skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's incorrect to think of the charger as "pushing" current. Not only in general electrical theory, but also in the context of charging lithium ion batteries. The real 'decision' as to how much current is used is in the management IC for the battery, which converts the 5V from the 'charger' to a variable voltage and current based on the charge state of the battery and its input power specification.

See, for example, this design note from Linear Tech: [0] which describes a 20V adapter, analogous to OP's 5V USB 'charger', that can provide 2A (40W total) to the laptop. If the laptop battery charge management IC says that the battery can use up to 2.2A at 12.6V = 27.7 W, but the laptop computer is using more than 40-27.7=12.3W, it will reduce the charge current to the battery to avoid damaging the 20V 2A adapter. The problem that pdelbarba's USB battery packs are solving is that they can be plugged into various adapters - perhaps a port on a laptop limited to 500 mA, or a 1A 'phone charger' or a 2.1A 'tablet charger'. Some manufacturers solve this by adding resistors to their chargers so that the device can sense the resistance and know it can use up to 0.5, 1, or 2.1A. But everyone uses different resistors.

So Anker does a functional test rather than the electrical equivalent of user-agent-string parsing to set the current limit.

> unless the charger could somehow sense the resistance of the charging cable and compensate for the voltage drop, then the output would be >5V at the charger, but =5V at the end of the cable. That would take some sorcery I'm not aware of though.

That's pretty standard for lab power supplies. It also is used in precision metrology with sensors like load cells. All it takes is a pair of non-current-carrying wires to sense the voltage at the device. The current-carrying wires experience a voltage drop, but the sense wires are only feeding into high-impedance measurement inputs. This is known as a Kelvin connection.[1] With a device that takes an excitation voltage, you'd use a 6-wire connection.[2]

[0] http://cds.linear.com/docs/en/design-note/dn194f.pdf

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-terminal_sensing

[2] http://loadcelltheory.com/LoadCellSupportTheoryPDF/ShuntCalR...
* for young people age 18-24

Whereas I'm 33 and Instagram is the only social network that I use anymore, because the product prioritizes sharing a human experience rather than a political article or an opinion. Snapchat is the same, but I never got into it (cf. my age).
IOTA and Industry 4.0
Let me see if I understand the author's definition... in this essay he's equating "better at programming" to mean being better at management topics such as:

- SDL (software development lifecyle)

- technical debt

- documentation

- shipping mindset (e.g. "real artists ship")

However, if his Lily programming language is a personal pet project, are all those management disciplines applicable?

For many of us, pet projects are there to explore new knowledge of programming ideas. It's an intellectual exercise and not a management one. It's the projects at work that require discipline of meeting deadlines and reducing the backlog of defect reports.

15 years ago, I started a "music CD database" project to catalog all of my discs. I fiddled around with creating some database tables and some prototype GUI screens. A bunch of other unrelated things in life got in the way of working on it. These days, there's Spotify & iTunes which means my pet CD project will always be "unfinished" and neglected. As a result, I can write 2 different essays: 1) My abandoned CD project proves I am a worse programmer, or 2) My CD project was interesting to me at that stage in my life but since I've moved on
I have an iPad pro, a MacBook, and a Surface Pro. I carry the MacBook and the iPad. The surface is too hot, cooks off battery too fast, the screen is small, the UI for the desktop app I use has icons too small to Target with the pen. The charger is janky.
Should they call it the Surface Pro 7.5?
This is remarkable, even though it's obvious to any of their phone users (myself included) that Samsung's software development is shoddy at best, despite its excellent hardware. Which is a huge pity, but may well have something to do with the culture of corporate deference and rigid hierarchy. http://www.asianews.network/content/feature-samsung-debacle-...
One import thing with all Surface laptops that most people don't know:

> Support is limited to the country you purchased the device in.

Eg:

- If you buy an Apple laptop, and need a repair, they'll fix it if it's in warranty, regardless of where you are.

