skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"non-default helper programs"

Define "default". From the perspective of a user buying a Chromebook, the "helper programs" are very much the default.

Additionally, "helper programs that obfuscate the underlying OS" is pretty much the whole point of a desktop environment. I fail to see what point you're trying to make there.

"I mean, yeah Android is nice. And it technically runs Linux."

Which is really all that matters. We're talking about the Year of the Linux Desktop, not the Year of the KDE Desktop or the Year of the GNU Desktop.

Not that Android is (usually) a desktop OS, but whatever.

"But so does my wifi router... just because I plugged it in and logged into the web interface doesn't mean I can, with a straight face, claim that I am a Linux user."

Sure you can. You're not a Linux desktop user, but you still use Linux in some capacity rather than, say, VxWorks or IOS.

"Does having a laptop that boots straight into a browser without showing anything lower level than that really count as Linux? Does it really make me a Linux user?"

I think it does. It'd be no different from being a Windows user who only uses a web browser.
Why do you build your DBMS from source?
Understanding something is having a good working model stored the way brains store models, which is quite a complex network. Explaining it requires finding a way to serialize it that makes it as easy as possible for a listener to reconstruct the model in his own mind.

I think the effort involved in trying to come up with a serialization causes us to more carefully examine our models, which usually improves them.

But I don't think the lack of a good serialization implies the lack of a good model.
How does this compare to Azure Cosmos DB?
Yes, believing in Snap is believing they have the AR market. If you watch the latest Facebook conference and their AR announcement, Zuckerburg attacks this directly by calling the Camera the next "platform" as if we are installing apps directly onto the Camera. [0]

Facebook is clearly the follower here, there are a number of awkward jokes and it's clear Facebook doesn't "get" AR or the Snapchat userbase. Snap is the first (primarily US) company to actually get users to use AR and QR codes (in the form of Snapcodes), not to mention the first social network to do it.

Spectacles are the first camera that helps you experience video from the perspective of the person taking it. This is actually a long time coming, for anyone who watches Snapchat with the headphones in (think every kid 27 and younger because they are always listening to music), Snapchat is a very immersive experience -- today's mics are very sensitive and the realism of Snapchat makes you feel like you are there. Spectacles just take that to the next level, they will already be ready as immersive video glasses become popular.

I'm way long on Snap philosophically but do not hold a position. I'm also in the AR space and I see Snap in the lead.

[0]: https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/18/facebook-reveals-its-cam...
Have you ever 'taught' anyone anything? When you do, you'll probably get what Feynman was trying to say. Complexity is intrinsic. Just that as a teacher/guide/explainer, you have to gently guide the novices around enough to invoke a sense of curiosity that will drive the pupil to explore on their own. The task at hand here is to make things less overwhelming, not removing or ignoring complexity.

For every complex system, there is usually an underlying simpler, though not accurate, model that makes grasping the broader concepts easier.
You are quite wrong about that statement. As the other comment mentioned, both analog and digital systems are bandwidth limited and can not reproduce infinite slopes like in a square wave. Fourier expansions are one of the easier ways to study bandwidth, even if there are other formalisms.
Most people receive infinite return because they invest nothing.

A more meaningful measure is how quickly you can resolve a problem with open-source for X amount of investment, versus other options. With that, if a package doesn't do what you want then investing nothing appropriately yields NO return; whereas, investing certain amounts of time (asking questions, filing bugs, etc.) may yield more return, and fixing it yourself may yield the most.
CouchDB replication has got to be among the easiest and nicest in the industry. Setting up master/master is a breeze.
No I think grand parent comment means that some developers sometimes add spaces instead of tabs, even if it is by mistake.
That will mix everything up.

"Could" happen the other way too, but I think:
If you use spaces you typically dont repeatedly hit space to produce a single indent. You use tab which gets translated to spaces. Once the editor is set up for this, you don't accidently insert tabs for indentation.
Crypto currency was created to be decentralized, requiring no state to back it.
What about "Pocket PC"? I remember the Compaq IPaq having a high profile back then (2001).

Edit: maybe a more valid example is the O2 XDA "Windows Mobile" phone/PDA (2003)
Yes, yes, yes, me neither
What about those that don't have many friends?
Information isn't sapient. People want information, which gives information value.
It's missing the data on the best cheap models to buy :(
Coffee makes me more alert because it triggers a release of ATP.

I do agree it is arrogance.
> This may involve some amount of over-simplification (which should be indicated if present) and will undoubtedly leave out a tremendous amount of detail, but the conceptual essence should be there.

I think the disagreement hinges on whether you believe the snippets from the GP post e.g. the "rods and cones" or caffeine examples are fundamentally valuable or not.

