skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A combination of things: I had a conversation with Joel Spolsky which convinced me that people with the opportunity to contribute a lot to the world have an obligation to do so. (He grounded this in a Talmudic understanding but it largely comports with me as a Catholic, FWIW.) I've found myself vastly more interested in doing work when work impacts meaningful problems that I care about, like e.g. changing hiring in the tech industry or making entrepreneurship a transformatively better experience worldwide. I have at times had some not-so-happy health issues to deal with and when not dealing with them my tolerance for a more traditional workweek is rather higher. As I get increasingly far from my salaryman days, my raw distaste for things-that-feel-like-work declines.

I wouldn't primarily credit attitudes about or desires for money with any of this, though my personal burn rate is much higher now than it was in 2010. (I got married, had two kids, and moved to Tokyo; this makes ~$10k spend like ~$2k used to.)
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Server

- HEADLINE: sl to be installed by default

- DESCRIPTION: Cure bad habits of mistyping commands. Annoying at first, but in the long run will create better admins.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: DevOps
Majority of students follow the market and go for business degrees or similar. Gender studies or whatever are a bit of red herring - not that many students and mostly clustered on top schools - e.g. wealthy with connections (at which point their degree truly matters less).
All these "phobia" labels get applied to people who just want others to obey the laws. Even intelligent tech minded people just don't seem to understand this.
Then 2 hours maintaining and improving it.
Wanting to buy something that will last a long time is essentially an argument that there will be no significant improvements in that device category in your lifetime.

It also implies that you do not expect your needs or desires will change.
5 essential skills every web developer should have
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: Please, please, please fix space issues with /boot.

- DESCRIPTION:

I'm constantly running out of space in /boot, due to kernel updates. It drives me so incredibly batty. If I had to guess, this is due to poor defaults in the installer for folks that opt to encrypt their whole disk. Even still, this system was setup back on 14.04 (don't think it started on 12.04), and I have no intention of reinstalling from scratch just to fix it.

Publish something official on how to fix this problem! Make it easy and stress free! Yell at the people who didn't catch this bug before it went out! Sorry, but this is just a really bad problem: it leads to folks like me wasting time, and probably a whole bunch of other folks just not being able to install updates, and no idea why.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: software developer in the federal government
Your answer would be much stronger if you dropped your tone by a magnitude and edited out the insults. Your first paragraph is particularly difficult to read.
One of the big ones should be removing negative gearing on existing non-primary-residence properties. This is a fairly big reason why the boom is continuing.
Wouldn't this mess up a lot of current server installations?
No, please no concrete for the walls. I have lived in an an apartment that had concrete walls in Bangalore and it's just terrible. Concrete amplifies both hot and cold weathers. So you are spending a ton of money on air-conditioning and heating as well. Admitted, in Bangalore you don't need heating but I can't imagine a concrete house in the northern hemisphere.
Like others have stated, solid bricks, stones or even clay bricks are a better alternative. You still need to use cement but that's alright.
WSJ is at least center-right.
> There are some beliefs that are acceptable (Jesus) and others that are not (Zeus, Scientology)

This I don't agree. I find Greek Mythology more acceptable than Christianity. In some country the belief of Jesus is assimilated to being lunatic indeed. It's hard for me to believe that Creationism is taught in some schools in the US.
That has always been my approach as well, much easier than #ifdef spaghetti.
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: Make right click menu of dash items scrollable

- DESCRIPTION: When an application in the dash has open a lot of windows (for me, Terminal) the height of the right click menu eventually will not fit the screen. It cannot be scrolled so it is essentially impossible to find the correct window by right clicking on the application. See a screen shot of the problem at https://www.stdin.xyz/downloads/people/longsleep/stash/ubunt... - these are around 40 terminals at 1440 pixel height with scale 1.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Software developer
Not to sound pessimistic, but as more and more people get forced into metered bandwidth, how is using a plugin that generates extra random traffic "sticking it to the 'man'"?

Edit: Yes, I know this is supposed to mask your actual viewing habits. But security through obscurity has never really panned out for anyone in the end.
Absolutely agree. I hope he has attempted to contact the EFF over this for counsel.

As I understand it, what under similar policies, they could arrest a mapping product programmer for some nefarious third parties who plan terrorist attacks.
If YC had "model posts", this would be one of them. Very well researched and informative. Thank you.
New app: business swappers
why does a budget conscious network admin need audio and video surveillance through people's computers? wouldn't the business just install some cameras?

this tool was made for sextortion, marketed to predators, and the author is shocked when the feds show up...
> Although most techies imagined that their tools would be used to bridge disconnects, that did not happen.

That is one disturbing takeaway. Props to the author for seeing that and pointing it out. I for one feel stupid for having believed such a thing could happen. But then, hindsight is always 20/20.
> It amazes me how confident people are that somehow they know all there is to know about extraterrestrial life.

