skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But I'd at least like to see some people in the cities say 'we honestly don't care about rural people and they need to adapt'. That would sit better with me.

What a willful misunderstanding of the other position.

If someone said to you, while commiserating over some kind of economic hardship you were experiencing, that you ought to move into their town or even live on their street, would that seem to you equivalent to their saying that they "honestly don't care about" you?
Having automated outage reporting still makes sense though. It keeps you from having a guy that's paid to check every light in the city manually. And since your lights are on a city-wide network (they are, right?), then adding outage reporting should be a feasible thing.
> The road construct sounds like it would take quite awhile as you 'drive down the road...

Not really. I phrased it that way ("driving down") for a simple explanation. I actually zip around at light speed on that road :-). After doing it for a while I can now 'jump' from landmark to landmark instantly.

> Do you write each number down, pause and recollect the next number, write it down, pause and recollect...

Yes. The moment I get a number I enter that in a text field (I'm actually using this to fill up a bank form for completing financial transactions). It does not matter if I'm in a noisy place or not, it does not need super focus or anything like that.
Aka more simply as H2G2,
"the" and "to" aren't required in an acronym.
> Apple can make fashionable stuff

Got to be honest, I think they missed a big opportunity to make the watch fashionable and popular by simply choosing a square face, reminiscent of nerdy calculator watches from decades past, rather than a nice circular face, like most other watches.

Most people won't get an Apple Watch not because it isn't useful, but (I think) because it just doesn't look right, doesn't fit into the "fashion" that it claims to be.
"Capitalism."
Do you have any children?
As a Norwegian I absolutely hate the winter. It is my number ONE complaint about this country. I have for decades considered moving to some other country, but I never seem to be able to find a good alternative candidate. So many countries with nice climates are so broken in all sort of other important ways.

I did plan many years ago to settle in America, but I found it hard to accept the values of American society. While still immensely fascinated by America, and envious of the opportunities, climates etc afforded Americans, I have a hard time stomaching the rampant materialism, shallowness, and disregard for the lesser off. The revenge and punishment oriented nature of American society puts me off. It has too many rules, which are too harshly and inhumanely enforced.

Spain was an option too, but with the massive unemployment, low salaries and the fact that I don't speak Spanish, it isn't an obvious choice. But I've decided I am going to try to learn some Spanish. Maybe if I can run my own business I don't have to care about low salaries.
I love reading paragraphs like this:

The global market for AR products will surge 80 percent to $165 billion by 2024, according to researcher Global Market Insights. But Apple really has no choice, says Gene Munster, a founding partner at Loup Ventures who covered the company for many years as an analyst. Over time, Munster says, AR devices will replace the iPhone.

Oh, OK. Glad we've got all that sorted.
Upon close examination it's quite apparent that Mutual Insurance Companies are the best method to address risk without moral issues, I think, whereas most of the for-profit industry is so ridiculously in bed with regulators it's awash in essentially government-approved profit margins with any decent level of underwriting discipline. Quite fascinating. I support having coverage for things like Health and Property but what a bizarre setup we have in the US.
They cant be mad if you tell them you are leaving because you were hired to work on xyz and you are actually doing abc. Unless they hired you saying that SOON you will be working on xyz. Then you put yourself in this situation.

Anyways most employers will understand your reason for leaving and it shouldn't be too big of an issue to find a new gig.
> Hopefully we will soon live in a world where manufacturers are obligated to get good reviews five and ten years after their appliance is sold.

I don't know of a product I have recently bought that is the same model that was sold 5-10 years ago. When I'm looking up a product to buy, I look for the model I'm intending to buy. Likewise, when I'm asked for a review, it's from a product the company is currently marketing.

I focus my dollars on companies with better customer service records, but beyond that, how should I "encourage" companies that build things to last? Especially when few companies build with that mentality?

Even typical "built-to-last" brands like craftsman and kitchen-aid can no longer be trusted to not fall apart. The only thing I can think to really kick-start better quality, is to enforce mandatory a 5-year (or 10-year?) warranty.
I have a complaint letter written by my father-in-law back in the 50s about his car, which had seized up three times. The manufacturer wrote back to say it was his fault for driving at the same speed all the time, and he should vary his speed to prevent this happening.
It is not a matter of just being shut down due to low volume. The rates that you get depend on the volume. So the "back up" gateways end up so expensive you have no interest in even keeping them around.

From my experience you end up being tied pretty hard to pretty one provider and as long as you make fraud prevention yourself you can stay in business. Problem is that if you do all the fraud prevention stuff yourself then why do you need braintree for? To just invoke a .charge(100, "EUR")??
Thank you for responding; I do appreciate that.

