skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't believe this meme won't die -- it's so incredibly disrespectful to his family. Honestly no better than the Sandy Hook Truther bullshit.

Michael Hastings was a recovering alcoholic and meth-abuser whose brother, Jonathan, had flown into town the day before because he suspected that Michael was having a manic breakdown similar to the ones he had in the past. Jonathan had been called to LA since several of Michael's coworkers had reached out about his mental state.

After spending the day with Michael, Jonathan called their third brother to come help get Michael back into rehab. That brother arranged to fly out the next day but that night, at 4:30am, Michael snuck out of his apartment and crashed his car into a tree at very high speed.

Here's what Jonathan Hastings thinks about his brother's death:

I really rule out foul play entirely. I might have been suspicious if I hadn’t been with him the day before he died. After all, he definitely was investigating and writing about a lot of sensitive subjects. But based on being with him and talking to people who were worried about him in the weeks leading up to his death, and being around him when he had had similar problems when he was younger, I was pretty much convinced that he wasn’t in danger from any outside agency.

https://www.salon.com/2013/11/05/michael_hastings_life_and_d...
Does anyone know what the energy usage of the Instant Pot is overall compared to other methods of cooking?

I've explored various off-grid methods of living and the energy requirements involving food (both storage and preparation) can be surprisingly high. I'm curious to see if the efficiency gained by using a pressure vessel results in substantial energy savings.
What's the incentive for people to be the driver in this scenario, other than not crapping up the commons (which in this case is the freeway?)
I'm going to have to agree with other posters that have had the opposite experience.

The majority of taxi drivers I come across are terrible drivers. They pump the brakes on the highway when there is no traffic, they go slow in the left lane, make illegal turns, and don't know where they are going.

Lyft drivers are hit and miss, but for the most part, are people who are good at driving and getting where they are going. Plus they all use waze or Google Maps, so their directions are good.

I've had to exhort a couple of Lyft drivers (I try to avoid the other one) to go faster to keep up with traffic, but other then that, they are on average 2 steps above taxi drivers in terms of alacrity and situational awareness.

(This is in the Washington DC area BTW)
This is a wonderful idea and execution.

Tip for people trying this out, to experience it fully you have to:

- login with github
- edit some text
- then hit play again. The preview will then update.

- also, you can record your own edits to the video.

I am surprised by the quality and thoughtful demos.

Some simple things would make it better, like updating automatically without hitting play. Also, I think the videos should have x buttons to close them, not just clicking in another area.
What am I committed to?
+1

I know of no one in any of the dozen or so cities I've lived who doesn't prefer a typical uber driver to a typical cab driver.
Very nice presentation.
It is hard to judge the cognitive cost to someone without knowing what that person's pre-existing mental models are.

I don't quite see how cognitive load is a thought-terminating cliche though.
Considering the government is letting pedophiles walk[1] because they don't want to release their exploits, do you really think we would know if they were abusing their power?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13798924
holy hell that interactive video/code editor is pure fucking genius!!!!!

Is the mouse cursor an actual HTML element moving according to pre-recorded session?

Really would like some more details on this. I've never seen anything like it.
> I deeply miss the good old days, when I could trust that my computer would behave as I expected it to.

So don't update your browser. Or at the very least, use an ESR.

> So, you're saying that I should lose the ability to log into my router

You're using the wrong tool to connect to your router. The web has always been in flux. If your router only supports web login and requires mildly fancy web code which might get deprecated, that's a problem with it, not the browser.

Similarly, it's not the browser's fault that google has bad UX, and you can make sparse-looking pages with ye olde html as well.
I would be careful also if you think you might need to get a clearance in the future. I was in college during the initial Wikileaks Manning dump and I remember getting a email from the DoD forwarded through the Physics department that viewing or sharing classified wikileaks info could prevent us from getting a clearance in the future even of we did not have a clearance at the time.
Ditto. Also was prohibitive to seeing the one "ah ha" moment for users. Would have been nice to experience it before signing up.
I think cognitive load is a perfectly acceptable term here. Taken within the context of Cognitive Load Theory, we assume that any individual can only maintain a few items into their working memory. These items are portions of the code that you need to think about at once in order to achieve a task, and good code partitions off the logic so that in order to understand individual components you only need to reserve a few slots of your working memory.

Of course this is a bit contrived, but I would argue that pretty much everything we've come to understand as "easy to read code" all reduces down to how effectively it organizes itself given the limitations of our working memory. And in that case, it's one of the first things you should be sure to understand on your path to becoming a better programmer.
Time for my apocryphal story:

I needed to a fix a particular kernel protocol subsystem so I could use Linux at work. I sat down with the spec and a non-Linux computer that implemented it. I spent 8 weeks (I thought it would take a couple days--HAH!), and I wrote it and wrote the very nice test suite which included the single test case I couldn't handle (handling would have required major changes to the kernel).

