skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Can you use Git to deploy software to mass-market end-users?
Hey all, I use Git to manage the development of my software. I have a few thousand users, and every time I release a new version of the software, it breaks in ways I couldn't anticipate beforehand. I have both tests and error reports, but these only help after the fact.

(i) A user experiences a problem, (ii) send me a complaint that explains the issue (iii) I need information to solve the problem (reproduce the environment in which the bug happens) (iv) but I lack the information because the information I need is not present in my environment and I cannot predict beforehand what information will be missing.

To get the required information, I need to talk to the user. But sometimes (often), it's a deep technical problem that is unique to that person's setup. Right now, I build a custom version for the user, that hopefully harvests the required information.

The big problem here is that it's such a long, slow cycle, I want to move on and work on things that are more important than dealing with obscure errors.

So I was thinking, is it possible to use Git to manage debug deployment versions of my software catered to users specifically? I'd build a small interface for the user where she can input a tag/branch and the software will "update" itself to that version.

TL;DR: I need specific information from users to debug obscure errors that are unique to them, can I use Git to deploy custom versions of my software that can fetch that information quickly?

Also, any tips or something from others who're dealing with this would be awesome :)
Probably like a shockwave: when an actionable headline disperses faster than the speed that the whole mass of information can propagate.

If you're not in serious business, research, or operations yet, then you probably haven't experienced the most common state of things: lots of people you're trying to convince want all the information before making a decision or even pushing the headline to anyone else.
As Amazon Pushes Forward with Robots, Workers Find New Roles
This is a great explanation and it all makes sense.

Given the mess that it was born from, it makes sense for developers to think about staying away from this if building anything of consequence.

It also is incompatible with free software.

However there are a lot of things that are worth developing that are neither of these things and react can be a great choice there on the technical merits.
I've seen a number of sites prompting via a modal that isn't the browser's built-in functionality. If you say no, it just prompts again in a day or two. If you say yes, then you get the built-in (blockable) "enable notifications?" prompt.
High Intensity Interval Training for Maximizing Health Outcomes
I had expected something like this knowing that it's impossible to solve a 3x3x3 after assembling it with a corner rotated incorrectly. Thanks for this insight!
LinkedIn Sales Navigator Leads Extractor
> This sounds like a great way to lose all your real contributors. The article mentions "get paid for your time" over and over again, yet who is paying me for the time to write the code for the PR? You expect me to both dedicate my time to writing the code for a PR, and then pay you for the privilege.

It certainly sounds absurd on the face of it.

On the other hand, I can think of at least three cases where I'd do the work of submitting a PR if the project in question required me to pay.

In each case I can't currently gauge accurately enough whether these projects have a well-functioning development process. I could easily end up with a bitrotting PR with the project lead making a not unreasonable argument about why it's rotting (their time is limited, something else is taking priority, etc.). I imagine I'm not the only person who's ever been in such a "holding pattern."

On the other hand, if a reputable project says they'll take money in order to merge a branch I want, things become less amorphous very quickly. A project lead is not going to get away with blowing off a bitrotting merge request, at least not without their project's reputation (and future income from PR's) taking a hit.

edit: clarification
I live in North Carolina not SV. My father emigrated from Brazil when he was 17 and worked his way through college and business school. I grew up on food stamps. I started a company. Many of my dad's friends from Brazil and Mexico started businesses because they weren't able to get jobs. My point is simply that if society doesn't give you access to opportunity then some times you have no option but to do it your self. It's not easy. It's not fair. But there are a lot of other ways to start a business other than raising venture capital. Stay lean. Focus on profitability. On a side note. My brother was the first employee at a first round backed company (as a developer). He lived in the converted living room of our apartment for $400 mo. And lived in New York for a year for only $8000. He saved the rest of his $110,000 salary to provide the seed capital for any future ideas. Was it nice? No. It sucked. But he was focused on a goal. You can do it. Don't give up. It is actually really fun (even when money is tight).
how do normal speedbumps deal with snowplows?
> They say that they've actually only listed a random subset of the books some professors recommended, so that may be part of it.

That appears to be correct. If you choose to look at the list first by university rather than by subject, select MIT, then select electronics under MIT, AoE is listed.
They may well be penalizing those sites, but in the porn world, everyone's using those sorts of abusive ads, and being equally bumped down in rank.
> And even Triplebyte unfortunately fell back on a combination of abstract coding tests and amorphous "cultural fit" criteria.

I'm not sure when you went through Triplebyte's process, but I did recently and it definitely included a substantial practical programming section which involved writing an actual program and some debugging.