Isn't '"People in the cities" (who tend to be strongly left-leaning) literally want to give money to the less well-off people in rural areas to help support them. It's the right-leaning candidates who are opposed to wealth redistribution. Who is missing empathy for whom? From my perspective, the fiscal conservatives from the rural areas have relatively less empathy than vice versa.' exactly as much of an generic ideological talking point?

It certainly led to a lot of heated discussion, e.g. the top-rated comment in that thread, which stated in part 'If anything I'd say there's a lot of disgust with how many rural Americans live off the system.'
The EU has many many problems. Of course. Many of the critcisms you level at it would be equally valid of any single political party without a competant opposition.

Currently the EU only really has visible 'opposition' in the form of (IMHO) petty nationalists who want their respective countries to leave, rather than from people who are quite happy to be part of the EU, but want it radically reformed, or changed in specific ways.

I was saddened that the UK voted to leave (I'm British, live in the UK, but grew up in Cyprus). And horrified by how the 'Brexit meanx Brexit' group are now pushing it through with very little discussion about what that could mean, or how Euroskepticsm could be rechanneled into something positive.

The idea of Europe-wide cooperation, freedom of travel/work, etc. isn't going away any time soon, and currently the vehicle it's embodied in is the EU. I deeply wish the UK government had said, "Right. So the referendum proves that enough of the country is very very unhappy with the status quo. Would leaving the EU fix that? Or is there a way we can change the EU, or our status in the EU, in such a way that the situation is better?"

Post Brexit, the UK has no voice into the EU governance, and it's very unlikely that the people with influence in the EU will lean in helpful directions to what the UK government(s) would like it to be.

I hope you're right, that we will return to much more ad-hoc co-operation, deals and many individual treaties and so on. I really really hope you're right.

But while the EU remains like it currently is, I suspect it's simply going to be awful for the UK for a very long time.

I guess it slightly depends on how grown up and generous the EU negotiators and leaders are. If they genuinely will look out for the British public (technially their citizens...) and their interests in this, then it may not be so bad. But the UK government is certainly perceived as being remarkably selfish and self-centered in the whole affair, which doesn't really fill me with confidence about the future of the UK.
> You're giving the Leave campaign a free pass on a technicality of language.

I suppose that's probably right.

I just don't like seeing snide throwaway remarks that when you think them, they aren't really exactly what the situation is. Like the Leave slogan, the snide remarks are also damaging to making sure everyone has a fair understanding of the true situation.
Most people won't get an Apple Watch not because it isn't useful, but (I think) because it just doesn't look right, doesn't fit into the "fashion" that it claims to be.

Apple's gamble seems to be targeting people whom have never owned or even wanted to own a traditional watch and for whom the traditional shape holds no intrinsic emotional value.

Nor for that matter is square an unknown shape even for higher end watches:

http://media.gq.com/photos/56c61128b9dd6cd82e6f7bb5/master/w...

http://media.gq.com/photos/56c61128585fc86b2f2497c6/master/w...
This is why I'm rather afraid of Tesla and their batteries - you know batteries, whether intentional or not, only last for about 1000 charge cycles, or in the case of Tesla for about 7-10 years, before they have to be replaced - which won't be cheap.

This will be an Issue that will be highlighted very soon. We'll see a huge devaluation in secondhand Tesla cars, since replacing the battery will be more expensive than replacing an engine in a car (I believe), plus it'll have to be done every ten years - while a car can keep the same engine for decades, especially when some of the wearables like timing belts and seals and such are replaced.

I hope Tesla will recognise this too and do something about it - battery replacement programs, preferably where they can replace batteries with higher-capacity ones as time goes by.

I don't see how owning a car in full can work for electric cars, not when the battery needs to be replaced every ten years. I don't know what the lifespan of the drive unit is either.
Formally proven tetris on the Arduboy miniature game platform
I work in SEO and regularly see large, poor quality link networks benefit sites, despite all Google's efforts. Other people have already suggested reporting the sites, but in practice you will never be able to keep up with someone who is really putting effort into this tactic.

It's best to avoid fighting this head on and stick to doing things properly - content, presentation and links. You may be under pressure now, but it's worth it in the long run. They will get their comeuppance.

If you're lucky you might even get an cryptic answer from the source during one of the Google Webmasters Hangouts - https://plus.google.com/collection/8926cB

(If you're interested I'm happy to have a five minute look in case I spot an opportunity you might have missed.)
>I'm pro leaving the EU because I do not agree with how it is run

... such as?
What a randomly self-serving assumption to make.
But if the consumer has no way of telling which is better there's no reason for the manufacturers to use quality as the determining factor for setting the price. Instead they'll focus on making it look more expensive or add features you'll never use in order to win market share.
Profiling and Optimizing Your Python Code – Dataviz Agile – Toucan Toco
From what I read here in the last month or two, I'd rather not have the Canadian and American borders be the ones that I'd often have to use. Many horror stories, even from native citizens.
Circular Airport Runway: Improving Airports Efficiency
Show HN: A responsive landing page for open source projects
Improved bandwidth for disordered antennas
Building a secure password reset feature
The other point is that you don't want to over-engineer any single part. Getting a 10,000 hour lifespan out of the motor is useless if the chuck cracks in 2,000 hours and the thing gets thrown away. Ideally you'd have the entire thing fall apart at once.