- If you buy a Microsoft laptop, and need a warranty repair done in a different country, Microsoft won't help you.

I purchased a Surface Book (which I love) in a Microsoft store in the US. It's been sporadically doing this since a couple of months after I unboxed it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_f85KlC5Bc

Microsoft UK won't fix it. Even when I travel to the US I'm not sure I'll be there long enough for Microsoft to do the repairs. I love the hardware, but this policy is really bad. I paid for the top of the range laptop and expect support for it.

Edit: I've raised this with Microsoft Support in the past and they've simply restated the policy and closed the case as resolved. When I attempted to escalate it, they told me to post a complaint to Microsoft's legal department (?!?).
Anybody knows if they are going to release a new surface book too?
Running thousands of server-side A/B tests anywhere. Free
I have an SP3. It is the best device I've bought in years.

I interact with the device in a fundamentally different way. I will sit and read a document with a pen and no keyboard (to proofread, highlight and makes notes). I'd tried this on ipad and it never fit in my workflow well.

I will use it to take notes at a meeting in OneNote. Again, the ipad workflow never worked for me for this.

The benefits definitely aren't for everyone. But it fits me perfectly, and I wouldn't go back from it now. Its probably at least a year before I upgrade (I also have a desktop for heavy lifting). I'm feeling the pinch of the older SP3 cpu a bit on some of the work I do, but not enough to warrant an upgrade yet. If I had money to throw around, I'd get the new one as a drop in upgrade without a second thought.
I agree the S8 is more widespread than those 3 combined, but those were flagships anyway
This seems curious to me, here in the midwest, it's pretty common for non software companies with shit legacy apps to desperately hire anyone with experience. These companies find it impossible to keep developers, no one wants to work at them. I'm at one now, making the highest salary of my career thus far. I'm not quiet 50.
The formatting of the text is awful on mobile. It looks like it's using something like <pre> to render to because there are hard coded new lines at the end of each line. Please don't do that, this isn't poetry! Just wrap your lines normally!
As an Arq user, the honesty and openness are greatly appreciated. Hopefully, nobody has gotten bitten by this issue when attempting to recover data.
Jury: Ramapo town supervisor guilty of criminal fraud (1st of its kind)
That is really a non-issue. We don't have to invent new places. Low-cost communities already exist and are abundantly found. Incomes just tend to be lower, thus they are less appealing. But that can quickly change. Imagine,

1. Community A provides revenues of $30,000 per year, and expenses of $20,000 per year, with an income of $10,000 per year.

2. Community B provides revenues of $100,000 per year, and expenses of $50,000 per year, with an income of $50,000 per year.

Naturally Community B is going to be the more appealing option. But if housing costs (among others, but housing is the topic at hand) keep increasing in Community B, at some point you might find your expenses at $90,000 per year, leaving an income of $10,000 per year. Exactly the same as in Community A. At this point there is no income advantage in either location.

Assuming you live in Community B, until your income is reduced to that of Community A it is worthwhile for you to spend more and more of your revenues on housing to keep a good thing going. Even if your expenses rise to $80,000/year in order to stay in Community B, it is still a good deal. Your income is still double that of Community A.

But the market always seeks equilibrium. While corrections take time, eventually your Community B income will have to fall to the same level as Community A to eliminate the income advantage. As we discussed earlier, as long as one place has an advantage, people will move there and compete for resources (i.e. drive up costs) in the process until the advantage no longer exists.

And this is why certain markets are seeing incredible housing price growth. The market is correcting such that your your six figure developer salary in San Francisco provides the same income as working at McDonalds in Detroit.
It said in the article that people search it out.
There's only so much time you can spend enjoying a sightseeing spot before it gets boring.
Why browsers don't implement HEVC or AV1 based image formats? They are so much better than JPEG. https://wyohknott.github.io/image-formats-comparison/
It doesn't, but the point stands that users should be able to create their own auth keys and use them to authenticate a third party application to the target service, rather than having the app author bake some arbitrary key into the code.
Sure...except you have to buy a $200 dock to connect it to anything.