They do have the difficulty of not controlling the downstream on-site interview process, so there's a limit to how much they can innovate. Ultimately their goal is to find candidates who can pass company interviews, some of which are still heavy on algorithms.
"One day he got an email from someone - likely someone making $150-$200k- more or less demanding that he review and accept some PRs, as well as do some work himself, for a feature they needed."

This is called a 'business opportunity'.

Seriously, people are going to ask you for free stuff all the time.

Sometimes they'll be up front about it (as in, "we don't have budget for that, but can you still help us out?"), and sometimes they just won't specify initially if they are willing to pay or not (ie, they'll just make a demand).

Every interaction is a negotiation, even if you are led to believe otherwise.
Subreddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/sm64online/

Threads are starting to form with public servers etc. Could be a good community to come of this, I'm excited.
My thoughts exactly. What a steaming pile of crap...no wonder that the OP has zero public repositories which have contributors...in fact all of the OP's repositories are forks.
> if you have a really good idea, it's good for more than one paper

One professor of mine spoke fondly of the "LPU", the least publishable unit...

> "when you turn a metric into a goal, it ceases to be a good metric"

Goodhart's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

PS: Ceterum censeo Elsevier(um?) esse delendum.
As much as I agree with the sentiment behind this post, I disagree with the implementation. The nature of open source code is collaboration. Paying for collaboration seems like it would hinder progress altogether and possibly direct the project into a direction that is not suitable for the poor majority not paying. One more thing that bothers me is that money for maintenance should not come from developers. This is like robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Disclaimer: I am the CEO of Code Sponsor (https://codesponsor.io)

Code Sponsor is trying to help provide those who are maintaining OSS projects with untethered sponsorship funds. They can go about doing their business on the projects and be making money through sponsor-based ad revenue. This provides them with the incentive and finances to justify continued support on those projects that end up being abandoned when unfunded.

I agree that this is a HUGE problem that needs to be addressed. Code Sponsor's approach is to go where money can scale: marketing budgets.
After a certain point, you really have to wonder if, just maybe, it's you. Anecdotally, those who somehow can't find work in this field might be sending all the wrong signals. Are companies looking for less than what you want? Sure. However, are your skills and connections actually worth that much?

This also doubly counts if you've made yourself a public figure in any way. Quite a few companies may not want to have to deal with someone who is very likely to talk poorly about them.
Is there a case study somewhere for such an interview? Like a description or a video or such?

Also how do you deal with the standardized interview being published? As in 'company X' uses a live coding exercise and they ask you to do X in a succession of changes. It would quickly come out for most larger companies.
What do you value more - freedom or security?

Are you passionate about the product you're creating or is it just a path to a big potential exit?

Are you independent or do you like to play follow the leader?

Do you like to do lots of different things, or would you prefer to just focus on your core competency?
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"If your processor has an errata in it and you update the documentation to allow that errata, is it still an errata? I think it is, but apparently it's allowed in the newest version of the AMD manuals" [37:48]

I don't understand why more vendors don't do this (if anyone wants to comment to this, I would be interested to get another opinion.) While my experience is admittedly limited to obscure chips that require NDAs for access to the specs, I was always a little annoyed that almost every time there was not even a reference to the errata documentation that the vendor provided when a new version of the spec would come out.

Now in AMD's case, I would argue that they should be more clear that it's an errata, and mention that the updated spec differed from previous versions (which it alluded to by saying "This behavior is model-dependent".) Ultimately, the spec is THE document on how a user should expect the chip to behave. So sue me if I am blurring the lines between an errata and a mistake in the spec, but I just want my documentation to tell me what the chip does without having to refer to a dozen other secondary documents dang it!
what screwdriver are you using that has conductive handles?
Can't speak for everyone, but in my case I've got a lot of old legacy rubbish that I need to access through IE that just won't work through Chrome or any other browser.
What LOE (Level of Effort) would it take to replace our current SSN with a public/private key system? More than just a massive bureaucratic shift and public reeducation movement?

Could we have a memorizable public key and still have any meaningful level of security?
There is Agda, which was created for that, and even HoTT has a formalization in this language.
I'm really surprised at least several people don't believe this may be the case.

Suspecting ideology is maybe being substituted for objective reality?

The "line" is that we have so many people locked up because of unjust (racist, drugs, whatever) policies. And no doubt this is a very large component of the problem.

However, a very large number of people in prisons are dangerous or violent people who shouldn't be out in society at all and I don't think we could say their incarnation is discriminatory or unjust (although we could justifiably speak about how much of an anti pattern the current prison system.. but that's another topic).

