skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm a former journalist who had to leave the industry not because I didn't care for journalism anymore, but because newspapers lost their business model, and the industry remains a shadow of its former self.

Whenever people ask me how I got into the technology industry (as a non-CS person), my short answer is something like this: when I saw what the Internet was doing to print media, I knew I had to learn how to code. Which led to having to learn how to design (CSS & JS). Which led to having to learn how to create servers for hosting and zero-downtime deploy. And also needing to understand machine capabilities and OSes and network loads and... etc.

Journalism was what I loved in middle and high school: darkroom photography and developing pictures from literal film in stop bath. Cropping shots with razor blades before gluing them on mockups. Soliciting local businesses for ads sold by the square inch. Writing and editing and editing and editing because hey... once that hits the press there is no edit button.

The process of traditional journalism is kind of dead, yes; though I don't think the industry itself has lost its business model... more like it fractured in a way that made national and world news dissemination way more powerful than the local yokel beat. That was what initially happened, anyway: small newspapers simply could not compete, and those that could were slurped up by massive parent companies that may or may not be entirely neutral or unbiased, politically, due to their size.

However, I think the tides are starting to shift and the trend is back toward localization. My initial grand design plan for Ecosteader, for example, was big and national.. like a magazine. I realized that the kind of advertising I'd need to be able to sell in this niche would actually do best locally. And indeed, this is why I keep the site live (despite the fact that I have sold only one book and received zero dollars from Adsense). I am pretty sure that going forward the next "big" disruptive thing in will be in hyper-localization ... ecological and efficient when it comes to physical goods and labor.

Anyway... slight digression, but I think it's indicative of what matters WRT to what people are willing to pay for when it comes to advertising delivered alongside content. Advertising works when people are looking for specific content relevant to them and they notice a good deal or a sale or a new store opening or something interesting about a place they see IRL.

This is getting too long. I will stop now.
https://turnoff.us/geek/user-space-election/
> some odd reason

Let me place my bet: Professional look (design, typography) + Medium brand + very little effort to publish + chance to get featured if it attracts clicks.
i've noticed people seem to use medium but hosted on their own domain?

i suspect probably quite a few more front pages if you include that.
There was another release date 2016. Passed that too. Now there is this Vulcan thing. Meanwhile the full game universe is nowhere to be seen. They have now given up setting a release date at all.

I don't understand where the community gets all that positive vibes from but I've lost it and yes....I invested too.
"Prescient Traveler" oh what a perfect app name. You can tell it's coming from a spy agency.
What about the ratio of human drivers to autonomous drivers since the crash? Not exactly 1:1...
Driver support. App support. Which form a vicious cycle together with demand.

EDIT
That's not to say that there aren't options that aren't great for given use-cases. E.g. as a developer I'm very happy with my linux-on-laptop. But if someone sends me an Office doc I am in a position to tell them to send me plain text or pdf or I won't be reading it. Not everyone is.
Rust doesn't have fast compile, and I think it's hard to argue that a language without TCO is a functional language. Recursion is a critical part of the functional paradigm.

Also, I think a lot of people are attracted to Go because it's very simple to learn and use. Rust with its borrow checker is definitely not simple to learn and use.

But it's true Rust has some functional features.
You can handle that fine provided you don't assume that.

> I'd really hope that Apple checks that the filenames are valid UTF-8 as they otherwise can end up with very interesting security bugs.

I think that's a bit pessimistic as Linux has run for year like that without any real issues.
There are ~260 million automobiles on the road in America. There are a statistically insignificant number of self-driving automobiles. I _suspect_ that self-driving vehicles are going to reduce traffic accidents when deployed en masse. However, at the moment it's comparing apples and oranges.
Deep Neural Networks Do Not Recognize Negative Images
Graeber is brilliant and I highly recommend his book: The Utopia of Rules.

Much of what we do falls into the pointless jobs category too. We write software to help people automate things that don't need to be done in the first place. Almost every piece of software we write has been written before, and will be written again tomorrow on a slightly different platform for a slightly different audience. What percentage of software development is totally redundant? 90%? More? What percentage of the work we do has "clear, undeniable social value" as Graeber puts it?

When you take a step back and reflect on what we do day-to-day it seems so utterly bizarre.
Everything you need to know about vim
> A large part of India is quite religious and Hinduism is the main religion

The article mentions:

Ahmed, a middle-class slaveholder in Uttar Pradesh in India, was eager to show me around the village where he was a member of the ruling elite. While I was grateful for the warm reception, I was visiting Ahmed’s community because of gross human-rights violations – bonded labour, child exploitation, and outbound human trafficking.

My understanding is that Ahmed is an Arabic name and I had been told that Arab people enslaved Indians and that this practice still goes on today. So I'm confused now. Are Hindus enslaving other Hindus?

