skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is this a joke?

I started using FF as my primary browser two weeks ago, thanks to the good performance of Quantum in beta and the new brand image as the privacy-oriented browser.

If this ends up on a single download I will switch back to Safari.
Think Evening Coaching Classes Are Safe for Your Daughter
transition took me a day, but surprisingly my most needed extentions could be replaced.

I still muss vimperator/pentadactyl, but saka key is on a good, less intrusive way.
I’ve never heard that term before. What’s its significance?
TBH, as someone who learned programming through making games (with graphics!), it disappointed me too. That said, I found it to be only a small issue (and arguably a justified decision) in otherwise great book. A lot of the game code is really separate from the issues of display. In later chapters, the book uses the web browser to provide for a graphical display. And also, come on, the type-in implementation of Robots game made half-a-page long through abusing loop and format is just plain awesome xD.
extentions still.

Chrome always feels to me like a browser on a computer that's not mine. No themes, no hacky little things, no tree style tabs and of course always prompting me to connect my google account.
in some ways these complaints remind me of trying to pick up Haskell or Rust -- tooling isn't quite there, breaking changes all the time, outdated resources online. funny that Swift, another "weird" type-heavy language, has the same problems.

i wonder if part of the IDE problem isn't to do with having the elaborate type system. it might make certain things easier but having to do inference could slow things down a lot.

my dream is that someday Swift will be a mature, well-funded, "enterprisey" language that is also weird and functional. Something to join the ranks of F#.
> Empirically, programs written in memory-safe languages produce multiple orders of magnitude fewer memory-related bugs than C and C++ codebases do.

This kind of emperically-driven motivation is great! Would you mind pointing me to some sources? My google-fu didn't immediately yield anything helpful.
That (static type checking) is unfortunately not the part of the standard, but some implementations take extra care to help you. In particular, SBCL will do its best to use every and all type declarations you provide to both statically check and optimize your code.
Magic Leap: still making millions from made-up tech
We should talk about gun control vs. I’m going to shoot your liberal face
"More or less, yes, if more people understand one design than another, then the one that more people understand is the right one. ", he posted on the one website in the world that still holds on to the original meaning of the word 'hacker'.
They pay for support, not the software. If you want to sell support around your open source project, you don't need a new license for that.
> Good luck getting this adopted. A couple of months ago I was trying to responsibly disclose the complete exposure of every customer's name, email address, phone number and the last four digits of their credit card to a public QSR company that allows online orders. It was straightforward enough that I found it passively while trying to login.

If I may give a hint: Sometimes a good way to handle such issues is going through the media.

(I've handled such things in the past, you can mail me if you want, but I don't want to see this as self-advertisement. I guess there are plenty of other Journalists covering IT security who are willing to handle such issues as well.)
Rajdewani
All the crypto engineering that goes into password hashes is about the fact that passwords aren't long enough, so your "if" caveat makes your argument rather disconnected from the real world. People won't use passwords with the sufficient amount of entropy, they couldn't even if they wanted to (because of memorizing difficulties, typos, lack of good text entry UI on mobile devices, etc).

As long as you're using a password entry field designed for manual entry, you can't credibly counter that with "people should use password managers and autogenerated long line-noise passwords". Because you can't base your security upon all your users taking the initiative and doing the power-user non-default thing.
In the UK at least, independent research at pharmaceutical companies or Contract Research Organizations typically costs 1.5- to 2-fold what it costs at a University. Mostly because they pay higher wages than PhD students get, but also because they have heavier overheads. They're also typically less nimble as their research programmes are larger with more layers of management.
How to Build a Serverless, SEO-Friendly React Blog – Netlify
Ask HN: Do you listen to Audiobooks? How has it compared to actual reading?
Earlier this year, i tried listening to Barbara Oakley's A Mind for Numbers and couldn't see it through so i just went back to the physical book.