> There are fields where nobody can really do this. These are fields that nobody truly understands yet.

Curious what you would consider an example of such a field?

FWIW my anecdotal example of what I think the GP is complaining about... I read "The Elegant Universe": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elegant_Universe

It's a good book, and I enjoyed reading it. But over subsequent years I've had growing doubts over the true value of the "understanding" that it provided.
Nice.

From the title I thought this was something like 'self service hosted mooc platform', which I was also really excited about.
Frankly, if over 90% of your peers are using a given editor/ide, odds are they're using the defaults... as trying to get everyone to change the defaults is painful. Having spent years fighting this in some environments, it's far easier to accept.

If your editor supports a common config format (.editorconfig), then use that... if you're all using the same IDE, then best to adapt to the defaults (mostly).
> The Constitution isn't just a historical document, it's the law. It's certainly open to change by the will of the people, and it defines a process for doing so, which has been used seventeen times.

Either 27 or 18, depending on whether you count the simultaneous ratification of the first 10 amendments as one use of the Amendment process or 10 separate, parallel uses.

The only way I can remotely see that gets to 17 is if you count 1-10 and 27 as one use of the Amendment process since they were submitted together, even though 27 was ratified 200 years and a few months after 1-10.
I love organizing, simplifying things. Geeks are addicted to complexity. I think it's some kinda machismo thing.

This incompatability has caused me problems my entire career. I've more or less stopped trying. I just do what I'm told and save my creative energy for my personal projects.
Specifically for CouchDB, because packages provided for CentOS/RHEL were outdated and now they don't even exist.
For me the "derivative is a rate of change" moment was when I was told that a limited integral is the area under the graph. It just never made sense till then.
I would certainly consider image-as-captcha, but it is not my favorite method. From my experience of running a website in which I do cater to at least a dozen handicapped readers that I've spoken to personally, some of whom are blind, others who are deaf, others with dyslexia or have trouble reading text, these types of captchas cripple those users.

And while it might seem like -- oh well for them -- having to deal with challenges in the real world is hard enough, and now they'd have to face it on the Internet too? So that is why I am trying to come up with a captcha system that can fool bots, but is human-friendly and not complicated just the same. Google's No-Captcha Recaptcha usually works great and I have used it on other websites, but for some reason, unfortunately on MyPost, it had failed me, either not "seeing" my answer as correct, or just not working as it should.

But I do appreciate your suggestion le-mark.
I would be more than happy to exchange many of the non-violent offenders who ended up doing not much harm on an absolute scale with these white collar criminals who end up harming many, many more people.
If your high school programming class was using Alice or Scratch, that's probably the real issue. My kids picked up Scratch at around 9 or 10, and loved it. My oldest got the bug and went on to learn Python, Java, and Lua; he's a HS Junior and contemplating going into CS. The younger ones are less inclined to programming proper but still like making things in Scratch. But if I were presented with Scratch or Alice as a teenager I'd feel a bit patronised.

If you were already a passionate programmer when you took these classes, it's not surprising you felt disappointed; but that doesn't mean these aren't effective tools to introduce the uninitiated to programming concepts.
Yeah I phrased that poorly. I think open-source is good for companies financially because it makes a more valuable product for end-users. And I wish THAT was the focus. What is typically the focus (although admittedly, is not really the focus in this article) in presentations trying to get companies to do open-source is, "look - people will do a bunch of free work for you". I think that's both unlikely and beside the point. I didn't mean to say that the fact that there IS a financial ROI should be irrelevant or a negative.

For instance: I gladly pay more for a book directly from O'Reilly because they don't have DRM on their ebooks. It's not that they're getting any direct freebies or savings from not doing DRM, it's that I look at the freer-as-in-libre product and think it's just a more valuable thing for me to buy. Same with software.
Linear time suffix tree construction. You have 90 seconds. Go!

:-P
Being able to convey information in simple terms and pass along the depths of your understanding are two independent topics.

As an example, when we teach people how to fly a wingsuit, we essentially teach wingsuiting (which is a massively complex pursuit) as a set of nested arrays of increasing complexity.

For example, for a first jump course, the goals are as follows:
- Exit safely
- Demonstrate ability to navigate in-flight
- Deploy

These are the most foundational aspects of flying a nylon dress out of an airplane.