Further, I'm wondering how this all relates to the article. The article doesn't mention religion at all so it is unclear to me whether you're saying Hinduism encourages slavery. I have Hindu friends who told me there is no such thing as "scripture" in Hinduism because there is no "god given" book like Torah, Bible or Quran. So I'm having difficulty understanding what's going on in India.
~ StArTuPs ~
Dynamic Routing in Artificial Neural Nets
Money is just a way to exchange time and resources between people. Money is not needed to live.
They aren't "essentially" particle accelerators, they are full-blown accelerators, linear accelerators, specifically.
Length of time on the front page, that filters out the sites that manipulate a front page presence their content can't sustain.
I agree. I don't think they should write a custom website to host their articles. I'm perfectly happy reading Ghost or WordPress.com articles as long as the site is well designed to fit the content.

While Medium is a very beautiful, well designed site, it doesn't work equally well for every kind of content out there. Technical content with code snippets are one of the least-suitable type of content for Medium.com design.

No matter how much thought is put into the design of the site, Medium's design is still designed to be a one-size-fit-all kind of product, and well, that means no matter how high quality their design is, it is still taking a somewhat "highest-common-denominator" approach to the design.
Every time there's something that comes up for C++ I get excited, I've always wanted to use the language, but it's like tap dancing in a mine field.

C++ needs a linter that rejects code that doesn't meet a certain standard ala Rubocop.
I agree with this,

I contribute $54/month on Patreon and $10/month on YouTube Red for creators.

Having said that I think people will struggle with Medium because Patreon is sold on a personal relationship with a given creator and genuinely wanting more from them. Seems like that won't work so well with Medium.

I like Medium though
Instagram Adds Two-Factor Authentication
> Compared to Go, OCaml is unfortunately a rather large language.

I agree. That said, ML is definitely a small language like Go, without OCaml's extras like the object system.

Alas, ML lacks Go's awesome and very modern standard library, which is a key part of Go's allure.

But yes, I would adore a functional language with Go's best features, particularly the standard library, solid concurrency, simplicity/ease-of-learning, fast compiles, binaries, static, etc.
Advanced Ruby Programming – 10 Steps to Mastery
Do you actually read the emails and participate in testing? I am not even an evocatus tester and I can play in the persistent universe. I think you're thinking about the fact that -- before the final game launches -- there will be a universe reset. But what you've just said here is not true. [0]

[0] https://robertsspaceindustries.com/spectrum/community/SC/for...
You don't have to upgrade. Lots of still functional pre-courage Macs you can buy.
There's also Standard ML, which smaller, and fully specified, with multiple implementations.

But I think part of the problem with both is tooling. Build and dependency tooling in particular. Opam was a good step in the right direction, but I think OCaml and SML could both benefit from a Cargo-like tool, that made managing projects and their dependencies simpler.
It would be good if people started adding team size, project size, codebase size, complexity of assigned work, etc to their answers to provide a bit more context.

I'm currently working in a team of roughly 60 developers on a 2-3 million loc system.

First contribution is usually within 2 weeks. We tend to start new developers on straightforward feature work.

We used to start new developers on bugs but found there was far too much tribal knowledge required. We couldn't use bugs to gauge if there was a skills gap.

For senior developers it usually takes around 12 months for them to be performing at a senior level.
I think the register makes some excellent points and I don't immediately see anything I disagree with ... but ...

The last few years have re-arranged my expectations. If you had told me an instant messaging platform like What's App would get acquired for billions I would have laughed. ICQ, AOL Messenger MSN Messenger, etc. had already come and gone. If you had told me one of the hottest IPOs in 2017 would be based on a photo-sharing app, one that doesn't even persist photos for very log, I would have laughed. If someone had sat me down in 2007 and said Flickr would be overshadowed by SnapChat I don't think I would have believed it.

So yeah, I get that blogs have been done and they mostly faded away to "journalism lite". But I get the feeling we'll see a few more whacks at that piñata before the candy comes out.

Maybe Q&A sites will also make a comeback? Quora and stackexchnage haven't seen the kind of growth that creates industries
Desire is suffering. Advertising induces desire to generate economic activity, and so could be construed as a form of paid torture.

We're kept on the "hamster wheel" by a carrot, not a stick.
This article was an absolute joy to read. I might subscribe to LRB.
Ahh yes. The "Tesla" defence.
Yep. Although I've read a few good posts on Medium, most of the content feels like something you'd find in popular business books. The design of the site seems to discourage anything with a technical/academic/deep thinking side. I've been wanting to post there, but I don't have anything to say that would be a good fit.
How can you say

> Inaccurate. Good content can and will self distribute.