Last night I picked up Cal Newport's Deep Work and so far it has been a pleasant experience(Maybe the reader was far better?). Nevertheless, i noticed that whenever i took off my attention for merest slice of a second, i felt that i had missed something important and had to rewind. It's a bit distracting and needs a lot of focus. Maybe, i am a dinosaur where books are concerned(I do a lot of my reading on Electronic devices though) but this audiobook stuff looks like a lot of work, compared to actual reading.

Anyone else feel the same?
Isn't responsible disclosure the aim here? I don't think substituting coordination for responsible is a sensible strategy for your project.

The coordination is inherit from the fact that they are honouring your disclosure policy. The word coordinated is redundant.

Objectively, it should be called a "security disclosure" policy.
SVG is good. SVG is well-supported, though for the oldest browsers you’d still want PNG. Server-side user-agent detection would work fine for that.
Nice service - I was looking for something like this to generate default avatars for our SaaS app recently.

How does it handle middle names? i.e., does "John Arthur Smith" still return (JS)? What about reverse names, e.g. "Smith, John Arthur"? Is it smart enough to parse the comma and work out first/last initials from that?

Addendum: I also assume that you intend this service to be a 'once off' generation of a user avatar which can be stored locally? Do you rate limit so that people cannot simply dynamically generate avatars for ridiculous long lists of people on their web page?
No, it has been in Beta for a week or so.

Edit: and clearly it remains in nightly.
A Comparison of Four Algorithms Textbooks (2016)
I work quite a lot with a Chromebook Pixel from 2013. All I need to get work done is a VM somewhere, SSH/mosh, tmux, vim and a nice display.

I hope to be able to buy the new Pixelbook as a replacement, if it ever ships to my country.
Is the expectation that mentors get compensated hourly? I'm not sure how this arrangement works.
Definitely subjective. It's easy to argue that it's actually the C family of languages that have a backwards declaration syntax - in case of complex declarations, not just backwards but completely crazy inside-out zigzag [1]. Yes, there's a logic in it, but it's definitely not intuitive. On the other hand, the "type-on-the-right" syntax is quite popular outside the C family. Pascal, Ada, Go, Scala, Rust...

[1] http://www.unixwiz.net/techtips/reading-cdecl.html
Google promises support for at least 5 years after release.
I may be missing something here, since I've not heard of Skylark (the Python variation itself not Google's Go-based interpreter for Skylark) but my brief searching suggests it's abandoned..?
Just tried it -- by default it renders the first and third initial: https://ui-avatars.com/api/?name=John+Doe+Third

You can add "&length=3" to the query string and it will render all three initials: https://ui-avatars.com/api/?name=John+Doe+Third&length=3
SVG is awesome... but this is a basic enough subset of SVG that SVG is unwarranted. CSS will do this just fine (and any browser capable of displaying this SVG can probably support the CSS features required to pull this off).
Ask HN: Anyone in London with advice on the tech scene here?
Hey. I’m fairly new to London and have so far spent the year working on a self-funded startup with a non-tech cofounder.

I’m currently looking for advice on the tech scene here, recommendations for where to meet the right people, get funding, or even just a chat!

Thanks

——

A little background on what I’ve been working on: it’s an online discussion platform — inspired by Facebook groups, Discord and my history working on a hugely popular forum.

We just launched as very limited beta, sending out invites to some of the ~3000 people who requested one so far. There are currently only ~100 active accounts but things have gone relatively well.

However I’ve definitely made some mistakes: having only one co-founder (particularly a non-tech one), not seeking out external funding, as well as building the API and web and mobile clients entirely by myself, not following the MVP advice enough and taking too long to launch.

After some difficulties I’ve taken the last few weeks off and am ready to jump back into things. But I need to rethink my strategy and seek outside funding or at least some advice.

People really love what we have, but some work is needed before publicly launch.

I believe this thing will be a success, but I’d greatly appreciate any advice, or a chat over a coffee if anyone in central/east London is interested in anything I’ve said, or even works on/knows of a startup in a similar space.

Thanks for reading!
Voice Changer App – Voice Converter App for Android or IOS
Thank you!