Who claims that?
This is exactly what I had in mind when Snowden happened. I never wanted to take this on, because of multiple reasons. Very awesome to see this, installed it immediately.
Because LPDDR4 wasn't available in sufficient quantities or not supported by the platform SkyLake only supported LPDDR3 and the current KabyLake SKUs also do not support LPDDR4.
FLAVOUR: All

HEADLINE: Convenient snapshot & rollback by default

DESCRIPTION: Possibly implemented as snapper + lvm thin provisioning or btrfs. Other distros already have this, but it is far from user friendly.
> It's not the smartest point of view, but it's very common.

And the opposite view, that the government is an evil entity lurking in the shadows, out to get you and your family is smarter? Amusing.
Advanced React and Redux
Anti-climate science think tank trying to get textbooks into US schools
I think they (g-suite, MS suite) solve a bit different problems and I would agree that MS suite is more suitable for established enterprise with e.g. ability to book meeting times and places, lync integration with e.g. tandberg.
The undersecretary that you mentioned is now The "Senior Fellow on Ethics and Leadership at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress and Counselor to the Director at the School for Ethics and Global Leadership." [1]

Receiving a senior fellowship in Ethics is quite the turnaround from six months in prison.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egil_Krogh
Mr. Anderson...
I became significantly less able to use Ubuntu after I had a few kids. +1 ....
Adding variance always messes with statistical models and thus anything related to big data analytics, which internet surveillance is all about.
Maybe he got fast-tracked because his startup is into AI. That's a hot area.
Sales would be the point of control.

Gun manufacturing equipment is not prohibitive. Zip guns and 3-d printers facilitate it.

Drug production for cocaine, heroin, cannabis and others is as simple as a garden.

Not that I agree the kid should be arrested. I simply perceive the feasibility of software prohibition via government license to be as effective as it is for guns and drugs.
Is the image of an DDR5 DIMM? because from the look of it it has some serious power management and storage components looks more like an NVRAM DIMM to me.

Edit: the image name has 8GB NVDIMM in it, so yeah this isn't DDR5.
A Kickstarter to improve spacex video retransmission
Let's start a Kickstarter to improve the video quality for spacex launches.

It could be anything:
From providing reliable satellite feed to launching a small rocket-mounted camera preceding the rocket in the firsts instants of the launch.

That would greatly enhance the fun factor of the videos and make more people interested in space again.

And that's a Good Thing, right?

Who's in?
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: text antialiasing options

- DESCRIPTION: I'm not a Linux guy, but when I've tried it I'm always annoyed at how ugly text looks compared to macOS. It would be great if we could pick different text renderers or have a new one with an easy GUI for adjusting parameters.
Fedora with Gnome shell on Wayland already handles both 1 and 2, although power managements is about the same as Ubuntu and Wayland comes with its own set of issues.
> Maybe a bit amateurish and not how I'd do it now, but not terrible. I can't be the only one like this.

Not at all. I started my first real project in September 2015, had a release out by mid-November. And the code worked, really well. I was praised by users of the software for how reliable it seemed to be. Now, 15-16 months later, I can definitely see the warts - there's a lot of global state, some crackpot abstractions and if I ever want to add new features to it I'll have to do some spring cleaning. But at the same time... it still works. The design is appropriate enough for the needs of the project and its functionality.
An interesting way to look at this, but wouldn't it be possible to pluck this pattern out from relevant data?
Really? I would consider Adelaide a much easier place to afford to buy property. It has not really seen as high or as long period of price increase as the eastern state cities.

But I guess that's the case everywhere in Australia. The places where a young person wants to live (young / without children) is not somewhere which they can afford.
> Most programmers who attack C at the moment are frontend web javascripter kids and rust/functional language snobs, who both never used C and keep repeating the same stuff.

Having half-baked information on how C sucks is better than having illusions that its somehow awesome. This:

> There is a whole crowd that thinks C is some arcane stuff only to be used by by magicians, and if you're not a guru it's gonna kill you.

is actually a very reasonable starting point when deciding whether to start a substantial new project in C. Well, minus the arcane part - part of C's success can be attributed to how simple it is to learn how to shoot yourself in the foot.

It also means the number of new programmers that are fascinated with / desire to learn C continues to drop; hopefully that will be enough to break the cycle at some point in the (not so near) future.
Thanks for your reply. They are really awesome.
Tort lawsuits against VR/AR companies when users physically injure outsiders
FLAVOR - Desktop
HEADLINE - If I try to "Quit" an app via the app bar more than once, please `kill -9` it (optionally, an are-you-sure dialog).
DESCRIPTION - Sometimes apps lock up. Like a forever-running query just destroys my SQLDeveloper and I have to pull up a command line to kill it because the UI of the app has locked up and right-click->Quit doesn't do anything.
You can't update a major version and expect things like this to not change

(What I mean is: sysadmins are aware of this and won't "just" upgrade to a new major version without considering such factors - at least they shouldn't do that ;) )
I agree with your overall point, but bringing up satellite connections is a bit silly - you shouldn't be optimising for edge cases.
So let's keep score.