And follow it up with

> You're on the internet

My experience on the internet is much different than yours.
You can pursue that goal without simultaneously pursuing hype.
Using the reader mode resolved the problem for me.
"Your" as in "the one you brought up".

What does history or the Bay Area have to do with this discussion?
Just as a flower grows from rot and decayed matter, the unpleasant things in human history and unpleasant things in human nature have provided what was needed for that which we have which is beautiful and life giving and good right now.

We look at a little slice of time and moralize. Which is all we can practically do. But morality changes and it doesn't come out of nothing either.
Wait, drunk driving is a willfully criminal act how is that comparable or relevant here?

We already have things like taxis, Uber and Lyft and people still get drunk and drive under the influence of alcohol and kill people.

Why would ride services with autonomous vehicles change that?

If someone is going to get drunk and drive a car rather than calling an Uber with a human driving they are no more likely to get drunk and call Uber because Uber has driverless vehicles.

The target for self driving cars is ride services not individuals.
the touch ID button is the power button
I thought long-haul trucking was a given.

I'm still believing that taxi/uber service will be the first consumer facing application.
The good news is that you don't need that big of a community for a language to do well. It does, of course, need to be big enough, but you don't need to compete too hard with the big corporation-backed languages to have your language community grow enough that it can sustain itself.

Of course, I guess I don't have any real data on it, so this is just my intuition based on observing various languages. So, you know, just my 2 cents.
Perl and Ruby want to be suitable replacements for Scheme, not the other way around. The authors of these languages were well aware of Lisp and many features and aspects are imported wholesale. These systems amount to the author's critique of Lisp -- what they felt was lacking in syntax or style or hygiene or principles. Ruby says, Scheme is okay but why not more convenient syntax for objects? Perl says, Lisp is cool but why not a maddening assortment of wingdings?

Scheme and CL bicker over whether an empty list embodies the concept of falsehood. JavaScript says wat? And Haskell is like, lol.
What's the "Tesla defense"?
The Hidden Power of Stack Overflow
Case insensitivity is something best addressed in userspace because:

1) History has shown that doing it at the filesystem level causes significant compatibility issues

2) Case insensitivity can present visually confusing results

3) Round-tripping between cases sometimes is not possible without loss of information

4) Some languages don't have a meaningful definition of 'case insensitive'

5) Some languages would demand a more comprehensive approach (i.e. being able to search using either kana or kanji for Japanese filenames)

So for things like case insensitivity (or #5 above) it's best to handle them at the application (or, ideally, OS user space library) level, taking advantage of information like system locale. Low-level APIs and system services can use case-sensitive filenames.

This is different from the question of whether to normalize filenames, because filenames are still visually unambiguous (at least most of the time) in UI, logs, and debuggers.

Incidentally, Windows is proof of this technique's advantages because NTFS is a case-sensitive file system while Win32 is case-insensitive. IIRC the Linux subsystem for Windows takes advantage of this.
In my experience, the double login issue seems to happen when restoring after having run out of battery. It happens on my ~2013 macbook as well.

A completely unscientific assessment is that the first login is to authorise restoration of the session. Unfortunately it seems like that authorisation can't be passed onto the session itself, so that also needs unlocking.
Yes, I'm a pretty big Tesla fan, but this has been my main criticism against Tesla's cars. The most rabid fanbois don't want to believe it, and just buy Tesla's argument that it's the driver's fault when an accident happens while AutoPilot is running, because he "didn't take the wheel in time."

I think Ford's study proved that humans can't react quickly like that if they don't already drive the vehicle, and I was able to figure that out myself simply through intuition, way before Ford discovered it. I also think that internally Tesla does believe the same thing, which is why it has pulled its "self-driving" ads from around the world.

It's just publicly continuing to say that if there is an accident then it's the drivers' fault "because there are plenty of warnings" (like 200 miliseconds before a crash) or that it asks you to put your hands on the wheel every 5 minutes, as if that does anything. An accident could easily happen in-between those 5 minutes. I guess that feature is there because Tesla also learned that people keep dozing off when a car is self-driven. But I think people who start dozing off because they aren't driving the car themselves will be able to ignore the sounds relatively easily.

The bottom line is that such systems put humans in an almost impossible situation that they're not equipped to deal with as humans, and Tesla and others act like they're legally covered and that's all that matters.

I think there should only be two types of systems: autonomous features that only activate in emergency situations to save people's lives (like auto-braking when there is an accident about to happen), and complete self-driving that doesn't need a human's attention at all. There shouldn't be anything in between.
If you are rsync'ing from HFS on a Mac to a Linux server, you can use "--iconv=UTF-8-MAC,UTF-8" to fix this problem.
The issue is that reliably driving in London without any sort of human backup is a really hard problem--and is unlikely to be achieved in anything like a VC funding time horizon. Sure, cabs in a city are a business whether the driver is organic or digital. But you have to be able to actually do it (relatively) safely and reliably.
If they didn't support IE, that would be fairly damning as well.
I don't think thats necessarily true, but I also think that Medium has that kind of connotation for me.