It handles last names and middle names as such:

- your example would be JS, however if you specify a desired length of 3, it would be: JAS.

I actually haven’t tested commas and such but I will definitively add this! Added it to my todo
Do Ask HN submissions need to be approved?
> That's an indirect way of saying that L0's approach will accept a certain amount of unlicensed use.

Not sure it's very wise to say this on a public forum, if any L0 user decides one day to enforce L0 in court, the people infringing on the L0 license could point to this comment by the creator of L0 that L0 "will accept a certain amount of unlicensed use". I also don't see much difference between that and a donate button.
What happens to your Steam account when you die?
Just get rid of the dialpad and let us use the keyboard to dial numbers. Google Keyboard already has a dialpad-style layout and you can choose to centre it or move it to the left or right thumbzone.

We already use the keyboard to type numbers and it works much better than a full screen dial pad.
Ask HN: What's your favorite “old” space sci-fi?
When I was I kid in the 1970s i loved books like "Shipwreck" "The Man in The Maze" and "The Stainless Steel Rat".

What are your favorite old space sci fi books?
I absolutely agree, I would also recommend anyone to use CSS and HTML, it's pretty straightforward.

However for those that:
1) Don't want to
2) Don't know how to
3) Required rendering besides HTML views

This can be pretty useful :-) I do agree with you. I would actually consider adding SVG support to this as well.
No Chinese? https://ui-avatars.com/api/?name=马云
How come we have no international organization that does research for research's sake, and is jointly funded by multiple countries and private donations?

Or is there one and I'm just not aware of it?
Brilliant - thanks for this. Also, would be a nice feature to have the colours randomise themselves as an option, so that I could have different coloured avatars on my people listing without having to worry about generating pleasing colours and ensuring that the foreground and background do not clash.
I have an XPS 13 from 2015, the full HD variant, running Linux.

For the most part, it's a great machine, and I have no noticable coil while. However, since I always code with a black terminal window and bright text, I'm very affected by that dynamic backlight bullshit. I can't comfortably code if there's a lot of sunlight in the room (not to mention being outside on a sunny day). It's really quite annoying.
Show HN: Secure Windows Shell
Free web hosting through firebase
It's also true that even with a "password hash" your short password is not secure. It makes the attack more expensive, maybe from $10 to $10000 today, or $1000 next year. But practically that isn't something you should rely on.
Uni research is probably minimally taxed, too.
Yes. See https://github.com/uncomplicate/bayadera/tree/master/test/cl...

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEOOYbscyTs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGxYfi3Vi3s
After actually reading the article, my first thought was how awesome of the open source movement to actively promote enabling opportunities to learn by reading code, and how sad that various licenses (and unfortunately even incompatibilities between various open source licenses) and fear of patents restrict those same opportunities.
funny that the they write

"How much have you spent on your Steam account, do you reckon? Even if it's a rough estimate, try and come up with a figure"

without trying to check if there exist steam account value calculators such as https://steamdb.info/calculator/ so people can't get extra disappointed in themselves
> then I don't want to work with you, period.

Are you one of those adorable persons who think search and replace is a suitable replacement for refactoring support?
Ut stores the avatars on the server, cached by all parameters (not the name, but the generated initials) to avoid generating them again. Also some response headers are set to ask browsers to cache the response. I would also recommend users of this to download the avatars, as you suggested, especially to ensure fastest possible response rates.

Actually there is no rate limiting, but seeing just how many visitors this HN post has gotten, I may have to add some sort of limiting.