Note: I don't say all, or even most in prisons fit this bill but many do.

I guess the point is a question. Why do we have such large number of violent and criminally minded people in the US? Do we have a larger number than China even taking into account population size differences? I bet we do.

TLDR, criminal justice system is broken in many ways, agreed. But I posit we (in the US) have a more violent and criminal population also. I think this is worth exploring rather than just parroting whatever anti-establishment line is in vogue at the moment.
"Raise Plow" road signs near the speed bump.

This would work for non-Newtonian speed bumps as well, though the first time a plow driver doesn't see the sign, and there's always going to be one who doesn't see the sign, you end up wiping out the speed bump instead of just dinging it.
Like a link please, I want to see "null or with random results". Not sure how customized results affect things though.
It's not the fact that you need to "pay rent", it's your approach to doing it. As it stands now, I actually quite like the sound of Matrix on paper but I can't present it to my CTO as an alternative to our current comms platform if the first thing he's going to see is begging - it makes it look like the project is dying.

There's obviously a smart team behind this, and the protocol obviously has a lot of potential - I'm positive there are other ways you could fund this.
It still is fake news.
Unfortunately, ironically, that sounds like a clock that would take a long time to make.
I am not sure if affiliate marketing count as a content site, you are always "selling" something directly or indirectly in order to make income, at http://toptalkedbooks.com, we present the best books to users from HN, stackoverflow and reddit. I think the bottom line is, give quality content to users, income will follow.
> Interviews suck for both parties, a world without interviews would be a better world.

Actually, I rather like interviews. They typically pose some fun programming problems and I have a chance to talk about a lot of the cool work I've done over the years.

Honestly, I do think the interviewing process is very risky from a company perspective (it's insane to me that companies will invest tens of thousands of dollars into someone based on essentially an afternoon of conversations), but it's perfectly great for some candidates.
To be part of a community you need to have the same stake as everyone else. Businesses don't have communities, they have customers.
In particular they seem to have let their standards slip in regards to headlines. For example, the title of their first article about Gibbs' findings was "The mysterious Voynich manuscript has finally been decoded". That makes it sound as if the matter is settled, when it is decidedly not.
If we follow your logic, when do we ever get to excavate anything? We can always anticipate even better technology that could capture even more information. But if we keep waiting, we'll end up with no information at all.

The article seems to suggest that the archeologists broke through a concrete barrier during routine excavations at an already heavily disturbed site without realizing that the soil underneath was anaerobic. In that case, it might be better to dig up everything as quickly as possible, since the soil is no longer anaerobic and there will be nothing to see if you wait too long.
Lucy Liu – Topless Striptease – City of Industry (1997)
I found your post pretty condescending. I have read and understood many papers. Even written one.
Ask HN: At what company were you happiest and why?
I suggest you discuss this directly with archaeological faculty at a university, rather than making claims about dynamite - e.g. those who used dynamite were treasure hunters, for example, not archaeologists. Modern archaeologists do share your distress over most of what you've claimed.

For instance, you say "Information which could have been captured with improving technology, if only the excavation had happened later." A not-insignificant amount of archaeology is performed because of an imminent threat to a site, be it natural (rising oceans) or man-made (highways). I recall reading about (what I consider to be) significant Roman sites in London being destroyed after examination because a developer had a building plan for that particular location.

Even Time Team would dig up mosaics in a field, record everything meticulously, present their findings to the public (in a rather unscientific manner), and then bury it again, to protect it.

Go and expand your horizons, instead of making decisions based upon incomplete information. You have some pleasant surprises waiting for you.
I suppose it's a matter of practicality - with most text heavy sites you can put ads around the text and it works just fine. But with something like Youtube, that approach isn't really going to be as effective because people generally won't be scrolling around the page.
[IANAL] The React license provides more rights than BSD/MIT. Period. The "oh but what if Facebook has patents" claim is just as valid as it is for any other BSD code. If you're worried about React, you should be worried about all of your BSD code from companies that are big enough to have huge patent portfolios.
This is pretty disingenuous. They're counting each city in the SF Bay Area as separate cities, whereas to a job seeker it doesn't really matter. It should really be comparing commute zones rather than specific city names, that's more interesting comparison. I'd be willing to bet that if you compared the SF Bay Area to other commute zones, there would be no comparison in terms of jobs.
Research in Focus: Machine Reading Comprehension [video]
and yet you decided to link obama to this lobbyist with a game of 6 degrees of separation.
What is broken?
It's fun. A few tips from my predictit.org (healthy:) addiction:

Never buy at the asking price, put in a buy order lower and let the market come to you. Unless it's a question that will be resolved soon, it's likely your buy order will get filled.