But, of course, failures are statistical. Worsening the quality of the most over-engineered part is usually beneficial, since in most cases you're paying for nothing, but occasionally that'll still be the part that gives out. So you come out ahead by making a more cost-effective product even while failure rates rise.

Of course, that's where the article's point about insufficient competition comes in... Standardizing quality throughout the device is sensible, but if those savings aren't passed to the consumer then they're losing money.
what is this, a website for ants? It needs to be at least twice as big!

Seriously thought, that's quite an unreadable interface.
> which had over 100,000 signatures

I'm not from the UK and neither for or against Brexit, but what good is a petition with 100,000 signatures when they'd just had a referendum with 17.4 million people voting 'leave'. [0]

Considering most of the signatures would have been people who voted to 'remain', in what world does it make sense for a 100,000 signature petition to overturn a referendum with a 1.3 million vote difference?

Even assuming those 100,000 signatures were all from former 'leave' voters switching sides, it would only change the result to be 17.3 million vs 16.2 million. A difference of 1.1 million.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brexit#Referendum_result
I'm wondering how this squares with the fact that Norway has the 13th highest suicide rate in the world (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/suiciderate.html). I know that suicide is often the product of mental illness rather than general unhappiness, but clearly Norway has a large number of people with some sort of depressive disorder, which I figured would lower them in terms of general unhappiness. In fact, most of the countries in the top 10 of this list have very high suicide rates...

EDIT: I'm an idiot, Norway actually has a rather low suicide rate, please disregard.
...it was also about the notion of freedom - being less intertwined with the EU (and thus its regulations, economics, security concerns, etc.)

That is an illusory kind of freedom because you can't turn the clock back. Reducing trade with the EU would be a loss for everyone. If the UK breaks from EU norms and enacts its own regulatory frameworks, that just means more overhead for companies that want to operate there... And so on.

The English habit of blaming Europe for regulations has always puzzled me, because pre-EU Britain was in many ways a bureaucrats' paradise. The number of civil servants peaked in the mid-1970s and has been declining since.

From what I've heard, just getting a telephone line in '70s England could be a nightmare. There's a lot of things that are so much better today thanks to a pan-European competitive environment and free trade. Imagine if Britain had created its own mobile phone standard instead of going with the European GSM. That would have been more "independent", but to no benefit at all.

A lot of things post-Brexit will end up like that: it's just easiest for everyone if Britain tags along with the EU standards rather than reinvents the wheel -- only Britain won't have a say in the processes anymore.
> I think that switching on types in Go is gererally a total anti-pattern.

It's not. It's a standard way of implementing variant types. See https://golang.org/doc/faq#variant_types and https://golang.org/src/go/ast/walk.go?s=1311:1342#L41

True, it's not used often. Sum types aren't a great fit for Go (as the FAQ says), but sometimes they are exactly what you want.

> Otherwise you're just fighting the language, which doesn't make any sense, as you can just switch to Rust then.

I find these types of comments really dismissive and unhelpful. A single comment declaration and one Sunday's worth of hacking (thanks to the incredible tooling provided by Go) makes my experience using Go better. Why do I need to switch to Rust? It would take several months and significant social capital to do. (And I'm saying this as a member of the Rust library team!)
Go tends to be more Web related - back end services communicating over networks, etc. It's taken over things that in the past would often have been done in things like Python but as scales increase performance becomes more important. Google's backend web services is teh classic example of usage.

Rust is more in the C/C++ role - 'systems programming'. This leans more towards things like command line tools, system daemons, OS kernels, embedded work on small processors etc. Doing performance intensive tasks in Firefox is probably Rust's most well known application.

That's not say that there are overlap areas where they can't both work well, but those aren't so much the areas of emphasis.
>Windows is tragic in many respects, but proprietary incentives did speed up computer development early on whereas GPL has slowed things down, and been sidelined, again and again.

The GPL is commonly cited as the reason why Linux is where it is today. It's a different incentive model to be sure, but one that undeniably works. It's why many prominent projects continue to use it, and it's why new projects use it as well. The only thing the GPL slowed down is people who aren't willing to accept how the GPL was designed to work.