After a few jumps, we'll add complexity to each of those, so to shift one point, it starts looking like:

- Exit in an unstable manner and gain stability in less than three seconds

In order to do that, you'll need to understand what causes a wingsuit to be stable, why it gets unstable, what happens when it gets unstable, and how to correct it. Additionally, you'll understand why I want you to do it in less than three seconds. However, at first, you just need to get out of the fucking plane. If I try to tell you all this extra shit you won't remember the foundational thing I need you to remember. You'll probably get unstable, you'll probably figure it out kinda, and you'll probably at some point deploy a parachute.

Teaching's hard.
Someone explain cryptocurrency!
Keep it as simple as possible but don't try to make it more simple than it actually is.
I'd argue that programming requires much more critical thinking than macaroni art
Hey all - co-founder of Plaid[0] here. First congrats to Stevie - awesome to see Teller launch - great to see some innovation on the other side of the pond. Looks like a great product!

There’s quite a few differences between Plaid and Teller - an obvious one being that Teller is UK only and Plaid is US only! Feel free to email me (william at plaid.com) if you’d like to talk through anything about Plaid.

[0] https://plaid.com
I acknowledged that the school isn't well known. There is also something called Google where you can search for things you don't know about.

Sorry about talking down but you have seemed to miss the entire point of my argument. Even though the school isn't well known, I said they can search for the name if they don't know about it.

>Indian schools are know for suppling large US software companies with cheap labour - often below market value

I don't know how this suddenly came into the argument. If this was some remote university in Russia, my point would still stand. You seem to have a very prejudiced view of Indian universities. Please educate yourself. You aren't being mean, just ignorant. Indian schools are also known for producing world-class engineers.

Not just software. Google, Microsoft, Adobe, Pepsico, Mastercard. Do you know what they have in common? A CEO educated in an Indian University.

>Indian "scientists" has a better connotations than the specific school, whose reputations are unknown or second rate

We shouldn't do that has better connotations but what's right. And acknowledging the achievements of a university is what is right.

>this immediately questions the rigour and relevance of their work.

That's your problem. Any scientific work must stand independent of whoever publishes it. Yes, screening process gets easier, but the questioning the accuracy must be accompanied by proper arguments, not bias.

Do you really think a country with three times the population of the US doesn't have any scientific achievements? Just recently there was a huge rocket launched with a fraction of the budget of the science department of a US university.
Since you bring up James Joyce, I'd like to add that poets don't explain things in layman's terms.
This is what I'm saying. There is complex and there is complicated.
I think it's meant at a higher level. This is one of the basic tenets of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's ideas:

"The limits of one's language are the limits of one's world." It's controversial, but the concept being if you can't speak about it, you really can't know it fully. This gets very fuzzy when experiencing art or emotions, but there is a cold logic to it that I appreciate, too.
At least from my perspective so far he is not significantly worse so far than say George W. Bush, he might be if he starts new wars, but that seems unlikely. Pretty much all the previous presidents screwed over the rest of the world in some way or another. Just to give you an example in 2013 in 35% of Germans believed the US government to be trustworthy (Snowden NSA spying revelations) according to infratest dimap, now that value is at 22%, only slightly higher than that of Russia (20%).
> You’d be surprised (I was!) at how much memory leak your JavaScript has if you don’t monitor it.

What are the most recommended ways to monitor for leaks in client-side javascript?
For native mobile apps, there are also a variety of native libraries that can be used:

Couchbase-Lite:
https://github.com/couchbase/couchbase-lite-ios
https://github.com/couchbase/couchbase-lite-android/

Cloudant Sync:
https://github.com/cloudant/sync-android
https://github.com/cloudant/CDTDatastore

We've had a good experience with CouchDB with an Android native app, iOS native app, and a web app (using PouchDB with it there).
I pay 12 Eur for unlimited calls/sms within Germany; 3 GB data; w/o phone; w/o contract term (it can be canceled any time); 100min and 100MB free in other EU countries.
Great excerpt. Except, it ignores the fact that there were smartphones, touchscreens, app stores, MP3's on phones way before the iPhone.

It's a very American point of view, since Nokia never made a lot of progress with their smartphones in the US, like Blackberry did, and their phones were strickly email and business.

I had a touchscreen phone that could hold hours of video or hundreds of songs, send instant messages, browse the web, get apps, use WiFi... In 2004. In 2005 you could alreday get GPS, more versatile hardware and better accessories.

The iPhone did a huge cultural change, and pushed UI and apps into the future. But pretending that it was the first one to make icons like phones today use or that it created the first computer-phone like the excerpt says - is nonsense.
Of course! :) I have to be positive for my own sake.
It's in my best interest to spread this to others, especially those who may be struggling as well. Psychologically, this is a very rewarding thing to do..even when you don't feel the best, if you can make another happy, it will most likely make you happy as well. I'm glad you cared enough to respond :).
Quite often the company's product is the open source project. It's just that instead of selling licenses, they're selling support contracts. You could get the software free, but for a fee you get to call the engineer that built it in the middle of the night for help keeping it running. And as a bonus, you get to leverage their ability to drive the roadmap when you have feature requests.