Pay attention to how many orders are on each side, often people will "prop up" a market with a series of small orders, which at a glance make it look like a particular position is worth more than it really is.

Put in small orders, over and over, don't make big buys unless you can afford to lose. Each day you have more information, not less.

Never under-estimate how far the other side will drive down or up a question. Your perception of what the other side will do is prob wrong, regardless whether you are actually correct when the question is called. (for example, you could buy "Yes" for T2016 @ $0.14 (on the dollar) when the Billy Bush tape came out).

Stick to what you know.

Make sure you understand linked markets before buying a bunch of stuff at 0.99.

Keep a strong cash balance. If you put in too many buy orders, you will wake up, they got filled, and your long standing buy orders are now canceled because you couldn't cover them and now you go to the back of the line when you place them again.

Always have some sell orders on every position. The swings might hit them and then you can re-buy at a lower price.

Consider that there may be players that are not out to make money.

Never use the comment sections for anything other than comic relief.

Keep track of your time investment, even if you are making money, it might not be worth it. In the case of predictit which is one of the few options for US players, you cant risk more than $850 on any single question (well.. really $1650 on linked markets) so you are not going to get rich.
Irma-scrapers: Screen scrapers relating to hurricane Irma
Professional mathematician here.

That can occasionally happen with much less important papers; e.g. someone is asked to referee something, and doesn't really feel like actually reading it but would still like to see it published. If they are not conscientious they might only briefly skim the proof and write a hasty referee report.

But ABC is a major claim. The community will not be nearly so quick to reach a consensus. In particular, from what I can tell now there are a handful of mathematicians other than Mochizuki vouching for the proof, but even that is still not enough: overall, the community has yet to come to a consensus that this is enough.
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First for Chicago's skyline: Open floor to cope with the wind
Released today, see demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YS3CrLG8dEg

I'm not affiliated with the project, just found out about it via twitter.
And to add to that, the "software jobs" in the beltway tend to be enterprise Java application jobs. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
After reading this article, I can see where Facebook is coming from when making these licensing changes. However, the points he makes about smaller companies feeling pain from Facebook due to patent infringement is very real too.
I don't buy that explanation - there's also just a lot of bad writing out there today. And, I'd wager, you'll find (more frequently than before) attempts to impress (and even obfuscate), rather then communicate and elucidate.

Note also that your hypothesis was briefly addressed in the article:

> An alternative explanation for the main finding is that the cumulative growth of scientific knowledge makes an increasingly complex language necessary. This cannot be directly tested, but if this were to fully explain the trend, we would expect a greater diversity of vocabulary as science grows more specialized. While accounting for the original finding of the increase in difficult words and of syllable count, this would not explain the increase of general scientific jargon words (e.g. 'furthermore' or 'novel', Figure 6B). Thus, this possible explanation cannot fully account for our findings.
Your opinion is based on the assumption that your interview process yielded an accurate assessment of competence.
I believe Velveeta cheese started as a way of using up small shreds and pieces of cheese that could not be sold as blocks.

(I think today they purpose-make it, and small blocks are just sold as shredded cheese.)

Sausage was invented (who knows how long ago) as a way of using up the parts of the animal that were otherwise not edible.

I don't think of these things as "inferior", but rather simply as a way of avoiding waste.
How to Avoid Being Scammed by a Flood-Damaged Car
> It's an interesting analysis, but it misses the key point: the payout will on average always be a little more than the running costs on a completely optimised setup, [...]

Is that necessarily true?

I can see why it would be true for a blockchain system when it is at a stage of development where the primary reason people run nodes is to mine for that chain's cryptocurrency, but there is other functionality provided by many blockchain systems besides just a simple currency.

If those other functions become important enough to enough people, then could we end up in a situation where people who rely on those functions run nodes to help keep those functions working even if what they can make from the coins and transaction fees of their nodes will not cover the costs of running the node?
Nobody is arguing in favor of the revolving door, they're just pointing out how it differs from regulatory capture. Don't argue for the sake of argument.
My current company, because it's 100% remote and I can work on my own schedule.
Your critique of hypercomputation applies all the same to Turing complete machines. A Turing machine can never be implemented and is a totally theoretical model. At best we can implement a class of machine below called a "Linear bounded Turing machine". For these machines the halting problem is solvable (it can just take a while). You could even implement a linear bounded Turing machine as an FSM it would just take an ungodly number of states.
Please take this survey on common human queries from/command to an AI assistant