Why can't I buy a $40 (or Chinese equivalent for $20) adapter to connect it to things?

Why isn't there a pin-out or open standard?

I know the magnetic factor would be a problem for this use-case - it would often be too "heavy" for the magnets.
How many cores will the new CPUs have? I remember someone telling me that the older version all had 2 cores only
Microsoft debuts Windows 10 version for Chinese government
Have the mentality and an unparalleled drive to execute and continuously ship and deliver tangible business value.
Because that's not how things work in China. An off-brand copy would be a literal copy of the PCB with cheaper and /or missing components (especially EMC-related ones). An "improvement" from a different OEM would have obvious differences in parts like the heatsinks (they are literally the same part, with extremely similar cutting marks) and various other generic interchangeable parts (e.g. the input MOV, the IEC connector, the optical feedback package on the top etc).
Why not take a guess and see what happens?
bad things happen; its all in how you respond. keep up the good work.
I specifically bought my System76 Galago Pro (when considering it vs. the Purism Librem 13) because it can do 32GB of ram.
Sounds like that the author needs to switch jobs or something. Try something out of your comfort zone. Maybe do something you feel is way harder but within reach?
I wonder if this will make countries more or less likely to stay in the EU. I would lean towards "more" because they probably wouldn't want to be on EU's bad side in the future. Tough luck for UK, I suppose.
Police arrest 23-year-old man over Manchester attack
Musings on Decentralised Control and Voluntary Adoption in Large Organizations
Exactly. Even as an electronic musician, I find myself going as tactile and kino as possible when trying to be expressive. Anyone can sequence notes, and notes don't make music. This will be good for producers, but not much value to musicians.
Is that not reasonably a case of mental illness though?
I follow places / landscapes / design, wife follows friends (their highlight reel life) and "influencers." It is complete garbage what these people are peddling (for money).
Hacked in Translation – From Subtitles to Complete Takeover
It had a 10-15 point advantage in the middle game. It chose to whittle it away in the endgame in exchange for more safety. In my opinion that makes it even more impressive.
Thanks for sharing and I hope the value is great in your lifetime - as in, providing help your children but also give you a chance to discover something about yourself. I feel bad for a lot of the drivers who don't see their downtime as a way to try something or practice something. For me, it'd be rehearsing stories or talking out thoughts on a recorder to upload while I'm back driving, maybe play a little guitar to see it could speed up how quick people help me out. I think many hard jobs don't allow enough room for a person to engage in some self-improvement regularly, and that's unfortunate.
"my mainstay project is Lily, a programming language, and I've been working on it for about 6 years now"

First, 6 years shows great dedication. Kudos for that!

What kind of usage does Lily have? The biggest forcing function, IMO, is true usage. Let your users tell you how good/bad of a coder you are.

Working on something for 6 years with no users is a problem. I spent about 18 months working on some web technology and never got any users. After 18 months, I realized the project was going nowhere and then I went and got a job. (Plenty of users, plenty of collaborators, and a regular paycheck.)

So, IMO, don't ask yourself if you're a good coder. Ask yourself what kind of niche Lily serves, and what you can do to grow Lily's usage base. Ask yourself what is Lily's functionality.

I didn't see any examples of real-world programs written in Lily. The problem with languages and frameworks is that the abstractions need to be tested in real-world programs to verify the design assumptions.
Words have meaning, and there's no denying that Trump has, quite literally, questioned the US' commitment to the common defence doctrine. It's not like there's some court of law somewhere that would make Latvia whole again if Trump decided not to fulfil the US' treaty obligations after the "Latvian association of I-am-just-a-farmer–oh-look-I-found-a-Russian-tank" wins the referendum to join Russia.
It vastly depends on your work flow. If you are like me and just using editor, browser, small LEMP stack, git, gulp, ssh and some other small tools then you are fine and 16GB is plenty but when you start doing virtualisation, docker instances, data crunching, in memory dbs etc. then suddenly 16GB doesn't look like much.
That's because the other direction is implicit.