I haven't really figured exactly what I'm going to do regarding limiting and servers. Currently I'm setting up servers in each region my provider supports, to fix latency issues, and spread the load
ML Algorithms Addendum: Passive Aggressive Algorithms
Did he move to New Mexico and start making blue meth?
For web this is done with 1 line of Javascript and a div with rounded borders, really

const initials = name.split(' ').map((n) => n.substr(0,1)).slice(0,2).join('')

<div style="border-radius: 9999px; background-color: navy">
<initials here>
</div>

Adjust width, height, font-size to your liking
It's funny you'd say this! I remember when I launched the core package on Github, someone suggested colors to be generated from the name or initials. I will look into this, it would be pretty neat! Thanks for the feedback :-)
yet no closures

(arguably, the only thing easy to do in assembler that you cannot comfortably write in C)
This is no good. I've used only Mozilla/Firefox since 2003. Even this makes me want to leave. I can't help but wonder why? Desperate for money? No body will believe the story that this is some how for "good"
Paying for a binary is a model that only makes sense in proprietary software, and IMO it doesn't make much sense in that model either. Supported seats is a far more usable model.
Interest rates likely to rise soon, so pound will likely strengthen.
Woah, Robohash is 6 years old now, time goes so fast... https://robohash.org/
Adafruit , here we come !
Wow, that is so cool! Can't believe I haven't seen this before.
Politics between the decision makers, especially in middle management. I see that quite often. They set a budget and deadline but keep changing requirements, arbitrarily choose systems you have to use but also often avoid making important decisions when needed.
Dragonchain – Disneys hybrid private / public serverless blockchain platform
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ct1hkROmxc
I'd absolutely recommend anyone, that has the ability, to generate them using HTML and CSS, it's way faster. You could even use the core package the generate the initials (as it's a little more than just each letter of each name)
Obviously most writing systems are derived from older systems, so I tried to only list systems that might have independent origins (although both the Semitic and Western systems come from an area that had writing for a long time, so it is questionable). Old Persian cuneiform was left-to-right (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Persian_cuneiform), while the Pahlavi and modern Persian writing systems have a common origin with Hebrew and Arabic (i.e., Semitic).

Thai (at least today) is left-to-right, but anyway Thai is highly irrelevant since it is derived from Indian writing systems and probably ultimately from Semitic ones (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmi_script).

Old Persian: left-to-right. Calendar: solar.
Sumerian: left-to-right. Calendar: lunisolar.
Egyptian: left-to-right. Calendar: solar.
Chinese: right-to-left. Calendar: lunisolar.

So, anyway, so far the evidence is not strong at all (and I wasn't saying it is), but I'm not yet convinced there was definitely no influence.
I interpreted the construction of data centers as happening over the span of a few years, and continuously after that. The whole transformation up to the creation of the Alliance seemed like it would have to happen in half a century, if not longer.
> Plenty of FOSS is well funded

You might be interested in looking at "Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure" study from 2016 [1], which basically shows, that this is a very common misconception and not true at all (and why it's dangerous to continue assuming this way).

[1] https://www.fordfoundation.org/library/reports-and-studies/r...
How does one “make apps faster with it” when the compiler takes 3x as long?
An alternative explanation is that there is simply an oversupply of scientists. I started and aborted a PhD in the mid-90s, and we were being treated like cattle back then. Computers slated for us for number-crunching were being given to admin temps instead. My supervisor was sad about it all - in the 1970s when he did his, PhD students were treated like golden children, basically a part of faculty. However, there were a hell of a lot more PhDs in the 90s.

Is enough money spent on the sciences? No. Do scientists waste too much time on chasing funding? Yes. But is there an oversupply of scientists? Yeah, I'd say so.
There's also this: https://github.com/tobiaslins/avatar
I have plenty of younger friends who I mentor in terms of basic life/career coaching and I don't really expect anything in return.

Even if it's free (and so far it seems like it's not and mostly freelancers looking for clients), I think it's a great idea to have something like this to help the next Hardy/Ramanujan find each other.
I'm working to support Chinese as well, preferably would be support for all languages. Sadly not all fonts support each character so I've been resorting to use different fonts for different unicode scripts :)
Thank you kindly. It's good to know his name again, and it's something of a relief to see that things seem to have shaped up for him since then.

I wonder how he's doing after the passing of Roger Tsien.
This article gives a prognosis of AI that does not destroy civilization but makes civilization better.

