for someone to make use of your software.
Rust hash iteration+reinsertion
How would they fix that? It's rendering all the examples on one page (like it should) so I understand it takes a long time.
If the housing prices are artificially higher because people could use it as an illegal hotel business, a correction would be better for the communities. Now someone who bought into the GTA housing frenzy with minimal downpayment as an investment can go underwater; so what? That's how investments work, no?
Only the dev version of the Neo supported altering apps on the device. Later versions were locked -- causing Yubico to issue replacement devices when it was discovered their GPG applet contained a vulnerability a couple years ago.
Of the few times I or my grandparents have used arb'n'b, it's been a spare room in someone's personal home.

So it does happen.
Go to alt.alien.vampire.flonk.fonk.flonk and ask if they are really aliens and what's a flonk.
> the part of the world I come from

Just curious, is a $5/month DO server cost prohibitive in your neck of the woods?
Solving Intelligence vs. Accelerating Towards AI Winter: Which Goal Is Better?
A warning to new developers
Well, that was a waste of time, the article is more a rant than anything else. I can understand that some piece of technology will not like everybody, but not spending any time giving proper alternatives. Not to mention that the header seems click bait since it's an opinion article, not an actual security risk.
Of course it was. The story was on the front page for over 5 hours, including 4 hours after we reduced the penalty. No moderator has touched it since.

HN's software causes stories to fall off the front page after a while. If you didn't happen to see a story while it was there, that doesn't make it "apparently" suppressed.
'Strawmanning an entire farm', I like that, it's cute.

I refer to these other articles because I'm saying there is a double standard. Why are we suddenly talking about banning Breitbart? For writing a provocative article on why women would be happier in traditional rules? If we look at the articles I mention and replace the word 'woman' with 'man', I can't see a lot of difference between what we now are supposed to be outraged by.

How is pointing out a double standard in these contrasting articles a straw man?
Just because a particular technology is not the "right" tool for every job doesn't make it harmful...
Yeah...I could do without the RAM munchers.
> a UU "irregular"

That's a nice phrase, and it seems to describe be at the moment as well.
An HSM consists of some secure memory to store a secret and a program, and a processor to run the program to perform computations using the secret.

A Yubikey consists of some secure memory to store a secret and a program, and a processor to run the program to perform computations using the secret.

The programs are different but they are basically the same thing. The author wonders why there isn't a simple general purpose gadget you can load your own program on to. As long as the action of loading a program clears existing secrets, the device could be secure.

Or to put it another way, consider a Raspberry Pi acting as a router and as a Raspberry Pi acting as a media streamer. They have completely different purposes, but they are the same thing.
> like it should

No it shouldn't. Split up large chunks if it impacts performance.
Bind is a total disaster. bind 4, of course. Bind 8 was also a major disaster. Bind 9 has security problems as well. It is huge and, due in part to DNSSEC it is way too complicated. It is more sensible to use more compact services like nsd for authoritative dns and unbound for a caching server. Or Dan Bernstein tools, even
The only viable alternative is Qt, and it is almost as big and offers a less familiar programming model.

Native is only an option if you want to rebuild your app UI from scratch a minimum of twice and never support Linux or other less common desktops.

UI development has always been in fragmentation hell.
I don't know Airbnb's demographics on travel (as in, who is hosting outside of USA and Canada, and who uses it outside of USA and Canada) but I wouldn't worry about this too much. Even if their usage is curtailed in the US, they can push for marketing and usage in other countries (they are eyeing the second largest home sharing company in China currently[1]).

However, I really wish Airbnb (and companies that use the same strategy, like Uber) would really try to work with cities rather than fight them. I mean, when you spend $8MM on tone deaf ads in San Francisco to fight some proposition rather than working with the city to come to a compromise, it's pretty bad. For example, the article mentions a specific bylaw for the area where the user in question in this article lives. I know things move slowly in law, but I feel it would be relatively simple to work with the city of Toronto (and the county(?) of North York) to get the bylaw removed or amended. I wouldn't be surprised if Airbnb demonizes the new SF law[2] once users get fined by the city, and to me this seems backwards. I think it would be smarter to try to work with the cities, and if you lose one, it sucks but that's life.

1: http://qz.com/845185/as-the-us-and-europe-crack-down-on-home...

2: http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/overview-airbnb-law-s...
>So, if you start thinking down that line, if someone threatened murder, you’d probably take that off the platform. If someone threatened assault, you’d take that off. But if a presidential candidate threatens to imprison an entire religious minority[...]

It's easy to see what he's referring to here, and thus, he demonstrates that he's captured by fake news as well, and doesn't even recognize it. Half-truths or intentional misreading of things Trump has said are bread and butter of the left wing's fake news organizations.

As a side note, he succinctly explains with what is wrong with a coincident push by the same people, banning of certain viewpoints off Twitter. Oh well it's a private company, and they can run it how they want! Your free speech is not being violated. But as he just admits, these private entities are extremely powerful brokers of speech, and what they decide stays and goes has a very large impact on society. But, consistency is not the strong suit of these people. It is entirely whatever argument works at the time.
Links? Thanks.
Did you even read my comment? Like, the bit where I stated repeatedly that there is no right to speak somewhere online?