It's a protocol. The word protocol means "state machine". Especially when hardware dudes design something.

However, state machines mean "indentation". One level for current state, one level (at least) for output variables, and a couple of levels for input variables. My code was well documented, tested, and easily changeable if you needed to add a new state.

"But, that's more than two levels of indentation. Rewrite it.".

After I pulled my jaw up off the floor, swore a couple of times, I replied: "No. This code is properly written, well-tested, and very amenable to changes when the spec gets updated. This code does what I need and what a bunch of people need. I will happily distribute it to them and you will have a bunch of users of this subsystem happily telling everybody to not use mainline because they are a bunch of tossers. If you wish to rewrite it to your indentation spec, feel free, but I will not sign off until it passes all of the tests."

So, they did. They decided to rewrite it to remove the indentation. Lots of early returns (full of bugs). State cases that got "simplified" by sharing common code (full of uninitialized variable bugs). And, because of all the sharing, it became difficult to add cases when the spec changed (which it did--regularly).

But, eventually they got their two levels of 8 character indent. After SIXTEEN WEEKS.

My question, of course, was "Why not just pull each state into a function? It was the obvious way to get what you want. It would have been much easier."

The response: "Well, we tried that. But there are so many variables per state, that the function calls were all exceeding an 80-character line length and we had to wrap them too much."

I had a bruise on my forehead that day.

Yeah, formatting rules exist and have good reasons. But please remember that the goal is "code quality and readability"--not formatting rules.
> Tolls may disproportionately burden the poor, but so do sales taxes, gas taxes and every other way we pay for roads.

So let's add yet another burden?

> Americans often suffer the most severely from the impacts of poor mobility.

Wow, somehow my crazy brain interprets this as if you're poor you're probably not as American as the rest of us.

> Working-class parents who are late to pick up their kids from day care, for example, often pay severe financial penalties.

So let's charge them up front so that they can't even afford to drop off their kids at day care?
He follows this up with:

> Don’t code “your way”. Just follow the coding standards. This stuff is already figured out. Make your code predictable and easy to read by coding the way people expect.

I'm not a C dev, but is "(null != thing)" still a convention? (Based on your comment it sounds like yes). If yes, it seems to me like he's saying: keep doing that!

Nowhere does he claim that his advice about this convention applies to every language (this would be silly) and not writing C should not preclude someone from giving programming advice.

The "generally applicable" advice that he does give is exactly that: general. Is it possible to write a blog post about code quality/complexity/insert-thing-here that applies to all circumstances? I don't believe it is. It doesn't mean that there is no value to be gained from exploring concepts that may apply.
You can just not tell it your wifi password.
This only a problem in dynamically typed languages.
"We assess that X happened" isn't really public evidence for X. It's an argument from authority at best.
I didn't know about this. Are there benchmarks that aren't canned by Oracle that you know of? I'm intrigued by this round-robin way of threading. I'm not a cpu expert, but how does this compare with the Power arch's way of threading?
There are many taxi monopolies and oligopolies in the USA; the fact that the abrogations of the rule of law are local makes them no less objectionable.[1]

[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/theres-no-constitutional-right-tax...
Yes, all facts should contain a probability property.
I work at Google, though not on anything remotely related to cars/transportation, nonetheless I'm clearly not unbiased here.

At any rate this part of Ben Thompson's post annoyed me for a different reason - he conflates and equates patent infringement with theft of trade secrets, while those are in fact quite different things, and have correspondingly quite different forms of relief/punishment.

I don't have a strong position on whether or not that should be the case, but the fact remains that theft of trade secrets is actually a federal crime.
Sometimes I find myself writing in reviews for less experienced developers the comment: this is clever but not clear.

I think as developers we get too enthralled in the problem solving and forget that in the long run we are more like journalists noting business rules at a snap-shot in time, which a future maintainer of our software must act as historian/archaeologist in order to understand.

What's funny is that often our future selves is the maintainer of our software. However, as we lament choices in the past, we continue to write intricate code in the name of elegance/conciseness.

These days I'm pretty pleased when I can say a piece of code utilises only syntax and statements taught in an introductory programming course.
> By embracing prototypal inheritance you will write cleaner code with fewer errors.

Do you have a concrete example in mind?
Code sample A is cleaner and has fewer errors than its class equivalent B?
How common are get time calls so that they would actually be an issue?