"X is a rectangle if it's a quadrilateral with all right angles."

Okay, so you can use this statement to look at an object and then check if it's a quadrilateral with all right angles, and then conclude that, by definition, it's a rectangle.

But for the other direction, if I tell you it's a rectangle, it's implicit that you can conclude all right angles. Contrapositively, it's also implicit that if I say it doesn't have all right angles, you can conclude that it's not a rectangle, i.e. that this condition has to be satisfied for anything worthy of the "rectangle" name.

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/566565/are-if-and-i...
I think the point they're trying to make is that the sort of person who wants 32 or 64 GB of RAM in their laptop (and I'm definitely in that group) also wants a fast processor and a decent graphics card. The number of people who need 32+ GB of RAM and are happy with a slow processor is probably quite small. The sort of work I'd use my Surface Pro for doesn't need more than 8GB of RAM and the sort of work I need 32+GB of RAM for I wouldn't do on a Surface Pro.
I would personally consider it to be sufficient, but merely being sufficient is not enough to be "the most versatile."
USB-C works just fine on most laptops that have it and it's incredibly convenient when you figure out you only need to drag a single charger with you to charge your laptop, phone and tablet.

Also HDMI/DP adapters worked without issues across my MacBook Pro, Samsung's Chromebook and another Dell laptop which is also hugely convenient.
Lenovo has laptops with 64g ECC.
I don't think the point is to move the refactor into production. The refactor is a learning exercise. But if you start on the least understood, ugliest parts of the code the devs might welcome a refactor of those bits.
This somewhat related and equally fascinating look at Scanimate, a video synthesizer used for all kinds of idents and motion graphics in the 70s and 80s is a fun watch:

https://vimeo.com/172607783
It could be argued that the US's (lack of) reaction to Russian occupation of Crimea and its lack of involvement in the situation between Russia and Turkey has eroded the guarantee that NATO is supposed to provide.
Getting on with our new robot co-workers
The SaaS App Explosion and Its Impact on Individuals
Instagram is full of "lifestyle" or "aspirational" marketing. After years of pragmatic search engine marketing it's an entirely new way of thinking about selling your product or service. Instead of "our product does x, y and z" it's "here's my wonderful life with this product, don't you want it (the life) to be yours?"
Relax. I've seen code written with/for the newest technologies and it's mostly crap. Just like you don't have time to learn it, most people don't. But everybody is happy, including the client, because they have this new tool written in the newest technology so it must be good. People evaluate software just like they evaluate cars: they take a good look at the paint job and declare that this car is good, while in reality the seller only took care of the paint job, the engine is dead.
I don't know about the 25% figure, but the original Alpha GO paper mentioned that their best solution is a hybrid approach between neural nets and MCTS. However, the system can beat the best Go bots out there without doing MCTS and relying solemnly on the policy/value networks, which I think is truly amazing.
This is the best way to learn agile
Apparently Wikipedia and I must be sharing a mass hallucination about Time, Newsweek, and a pop science show narrated by Leonard Nimoy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling#Concern_in_the_...

If the media weren't such blatant purveyors of disaster porn, people would be taking this issue more seriously.
I have the XPS 15 with 32GB ram, it's an amazing laptop.

It becomes essential once you start running VM's or Docker etc
Windows 10: Chinese Backdoor Edition™
That's interesting. I'd bet Flex desks could work well like that.
>All needed was a photograph of the fingerprint on a glass surface.