What I am pointing out is that the let's strategy in this election was suppression and abuse, and it resulted in President Trump. Maybe try a different approach next time!
MONETIZE GOOGLE MAPS ON Your WEBSITE WITH ADSENSE ADS
>[1]. yes, iPod. Showing my age.

That was, what, 9 years ago? I realize it's an eternity in the average JS framework lifecycle timeframe, but come on.
Top 22 Python Programming Books
Anyone doing this? Sounds like something that will be banned once it catches on, but also sounds good.
IBM did a study on work spaces and how they affect productivity. It would be nice if universities did the same as a joint project of the Architecture and Computer Science departments but everyone seems to be interested in coding to get a job rather than studying these issues that are faced daily by millions of devs.
> 1/ either try and locate all the add-ons that will be broken, get in touch with their developers, be ignored by most of them, start several weeks of negotiation with those who do answer, then eventually, several months after my code is ready, land the change, and notice that Chrome has landed that same change a few months ago

(emphasis mine)

And responding to that emphasis: so what?! People who use Firefox instead of Chrome do so for a reason! You're failing in two ways: 1) "breaking the user experience of millions of users for no understandable reason," and 2) turning Firefox into Chrome.

If Firefox users wanted Chrome, they would already be using Chrome. They don't want Chrome, they just want Firefox to continue being Firefox, to keep working without breaking their add-ons that make their browser theirs!

Why is this so hard for Mozilla to understand?

The day Firefox stops supporting XUL extensions is the day I stop using Firefox. I've been using Firefox since it was Phoenix. I already have Chrome installed--I'm not using it, and there are reasons for that. You should meditate on this.

Mozilla is slowly committing suicide. It's painful to watch, because it doesn't have to be. One of the great forces in the Internet's history is not going to be around in a few years. Firefox will live on, because of the MPL. But what a shame to destroy the organization that brought it into being. Such a waste.

Oh well. If the Internet has taught us anything, it's taught us that, when it comes to software, developers are fungible. The phoenix will rise again.
totally agree. he only came clean after getting caught. Who knows how many times he's done this.
Thanks so much! Means a lot :)
Do you support freeBSD?
> JS is a terrible programming language

[Citation needed]

Sorry, JavaScript may have gotten lucky being the lingua franca of the web, and it might not be perfect or even great, but it's "good enough" for most purposes these days.

If it were "terrible" you would expect at least one compile-to-JS [1] to have gained a non-trivial amount of traction by now. The supersets of JavaScript like Babel, TypeScript, and Flow are more popular than "not terrible" languages like ClojureScript, Elm, etc.

1. https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/list-of-langu...
It's just ozone, not a kind of zone.
Ha ha, I intended it as a joke. Probably not. I'd say Navier Stokes equations are more difficult to apply than Maxwells equations.
Could you give an example of something that was unintuitive or difficult to use?
As one who moderated a smaller forum for a while in the past:

1) Direct access to the database at times is needed particularly for bulk edits. In our forum we had certain bans and not all were immediately enforced by the posting software. Some were done in bulk operations down at the database level.

2) Manual semi bulk edits at time were done in places where scripts simple were too much work to get right.

3) Manual direct individual edits also at times happened but they are incredibly dangerous as they can erode the confidence in the site. From what I saw at multiple forum the temptation is very high at the top to rationalize such edits and it tends to work against them badly.

4) Edits at database level often leave little to no trace. That is one reason that makes them so dangerous. At production level very few should have access to the DB for accountability reasons.

5) Nobody really likes DB level edits but they are needed and done. The forum software and support scripts do not cover all situations. Getting 100% rid of them is unrealistic. For audit reasons logging original posts in a tamper proof place may be wise but is rarely done.

6) Clearly someone has abused privileges here, I'm fairly sure such edits are not condoned by any internal guidelines. There must be consequences.

7) Personal consequences. This is about ethics, behavior and trust. These things are not all b&w. Was he hiding the behavior? Is there insight? Are there mitigating circumstances? Also is he the right guy for the job considering the job description requires flame retardant skin? The board needs to look into this carefully and quickly.

8) Organizational consequences. How can they make sure this does not happen again? Do they have all the right controls in place? Are they are properly separating the roles. Should they get audited? The threat for an organization to suffer from catastrophic cyber events increased incredibly. It used be be groups of people revolting on boards. These days certain sites reach out to sizable fractions of the US electorate and whip up attacks (recent: Kelly's book on Amazon or CNN's app in the app store). Very solid organizational and technical controls are needed for a place that so easily gets into the cross-hairs of a mob.
What about the FST-01? It's what I use and it works pretty well in my experience. http://wiki.seeedstudio.com/wiki/FST-01
Excellent project! I wish I had this kind of service available a few years ago.

Minor question: are the servers configured for IPv4 only?
How “Alice's Restaurant” Became a Thanksgiving Anthem
The best solution would be to lazy load. If you can only see the first 3 property on page load, there is no gain in having them all load at the same time.
>> JS is a terrible programming language

> I can never see the point of comments like these.

At minimum, I think the hope is that js-only programmers become aware that there are alternatives. And hear that the people who use those alternatives often find them better.