Sure, I'd love a world where copyright was laughed off and where DMCA and anti-circumvention laws were annulled (i.e code is treated like the math that it is), but that's not the world we live in. In this reality, I and many others believe that the GPL provides the best trade-offs in terms freedom to users (and thus developers).
5 years after product comes out the patent is expired. Also to have a clause that you only have 7 years to get your product to market or else the patent expires with a grand total of 12 years at the most.
Confirmation bias.
Link to (I think) the actual project website, with English descriptions: http://www.endlessrunway-project.eu/
How Ida Tin Got VCs to Support a Period-Tracking App
Exploiting the Mechanism of Addiction for Mobile Game Developers
> At first the compiler was about 20 lines long, and the only thing that was able to do is to read an integer from the standard input and then emit a program that immediately exits with the integer as exit code.

I always find it hard to find the absolute minimum functionality i can implement so I usually just attack the problem hard, fail, and keep repeating until I have enough broken functionality, then I start adding tests and refactoring.

Can I ask what is your day job? :)
Is any EU country paying remotely close to the UK for programmers?

I'm not in the EU, but one of my brothers in law ended up moving to the U.S. from Austria in part because the pay difference was humongous (and of course the scene is completely different).

The only other country he considered was the U.K.
Most of the time, people that have more freedom are less happy. I remember stories I heard about people moving from Soviet Russia to the United States back in the early 80s. They were unhappy and stressed out because in the soviet union, they were assigned a job and the government took care of them. Here in the United States, you had to fend for yourself.

Freedom isn't always pleasant and happy, but it's better for the future of humanity. I've been all over the world and don't know anywhere that has as much freedom as the US.
> Apple are the only one who are new in that list, and it may just be a consolidation of existing office space.

AFAIK that's largely it; I don't know how much of this is expansion, but it's certainly mostly about getting their 1400 employees in/around London in a single space (with all the simplification of security, etc. that entails). It's worth pointing out that AFAIK the majority of those employees ultimately come from other companies that Apple has acquired over the years, hence the disparate offices.
"Appropriate speculation" isn't spouting off about a pet agenda a particular news outlet has or shoehorning it into whatever #popularbullshit is trending, it's about a logical conclusion to new information. Opinion pieces take that and twist it to their own bias and quite often into an inflammatory way.

Too many outlets use opinion pieces as fact and engage in public outraging by selecting the most controversial, inflammatory, or biased stories and opinions to get viewership. Hell, you don't have to look far for them claiming not to be news but "Entertainment News" and frankly, it's insulting. News used to have standards. Unfortunately it scrapes the bottom of the barrel.
How to Write SD Cards for the Raspberry Pi
The spectacular failures in these products that I've seen in the last decade were all skimping.

In the case of a refrigerator, the manufacturer undersized the motor, probably to meet some efficiency standard. The previous years model had an adequate motor, which worked much better.

I've also seen cases (Whirlpool refrigerators) where they included a rubber nipple that was too narrow, and would either freeze up and clog with biofilm. End result was icing of the condenser and evaporator. (Here's a description of the problem: https://partsdr.com/blog/w10619951-updated-drain-tube-fix-ki... )
Russian Election Interference Hearing – Live Stream
In regards to Bitcoin always needing fees:

That's true, but there's a fundamental difference between the fee structure when blocks are full vs not full.

When not full, and I believe the way the system was intended to work, the tendency is for miners to compete for users fees; hence the fees will tend to the actual cost of mining. Just enough for miners to stay in business and secure the network, with all extra value being captured by the users.

When full, users compete for mining space, and as such fees tend to the value of a bitcoin transaction. Which means all extra value is captured by the miners, and the users eventually have no incentive to use bitcoin as their transactions tend to be as expensive as they're worth.

Another troubling side effect of that is because of the zero-sum nature of mining, the extra fees will eventually just cause difficulty to increase to match, slowly pushing bitcoin's cost to match its value, providing very little (really almost no) incremental decentralization/security to the network.

The artificial barrier to the number of transactions essentially causes the world to waste electricity while at the same time slowly killing bitcoin. If the barrier were always kept just slightly above the demand for transactions however, bitcoin would operate completely healthily and the (nice low) fees would always provide just enough incentive for miners to continue to mine... by definition!
Yeah I see, this one is more of a server-side problem since it still allow SSLv3 connections.
Ironically, I work for a manufacturer who tries to support their product for at least 20-30 years, but obsolescence is an incredible challenge due to use of a lot of commercial of the shelf electronics which themselves go obsolete at a ridiculous pace. What I'm saying is, even if you try to engineer a product to last, if the supply chain supporting you isn't to doing the same, the problem often compounds.

In my case, obsolescence is a problem to be addressed to attempt to support a long product lifecycle. In most companies, planned obsolescence is a tool to advance tech, decrease support and manufacturing costs over the long run, and increase profit.
Python tricks for artists
Badidu's slogan:

Be the Evil, serve the Evil
Any particular state in mind?