NYT. Wins: too many to count. Losses: 3

I don't quite see your point.
Well this answers why your team doesn't have good product insight.

Perhaps you need to do the opposite. Hire American talent with college degrees. They can provide real useful feedback.
In the USA, what you are asking for is called a trailer park. Well, it's layout is horizontal and not stacked vertically. You can get a double-wide trailer for more room too.
Very common in large businesses like Citi, AllState etc. I know several people who have followed this path. They usually turn out to be people who code very little for a couple of years and then move on to product management roles and things like that.
Widows 10 handles different scaling (zoom) between monitors far better than any Linux distro I have used. A window keeps the zoom of where it came from until it is entirely on the new monitor. Works pretty well.
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop / All

- HEADLINE: Disk Encryption that works without gotchas

- DESCRIPTION: Currently, there are options to do full disk encryption and encrypting your home directory while installing. These options are fine, but

* File name limits.

* You cannot encrypt your drive after the fact. So you need to reinstall your system if you find out that you need it encrypted.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: (Optional, your job role and affiliation)
Software dev / user
Individually it doesn't do much. The bigger point is the render the data as useless.
Ubuntu has exactly that since 16.04.1:

1. Open CompizConfig Settings Manager (if not installed, `sudo apt install compizconfig-settings-manager`)

2. Click the "Ubuntu Unity Plugin" plugin

3. At the bottom, "Enable Low Graphics Mode"

4? Restart Unity / reboot (? because I'm not sure it's necessary. See for yourself :)

Agree it would be neat to surface the option in the regular System Settings panel, though.

Source: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/11/enable-low-graphics-mode-...
I wonder if it's just impossible to find serious right-leaning journalists that aren't full right wing, since journalism is already heavily liberal, full of institutional bias, and few people are willing to work for peanuts.
> But we didn't do this because we're idiots.

Because the highly profitable mining industry campaigned against it AND we're idiots.

Theory: Immigration is a main "export". It's a very nice place to live: democracy, rule of law, media and the geographical reasons etc. Immigration helps supports demand for housing and the bubble.

We're basically a hole in the ground - but a very nice one.
Basically people will have to drain their super to afford to buy a house, then when retired they will have to sell (or reverse-mortgage) their house to afford to live.
How many great minds does it take to invent a telescope?
Getting paid to do something...
I'm not trying to tell anyone how to feel, just objectively explaining why settlements have to have deadlines. Of course unlevel playing fields are always a concern, obviously that's naturally going to be the case between multi billion dollar companies and the little guy. One party (hopefully) has fully developed processes and procedures, likely developed/vetted by a large firm or in-house Counsel, but forcing open ended settlement offers on them isn't leveling the playing field. Such a system might only unlevel the playing field more, for example this claims process (while far from perfect) likely would exist, it would basically be telling the little guy to hire a lawyer from the beginning.

Yes there are terms for "strong arming" that would invalidate contracts or even this settlement: "coercion". Now think more along the lines of the GodFather making an offer he can't refuse (gun to your head asking you to sign) or I'm locking you in the room until you agree verse an offer with 24 hour deadline to accept with a confidentiality provision.
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop (but may apply to all)

- HEADLINE: Add Expert Mode Install

- DESCRIPTION: This week I started installing Ubuntu, and the installer is just too basic.
That's ok for the common user, but I like installing in expert mode. With expert mode I mean full control of what's being and how it's being installed (eg. network settings, software packages to install, mirrors, etc). I could not even change to a tty while installing.
When installing Ubuntu along with my other Debian, and I missed the latter installer in the process.
Another aspect to polish in the installer is being able to encrypt just one partition and even include an encrypted volume manager such as Debian's.
As an issue, I managed booting in live mode and encrypting manually, but after a successful installation of the system, GRUB could not manage to boot the encrypted system. Watch out, I might not have installed it properly, but it seemed to me this feature was not implemented correctly. Anyways, I think Ubuntu is a good OS that's able to compete with others

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Web Developer @Spain
I switched from Ubuntu to Fedora about a year ago and am quite happy with it.
I have to say I agree. In high population density areas I've never had trouble find groups of intelligent people working on issues and sharing ideas - active political groups, political philosophy Meetup groups, programming groups, etc. Usually these groups are more interesting than their college counterparts, since they have a greater diversity of individuals, avoid things like the inherent student/professor divisions one finds in college, and often are more in touch with real world problems and experiences.

Nor is there a shortage of cultural and intellectual events - there are often free talks from famous authors, different cultural festivals, art exhibits, etc. Or sports, for that matter.