I've worked on quite a few systems and can't think of a time where an api for getting the time would have been called so much that it would affect performance?
I think you need one more twist. If I'm poor, and I have a means-tested toll credit, then I have no incentive not to use the toll road. That is, the economic incentives you're trying to create don't apply to the poor. (Unless by "credit" you mean "I get to keep the cash if I don't use it", in which case my objection does not apply.)
The assumption here is that those people are part of the public and are not shilling a 'more correct record'.
Goodbye Rust, and Hello, D
meh CIA tools still require "intervention" or well "manually infecting things", on the other hand NSA tools don't... so the day, all the NSA tools gets available then it will be doomsday for all sysadmins in the world.
This seems to be exactly the same as what the anti-PC and general Trump voting crowd believe as well. They HATE oversimplifications that deny their viewpoint. For example "Affirmative action is 100% fair." That's not an objective truth, but the left tries to sell it that way.
I'm saying that this is an incredibly inane, nitpicky, superficial conversation that has nothing to do with the technical content of the presentation.
Hangouts switched from NPAPI to WebRTC in Chrome back in 2014, but continues to use plugins (NPAPI or ActiveX) in other browsers. Hangouts depends on some non-standard WebRTC functionality in Chrome.

https://plus.google.com/103171586947853434456/posts/39TCW3Pc...
Almost no cities have 24 hour mass transit including many that are considered to have good transit systems. That's a very high bar you're setting.
I'm just a little weirded out how this list is, in style, identical to many of the lists I've created and have open right now. I need this to be a bit more "henchmanny" and a bit less "average Joe/Jane sitting at their desk under the florescent lights drinking coffee and idly thinking about the workweek ahead."
Getting started with Elixir
I've been very impressed with zstandard in general, on x86, and satisfied with it on other architectures. It seems to do a good job and do it well.

About the main reason I haven't pushed on using it for work is just concerns about maturity. gzip/pigz works well enough for our purposes, and isn't enough of a hindrance to justify using what is still new software without a proven history.
How to Deliver Large-Scale Projects Using a Content Hub Strategy
Problem with LA is that we build horizontally and not vertically. We keep adding more homes in suburbs and not building up in the cities that have the jobs. There's a big anti growth movement preventing high density housing. They have been successful in preventing high density projects like the Bergamot transit village(on a rail line too). Today we're voting on initiative that prevents large scale developments. If it passes, housing will get more expensive and traffic will get worse.

To fix the problem, we just need more affordable housing where the jobs are located and that means building upwards.
I think based on the rest of the context that was kind of the point - to drive home the "screw these people" attitude that policies like this would spring from.
From a NorCal perspective, that is sad because BART stops around 12:30, seven days a week. But I suppose there are MUNI lines that run all night, which is slightly better.
> the consumers anymore, they stick their fingers in their ears and pretend to know best.

They are though. Consumers will pay for hardware with batteries that die after a year and a half. They'll pay for vendor-lock in and to be locked into the walled garden experience. They'll pay for hardware that will be locked out of the walled garden and unsupported by vendor updates after 4-5 years. They'll pay extra for accessories that give basic functionality to their electronics. They'll pay a massive premium for accessories that are subpar for their asking price if they're endorsed by celebrities.

I'm not a fan of newer Apple hardware and software, but we're in the minority.
> Also, there's a TON of crazy people riding, literal homeless crazy people, or kind of thuggish people. There needs to be some sort of loitering code enforcement on the train along with more security. I feel uncomfortable as a dude, I bet women feel even more so.

One of the ways to improve the public transit, as a whole, is to make people of all socioeconomic classes take transit. Consider New York, for instance, where millionaires are shoulder-to-shoulder with waiters, and homeless people on their commute... And it works surprisingly well.

Until politically wealthy people have to deal with the problem, they won't support any solutions.
But part of these leaks implicate the Russians, as their toy chest has been exposed too.
> Assange has repeatedly said that the source is not the russian goverment or a affiliated state party

False!

He does not answer the question about someone affiliated with Russia handing him the information.

He always repeats this carefully worded answer: "our source is not the Russian government and it is not [a] state party."

Why so carefully worded -- why can't he say "no one affiliated Russia gave me the data"?

Because he knows it came through an intermediary for Russia and wants to be able to lie, but still have a weaselly excuse if he's caught.

The fact that he's spent a lot of time spreading the Seth Rich idea is even more suspect. It's a conspiracy theory straight out of the KGB's cold war book.

Seth Rich was murdered and his watch was yanked at. He fought back at his attacker(s). "Nothing was stolen!"

The professional assassin got into a fight with the victim and then shot him, but forgot to actually steal something? Not very likely.
There's a difference between people being just plain stubborn, and people with an actual disability that hampers them.
Visual Assist by Whole Tomato Software [1] is a solid and well known refactoring plugin. For C++, it provides me a huge productivity boost. There is a C# version as well.