It is much more comforting than proposals to try to limit AI in my opinion.
Bitcoin doesn't have a real world use case, the fees is too high and it's too slow 10 mins

I just went to steemit blog network, now my grandma can use a blockchain
It would be useful for software developers to really step out of software industry bubble.

I hear all the time about construction projects delays and you get a lot of physical products with faults.

Other thing we as software developers live in is hiring process. I do not even know what could be hiring process for chemical engineer or something like that.
That's so cool!
Backup Your MongoDB Databases to Amazon S3
It's because rural america has said all the same things and worse about folks in the "inner city", and supported policies which explicitly disadvantage them.

People are fresh out of sympathy. This is white america's comeuppance.
This seems like a bad law. I know the government doesn't plan to use it for average Joes surfing the web but even so. I quite often have a look to see what the other side is arguing in conflicts including downloading dabiq (an ISIS mag) and reading Breitbart. It shouldn't be an offence unless you get involved doing or at least supporting terrorism.

The government seems to be overreacting to the earlier days when some of the ISIS founders did their organizing and preaching in London.
1 dad reflex 2 children
How Naked Capitalism Leaves Advertising Dollars on the Table to Protect Your UX
Hat tip to the evil growth marketing technique (source long lost, sorry) suggesting use of a default female "outline" avatar to strongly motivate account creation / gender reassignment (and perhaps even replacement with genuine profile pictures)!

Edit: Twitter recently discussed changing default avatars, in part because their default was often left in place as "fun and cute": https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/topics/product/2017/...

My main point was that default avatars can drive sign-ups motivated primarily just to change it.
I have a 32inch single monitor and that is good enough for me. I'm ADD and dyslexic and more would overload me. I'm on Mac so I have desktops setup. I hate open spaces. I have an office now and my team of two share a collaborative space and respect each other's need for quiet. Our FE devs work in a big open space and hate it.

At my last employer I was a roaming employee. No desk. Just a file drawer. I was not a dev then. But I hated it. I had to wander 4 buildings to find space to work. I hated it.
Norm McDonald also made a routine about Steve Irwin's death in the Daily Show a couple days after it happened.
Intel Will No Longer Provide Per-Core Turbo Frequencies
58 Civil Liberties Organizations Demand End to the Backdoor Search Loophole
I downloaded the app because I wanted to be of service, but I promptly uninstalled it when It wouldn't let me continue unless I typed exactly 10 digits. In my country phone numbers are 8 digits. In some countries they might have more than 10. Requiring exactly 10 digits is beyond ridiculous. Hopefully it's just an oversight on the part of the person that made it. Uninstalled, but willing to try it again if this issue is amended.
You would be surprised.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/telus-cuts-subscriber-access-t...
You are kind of asking for free consultancy, but good luck anyway.
I'm a little sad that I didn't do this
Show HN: IM Bot matching users by location and needs. Cryptocurrency rewards
With an android phone perhaps? And did they use Google maps to get the address to meet the person?
There are four sticking points in this article that I felt could use farther clarification

- why AI could not be used to innovate on manufacturing, and what that leads to

- the education and intellectual pursuits of humans and how it compares with what AI can do

- that there wouldn’t be competing AIs that would make this transformation much slower (especially if some competing AI fall into the wrong hands)

- that governments would let this transformation take place without retaliation or trying to capture this power
I'd say OpenSSL is an example of how FOSS funding is broken. It took several major internet-wide security issues before it was stably funded. Something so foundational to the internet should never have been so little funded to start with.
Kabuki Theatre for the proles.
Coders produce bugs, not the language they use.
Block syntax ?
The quality of the XPS 13 is very poor. The coil whine is so bad that I had to use noise cancelling headphones just to be not distracted by it.

For a $2,100 AUD laptop it's a joke. Their quality control is non existent.
That is very true. And in general, contrary to what Wall Street at least used to think, I think Trump administration will cause damage in the long run for the US economy, especially if he is re-elected.