I think the lack of branding on Medium sites has something to do with it. People ended up lumping everything as "Medium articles", from spammy "growth-hacking" articles to well-researched, well written investigative article.
This post is actually an example of a conflict between multiculturalism and equality. In many cultures, this bar is acceptable, and in others it is seen as demeaning. When there is a conflict between the two, how do they choose what is right and wrong?
Currently, yes, but as these get better, there's going to be a really dangerous middle ground, where the car is great in 99.99% of cases but can't handle the rare exceptions.

The human driver dozing off or browsing Facebook on their phone simply isn't going to be paying enough attention to realize they're barrelling towards an active train crossing or whatever the unexpected edge case is.
Not really. They are spec'd well enough for some years now to perform most common tasks well and conceptually they are all basically a big touch screen, nothing new here. You may get small improvements, bigger numbers on the spec sheet and flatter models because "look we can". You may buy a new one for whatever specific reason but it's not you miss out sth. substantial with a bit older model.
That's not about filenames.
Ask HN: What's your most useful Kanban system for small software teams?
As a small software team we started using Kanban with Trello a while ago using a relatively simple structure. It seems simple enough in the beginning, but we quickly end up abandoning a chaotic ship and falling back to even more chaotic slack chats to solve multiple projects.

But I like the idea of kanban in general, I want to check out what kind of systems work best for you (kanban system and workflow).

A few pain points:
- Where to collect feature ideas and bug reports, without making too much noise?
- Where to put stuff, which is not immediately required?
- Where to put the burning stuff, which needs attention without rating everything as "important"?
- What to do with those cards, which never seem to get done?
- How to write a "good" card, easy to scan?

One simple example we are using is:

Backlog -> Collection of features, may or may not do
Buffer -> Planned features, want do
Doing -> Currently implementing features
Test & Review -> Implemented and needs testing
Done -> Implemented and tested
Trash -> Not relevant anymore

Then once a month or so we archive whatever is left in done and trash
another template, which worked for us:

Later -> Planned for some time later
Soon -> Planned soon, when current tasks are finished
Doing Now -> Currently implementing
Done -> Implemented and tested
Inbox (for Review) -> Feature collection
Trash -> not relevant anymore

"Inbox" gets every feature suggestion, internally and externally via feedback from users. We then review it once a week and move it to Later, if we decide to do it. But only, if there is not too much in Later already. Then gradually they move from Later -> Soon -> Doing Now. And again whatever is in Done and Trash is archived once a week or month.

What systems and workflows work for you?
I'm curious about this. If you have a purely static site, what would be the major bottleneck for a front-page-reaching site hosted on a raspberry pi? I'm thinking things like compression would eat up a lot of its CPU, but you seem to know more about this than me.
It's always been a browser of the masses - and a tool to keep eyeballs on Google properties.
German coal mine may be prime for pumped storage
Having an x86 laptop that Just Worked between 2006 and 2016 was the anomaly, not the experience of a laptop owner described in this story.

I'll happily wait out this first generation while they iron out the problems until the next iteration of it. Seems like my maxed out 2015 was a great buy after all.
They way I see it, companies just need a place outside the city where drivers can enter the truck and do the last part (or leave the truck and get the next one).

This may work similar to ports, where a pilot come to the ship to navigate the port area.
Conceptually not very different, practically PNaCL has a problem of being an ad-hoc standard based on LLVM - WASM fixes that.
>> What percentage of the work we do has "clear, undeniable social value"

Can we ever define the "clear, undeniable social value"? Isn't it better to just let people vote, say, using money like they do now?
Computer program developed to diagnose and locate cancer from a blood sample
on the other hand, kudos to the researchers not joining the hype train - it might be their best interest to 'hype up' their research, but they stood fast to their honesty
Putting aside the many arguments regarding Medium's direction and quality, the headline is thoroughly inaccurate since you do, in fact, get something for your membership: an offline reading list, early access to new Medium features, and "exclusive stories from top writers" (although the snakey wording on that one doesn't actually say whether that access is exclusive to you or exclusive to Medium.)
Ask HN: Good tech talks you can just listen to – without watching
Recently I've been travelling by car a lot. It's kinda boring and makes you unable to really do anything, so I've started listening to audiobooks on the way.

However, I thought I could catch up on some tech talks I never have time to listen to instead, but it seems like every talk has a presentation component and you're missing too much context without seeing it.

So, does HN know any tech talks that are great, and still stay great when you can't see the person speaking and their slides?