[1] http://www.wholetomato.com/
> For any individual, freeloading is always the best course of action.

Very funny and real.
Luckily, that's not how it is.
> It is a trivial task but many seasoned people failed it to the extent that we thought "you don't really know Java, do you?".

This is the kind of bias that I think an interviewer should never have, and part of what makes interviews so stressful: that your ability is called into question off of something very simple. You don't know whether the candidate knows Java or not. You only know that the result of the interview is negative, which could say just as much about the interview as it does about the candidate. Assuming "you don't really know Java, do you?" with so little evidence strikes me as disrespectful at best. Why is this considered OK?

ashark makes a lot of very good points as to why someone may know Java but stumble with this question.
We added tolls to London but traffic hasn't got any better
They get paid.
I'm not the original poster but I think this is dismissive of a very real problem with FireFox. As a user I've seen perceived performance regress significantly over the last few years. From the outside Servo looks like a distraction - and the results tend to confirm it.

It may well be that Gecko just is that terrible and the only way to fix it is with Servo. If that's the case you guys really need to hurry up because you're loosing significant mindshare. Your organization's predecessor has also made this mistake before very publicly in the past with the Netscape rewrite.
Does anyone know how to unsubscribe from the "Your Visual Studio Subscriptions update for March" spam emails from Microsoft? I think they're super annoying, and have no unsubscribe instructions at all. I just got one announcing this launch.
Please keep pointless generation wars off HN.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13812246 and marked it off-topic.
Waze will get you anywhere in LA without a freeway.

Once you learn the side streets, there's always a faster way when the freeway is backed up.
If while performing counter-intelligence the CIA discovers that a foreign government/company can/is exploiting computer systems within the US, should the CIA have a responsibility to do anything?
Mine has unlimited paid licenses with one-click install for most Visual Studio editions. Time to swap to a company that provides better tooling =D
I just think A) we have to be honest that is only a tax on the poor B) then have the rich pay in a different way, maybe it should be a limit on duration of travel or miles by humans, ie. no matter what car you drive or who drives you you're not allowed to travel more than x number of miles/day. (this is beginning to sound really odd)
People do know that it costs to drive a car but the cost is hidden in some sense. I think few people actually calculate how much driving really costs. When I drive 10 miles I don't think to myself that it's going to cost me $5.40 (using IRS mileage rate). Gasoline taxes do not come close to paying for the road system. I remember when gas hit around $5 a gallon in the U.S. some years ago people did think about driving cost a lot more.

I suspect if the costs were more apparent people would be more apt to support public transportation and reconsider their driving habits.
Miami tried this, made tolls $7+, it did nothing. And because they put up barriers between the express (toll) lanes and regular lanes, when someone got in an accident in the express lanes, it was FAR slower than the regular lane. The mentality was/is '$7, well its worth it because I can't sit in traffic'
Better enforcement is a good idea. Seems to be worth the money.

Or carry concealed permits. You'll have to repeal California's action that requires all new semi-auto's to have a unique firing pin. But then you don't have to worry traveling.

I carry. I keep odd hours in a small town. I walk every night .25 miles to my office at 8 PM and then back again around 2 AM. Never had any problem (probably the same as most people on the train). If I do, I've got protection.
Self-driving cars are, unfortunately, an expensive half-assed solution to transportation in the US.

Buses (And really, any at-grade transportation that has to share the road with cars) are, unfortunately, not mass transit. 7 minutes vs an hour sounds atrocious.
All of a sudden, perfectly working JS becomes "legacy" code due to the introduction of a new feature in the spec. There's that saying, only the software industry is more driven by trends than the fashion industry.
Well, it's been a few years and we haven't switched it back. :)

We have had a number of clock issues, and one of the first things I try is taking and instance and switching it back to xen for a few days, but those issues have not turned out to be the clocksource. Usually NTP.

AWS can comment more about the state (safety/risk) of these clocksources (given they have access to all the SW/HW internals).
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Elon Musk: “Without tunnels, we will all be in traffic hell forever. I really do think tunnels are the key to solving urban gridlock. Being stuck in traffic is soul-destroying. Self-driving cars will actually make it worse by making vehicle travel more affordable".

http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/25/14391410/elon-musk-tunnels...
Is that the only thing you found offensive about that comment?

Poe's law appears to be in effect here.
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http://blog.goo.ne.jp/visulsign/e/00aa026d5923eb9ae7cec91302...
That's difficult when a large company like Google or Microsoft use the tools as part of their development process to make their software more secure. These are organizations with a very large megaphone if the CIA did that to their employees.