So really the debate here is not "do you hire an engineer full time or not?" it's "do you allow the output of that engineer to be open source or not?"

There's also a perk for the engineer: they work on stuff they can publicly point to as their portfolio full-time. Want to see me code? I don't necessarily have to have a bunch of side-projects on Github. Go check out the JIRA for these huge features I worked on!
> Christianity is quite focused on the idea of good and evil. Norse mythology was never like that.

It's interesting you say that. My only exposure to sagas was from reading Beowulf in school, which is a canonical example for the theme of "good vs. evil".
>I'm white. I and my two white sons found it hilarious.

That's good. I'm glad we can all enjoy laughing at minorities together then.
>"Bush damaged US reputation way more than Trump, USA did recover"

George W. Bush was in office for 8 years, Trump has been in office for 6 months. How can you realistically compare the two? I also don't understand the past tense. Trump is still a sitting President.
The article is strangely outdated on the CouchDB side, like someone wrote it two years ago.

It fails to mention that CouchDB now has Mango, which is a MongoDB-compatible query language.

Since 2.0, CouchDB also has Dynamo-like clustering thanks to Cloudant's open sourcing of the BigCouch code.

I wonder if the MongoDB side of the comparison is more up-to-date, or equally stale.
Yes, different hashing functions would naturally result in different page numbers.
I don't see why we can't have both. But, for it to really work, you can't throw them in Country Club Resort prison. They have to go to Pound-Me-In-The-Ass prison. They need to be locked up with some really bad people. Because, let's face it, most of these white collar criminals are really bad people.
You serialized that very well.
I understand the point of your comment. Just the last sentence ("Not being able to...") would have been enough. But your monkey example is confusing, because "=>" usually means "implies", not "because", and with that meaning there is nothing weird about the last statement.
This is eternal. The expert paves the way to understanding. Its only because of their expertise that they can simplify and explain it in a way that others can understand. They have a firm grasp of the concept. Understanding is not equal to expertise, just the first step.

I think there are too many times when people affect a tone of authority and expertise and hide their lack of understanding in verbiage and complexity while making excuses for their inability to explain it to the layman.
> Mobile support: CouchDB stands out, in that it can run on an Android or iOS mobile device. In addition to being mobile, the database can also synchronize with a remote master database, allowing the data to be shared easily between mobile devices and servers.

Meteor actually provides exactly this for MongoDB; it has a "minimongo" package in the browser that supports Mongo's query language, running it synchronously against an in-memory copy of the collection [0]. And with Meteor, you can specify "subscriptions" declaratively that enable bidirectional synchronization while their owner components are in scope.

Mongo certainly has some reliability issues (see other comments here) but I've yet to find a full-stack system so painless to develop in, especially if you need realtime support. With things like ToroDB Stampede [1] and a general approach of "write all your code in React with Meteor dependencies factored out into containers," there's a clear migration path towards the relational-based separate-backend-frontend world when you need to go there.

[0] https://guide.meteor.com/collections.html

[1] https://www.torodb.com/stampede/docs/1.0.0-beta2/about/
Oh don't I know it. Concur.
You're totally misrepresenting the point of that item. It's referring to the knee-jerk yellers. We have them here on HN as well. Look at any article regarding women's experiences, for example, and you'll find a few comments trying to shift the topic to how hard men have it.

I'm a straight, white man and the FAQ item makes total sense to me. I don't do that, but enough of my 'brothers in arms' do. It's derailing and annoying.
9 years ago a good friend of ours told us he had pancreatic cancer, but he hadn't yet looked into the details of the disease. The look on my face told him it was bad.

Turned out to be Islet Cell (the same type that Jobs had), and they were able to catch it in time.

He's one of the extremely rare to actually have been cured of it - and I still don't think he ever really researched the disease and doesn't really count himself one of the "real" cancer survivors.

I had Thyroid cancer at the same time and he was more worried about me ;)
Unfortunately, that is what is expected more commonly these days where the audience being presented to a.k.a layman aren't users or domain experts or people who know whats going on. They're management "experts" tasked with getting "resources" to "get things done".

I've seen people from my domain making ridiculous, inaccurate analogies and oversimplify to hide the inherent challenges that a task usually involves. And they get away with that because they aren't the ones actually building the product. They just have to sell it. And the one's they are selling to aren't/won't be using the product either, they will tell someone else to use it.