And wood glue! Looks like that method proved unreliable, so they expanded it:

"To create the mold, the mask is then used to expose the fingerprint structure on photo-senistive PCB material. The PCB material is then developed, etched and cleaned. After this process, the mold is ready. A thin coat of graphite spray is applied to ensure an improved capacitive response. This also makes it easier to remove the fake fingerprint. Finally a thin film of white wood glue is smeared into the mold. After the glue cures the new fake fingerprint is ready for use."
As a person with a Masters Degree & 10 years office experience who has found even White Collar work to cap out in the big city at $60,000, financially speaking, there is actually more potential in specialized driving than doing what I do now. Thank you for sharing your perspective.
please also share your "learned to code" story when you show HN (or separately, whatever). would help me a lot. You are where I want to be.
Online photos of oneself in foreign countries have become a fashion accessory. Bonus points if you spent cash to travel to help the poor in a developing country instead of donating it to people who could use it more effectively.
Roger Moore has died
Google has a thing like that for Chrome iirc (and its granularity is to the feature level)
To my experience, quitting Facebook has been quite easy. I quit four years ago. Sure, it's an extra burden on friends and acquaintances when they want to invite my to partys and such. They have to email or text me. (yeah, not on WhatsApp either). I might not hear right away when an old friend has a baby but for closer friends and family, I don't miss out on anything.

Note: I actually quit because I thought it would mean less procrastination, but then I discovered HN...
In that case you can vote to re-open and perhaps even post a bounty. Although bounties tend to invite lots of low-quality, low-effort answers just on the off chance that they might be the top-voted one once the bounty runs out.
I like a single magnetic cable that does power and data. Until there's some open connector that does that [1] I'm happy to keep using the excellent Surface Dock cables.

They could add USB C, but I still have more USB A devices, and I suspect others do too.

[1] USB C isn't magnetic, and the fake 'magnetic USB C' is just an adaptor and doesn't do data.
I'd like to see some of these studies that correlate for nature-of-following. It seems like the people who are put off be Instagram follow a lot of celebrities and lifestyle porn. I follow my friends and it's always nice to see what they're up to.

I don't recall ever seeing an ad on Instagram. Must have something to do with the sort of accounts one follows.
One full day a week is a great start, we had "refactor fridays" at one of my previous jobs.

I'd say for me, its when I can see that I can make something more efficient or spot obvious mistakes or slipshod code. So it could be once a week, once a day, once an hour.. or months later when I come back to something and see that I could approach it differently.

Regardless, I like where your thought process is going on this, that you're always looking to make your code a bit better whenever you can. :)
> The worst part is that I used to have some measure of pride in what I did. Now, well, something breaks and I fix it. Done. I don't bother blogging about much of what I do since I don't find it exciting, and it's not new.

This is a critical factor. If you don't care, your project will suffer no matter what kind of project it is.

What is a good way to stay motivated? And at what point should you consider calling it quits? (Since as he admits: persisting is now making him worse at what he's doing than he used to be).

I think these are some deep and fundamentally human questions way beyond just programming.
I bet there are many that we take for granted. My first thought was social class; that's environmental and it's possible they all had this in common.
People often think new tech is a cure for their woes, such as poor code quality - often it is just papering over the real problems & barriers.
Don't think it's really different from how you'd accomplish the same as a junior developer.
> Working on something for 6 years with no users is a problem

Agreed. If one of the goals is to actually have users (or fellow contributing developers), that would be a major contributor to burn out (lots of effort, few rewards, for a long time).
I'm not arguing that they don't reduce health costs: I'm arguing that a) they increase other costs (e.g. old-age pensions, since people would live longer) and b) they are an unjust imposition of force in order to change private behaviour.
Honestly, $100 for the pen? That should honestly be included since the keyboard isn't.
You've got to be kidding, right? Have you seen the reports about roads, buildings, and facilities? They've been financially and physically neglected since the early 1980s. The US needs physical labor more than ever - AND - US needs a drastic re-allocation of Capital from Investors to Poor People Who Spend if we ever want to fix this broken dang structure. The US needs to over-pay for much needed fixes and the rising tide will lift all boats, except the big goddamn yachts of the .01% but whatever they can afford it.