I remember reading on a financial site that bundled products are often a disadvantage for the consumer, since they force you to buy products you don't need. This is how I feel about college. I appreciate that there are many people who don't take advantage of cultural and intellectual events unless pushed, or people who don't want to live in a population dense area outside of a dormitory setting. But there is often a lack of understanding that many of us do take advantage of these things outside of a college area, that the world isn't necessarily an intellectual wasteland outside of the university setting. But when we want the necessary credentials for a career provided by a university (and the somewhat poor training that accompanies it), we're forced to pay for many things we simply don't want or need from the university.
I've been thinking about building something similar since the first Snowden leaks. I figured encrypted traffic to various locations would be useful considering that security agencies store everything until they can decrypt it at a later date. Unfortunately I'm not well-versed enough in implementing proper encryption and I'd probably just end up shooting myself in the foot.

Has anyone else ever thought about doing this?
- Some absolutely cannot live without it.

- "finding ways to perform better" by living without it is not something that happens in real life. To the contrary, living without adequate financial support has been shown by many studies to lead to anxiety, mental issues and general under-performance.

- It's clearly an unnecessary and disingenuous attempt to bring a loaded political agenda of your own into an otherwise innocuous discussion of programming libraries.
really, there's a native multitouch support for touchpads? do you have more info about that?
Facebook Launches Live 360
The 1920s ex-council house I live in is built from two layers of brick separated by a cavity (with metal ties between the layers, which are themselves a problem because they rust). Unbelievably even the internal walls are also all two layers of brick. All I know is that labour must have been very cheap in 1920.

The outer cavity is designed to stop water from crossing from the outside to the interior.

There is a fashion for filling the cavity with insulating materials, but that leads to problems because it can draw water between the layers.
"...this machine is super bad because..."

I can't tell if you mean it's awesome, or terrible.
I don't mean to be a curmudgeon, but why put out this kind of privacy-minded plugin for Chrome, one of the browsers I'd probably least trust to respect my privacy?
+1 then I can kill my custom "remove oldest kernels, except the running one, and leave at least two other kernels" script.
Well 1 depends on Wayland actually detecting your external monitor, I normally end up having to drop back to X to get it to detect my secondary 28" 4K monitor :-(
This is actually a really interesting topic. My laptop screen broke down a while ago and I moved so I'm now forced to use only one monitor for now after a long period of using multiple (mostly 3) monitors. It feels like I am actually able to focus better and am less strained by unnatural monitor positions and the constant switching between monitors. I guess your focus is always only on one thing, and whenever you need to switch focus you can just bring that into the foreground instead of switching your eyes to look at somewhere else. This actually doesn't cost that much productivity. In most use cases one monitor is really enough.

Though I guess programming, compared with other cases, does have a legitimate claim to using multiple monitors, especially when you're performing constant documentation lookup or running a live preview of the program, both of which can exist side-to-side with the code itself. I think the positioning of monitors is really key here. If you have to accommodate them such that all of them are in an unnatural position instead of the natural position that one single monitor can occupy, it can actually hurt your productivity. If their positions are mostly ergonomic, it should be much better.
Boom Supersonic Gets Funded
We did learn a lot, but that's kind of the problem. All of the capital that was created was intellectual - knowledge and experience, mostly in the heads of the few hundred or however many people that were the core of the team. Very useful while you have it, but also very easy to dissolve as soon as the funding goes away and all of the people with that knowledge scatter.

That's also the problem with Government funding of things like this. You can accomplish some pretty awesome things with a blank check from the Government, but those only get created for political reasons, and are subject to disappearing for political reasons as well. Businesses have their own problems, but once they put together a system they can turn a profit with, they have the incentive to keep doing it and improving on it indefinitely.
Doesn't seem like the best idea when it comes to environmental sustainability.
> Also why is the rar-archive "protected" with a passphrase

Many AV suites recognize common and innocuous things in code as viruses (e.g. compression, heavily used in demoscene production). Putting a password on prevents the AV from scanning the file and blocking it outright.
The point I was responding to was relying on the status of firearms as items whose manufacture is already severely restricted by law; on the other hand, as with axes, you don't need a license to make software.
Why? You need to develop your answer.
SetState() Gate – Navigating React SetState() Behavior Confusion
- FLAVOR: Desktop

- HEADLINE: Easy Dock/Launcher Customization

- DESCRIPTION: The user should be able to 1) drag any executable to the dock to make a new launcher 2) Right click any launcher to be able to choose a dialog to customize command line arguments, initial working directory, and icon.

The user should not have to edit a desktop item file or install or know about Alacarte. Windows got this one right.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Software developer for chemists and biologists.
FWIW, macOS changes a window's DPI mode when the cursor that is moving the window passes over from to one screen to another. Just tried that out. :D