skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Trying to write a piece about Egyptian concepts of 'death' and weighing the soul through to the present day would be a huge book, not a short article about 'anglo-centric, post-enlightenment reformation perspectives'.

It's also interesting to read as today is Samhein/Halloween/Allsaints/Days of the Dead, and there are definite celtic origins to anglo religions...and eradications...

The original article has images and is easier to read

https://theconversation.com/how-the-dead-danced-with-the-liv...
Announcing Apple iTunes Ping
Rich was a professor of an advanced C++ class (at NYU, I think) in the late 90s, and wrote a very popular paper on how to get some killer performance out of that language. He's been around the block and knows a thing or two about these things.
Does this support arbitrary time spans? Like from minute 1 to minute 58 without any other date/full date?
By pure curiosity: would it be a FRANKE fumes extractor ? I have the same problem with mine.
Hiring is the most important thing a company ever does. Bad hiring means you'll get a bad company. In the US you can partly balance this by firing diligently, but that has its own problems.

Tech staff shouldn't waste their time in hopeless cases, but assuming your applicants aren't all about the same the return on hiring the best one could be huge.
Poe's Law I suppose.
So Normal, Lucky and Smart walk into a bar ...

... and after a year still can't find a punchline.
Architecting Cloudy Apps
All roads that allow bikes (pretty much anything except a highway) are safe for biking because they don't have minimum speed limits and you should always be prepared to stop. At least, that's the case in states that have laws like Massachusetts that say "There is no law that requires bicycles to ride as far to the right as practicable". It may be different for your state though.
Body Clock Researchers Win Nobel Prize
How can I query Apache Arrow without entire Hadoop stack? It seems it could be a great in-memory OLAP engine, if only there was an efficient way to slice and dice it?
> I don't get why Arduino is so popular

The community.

If you can write a PID loop, you aren't the target audience.

If you have an old toaster oven and need to control the temperature and you have no idea what a PID loop is, you are the target audience. You can go get an implementation from the community for "the thing that controls temperature" and get on with life.
Interestingly the Hershey's factory has been reused as a large scale marijuana grow op although I suspect it employs far fewer people than the chocolate factory.
>Even with the precipitous drop in solar cell prices over the past few years they still aren't cheap.

By what metric..? The amount of energy and power involved in the two uses is completely different. Do you happen to know the bulk cost of silicon, or how much silicon is used in solar cells, or how much of a solar cells cost it makes up, or what process is similar?

You're not doing much more than a kind of free association. For actual context, spheroidal graphite powder is up to $10,000/tonne[1] and metallurgical silicon is around a quarter of that[2].

[1] http://www.mining.com/web/battery-grade-graphite-set-for-rec...

[2] https://www.metalbulletin.com/Article/3208513/Silicon-prices...
Vray 2.0 for Sketchup 2017 Crack and Serial Number 64/32 Bit Free
> turn off our brain and apply type verification everywhere ... type verification more like a religion than a tool.

A statically typed language can allow us to use dynamic typing if we want. For example, using a map of variants as a query result. Programming with maps of variants is even perfectly possible and pleasant in Haskell. Dynamic typing is not unique to dynamic languages!
Agreed on all points.

These days, a large majority of the frontend tests in my codebase aren't tests that I've written myself. They're automatically generated Jest snapshot tests that capture the virtual DOM output of entire components in different states as dictated by product requirements, using the StoryShots plugin for React Storybook.

These tests prove to be extremely effective in catching bugs, because they directly reflect product requirements, and because they end up exercising a large majority of the codebase for very little cost compared to covering the same amount of code with individual unit tests.

The latter point is an important consideration too, because a lot of the code these integration-level tests exercise are code that I'd have considered too trivial to have been worth the ongoing maintenance costs in building unit tests for, when considered in isolation.

This means it'd have been easy for me to be satisfied with selectively and arbitrarily deciding which pieces of code should qualify for test coverage, and leave test coverage at some arbitrary number, as opposed to what I do now, which is to always strictly require 100% code coverage, but explicitly and deliberately exclude code that I have good reason to not test, which feels like a much more solid framework for ensuring code quality.

I still write unit tests for functionality that component snapshot tests can't reasonably cover, but usually only at a level of granularity where the tests themselves can map cleanly to product requirements as well, instead of painstakingly testing every little function in perfect isolation.
DevOps: Application Monitoring Landscape
I think this is going to be very difficult in much of the US, to be honest, simply because of the density of settlement. European towns and cities have been constrained by their historic footprint, and the car has been clumsily imposed on that, but most of the US has been built from scratch around the car. You cannot serve low-density suburbs, built for cars, using bikes or public transport, the people need to move or the houses need to be redeveloped at a higher density.

Although, one of the interesting things about the US is that a lot of the population of cities lives outside the city jurisdiction, for a variety of reasons including tax avoidance. The people who actually need to be persuaded aren't the people who drive into the city from the suburbs every day, they are the people who live inside the actual city, and those people need to make a judgment whether the benefits outweigh the drawbacks of this kind of approach (the risk being that the suburbs will simply develop new centres and bypass the city).
The agenda slide says Kudu is mutable on disk while Parquet is immutable on disk.
Maybe drivers are like herd animals and are happiest when surrounded by other cars.
Checklist of things every manager should do
Does Apple iPhone X Face ID Have a Sunlight Problem?
It would take you less than 20 minutes to find and learn the requisite (free) software the first time, then less than 2 minutes each subsequent time. If you grok ffmpeg then you can probably get it down to a dead simple script and 0 time.
> you absolutely have to cuff up your pant leg to pedal anyway

You absolutely do not need to cuff up your pant leg. You just need an ankle band to keep your pant leg away from the chain: https://www.amazon.com/High-Visibility-Reflective-Ankle-Stra...
Mining is currently threatening Lake Superior watersheds -- both on the Michigan and the Minnesotan shores. I don't have as much information about the Canadian shore and watersheds.

It's also threatening the Boundary Waters of Minnesota/Canada -- a famed nature-intense recreation area.

In many of these projects, companies want to mine lower grade sulfate ores. This creates a tremendous problem of acidification, which leaches all sorts of things and especially heavy metals from the tailings. Things that disperse into the environment and never go away. And that, history demonstrates, are practically impossible to contain.

Mitigation plans are written on 50 and some magical 500 year plans. Neither of which suffice with respect to the continuing presence of the toxic byproduct. Not to mention, that most companies don't even survive the lesser timeframe, and that they have always chosen to spend money on lawyers to evade their obligations rather than on cleanup costs -- until coerced, and if there are even any non-disbursed company funds left to pay for same.

I think our next generation energy resources development is essential. But along with it should come 100% recycling of the metals and as much other involved materials, as possible.

Governments should also insist on pro-actively funded mitigation trusts that exist separate from both company and government and cannot be "raided" by other for other expenditures.

How that competes with extra-territorial, natural resource poisoning competition? Well, that's a corner that the U.S. and Canada, among many others, have well painted themselves into.

P.S. I forgot to mention Wisconsin, sharing the south shore with Michigan. A proposed mine there threatened (threatens -- have they really given up?) the Bad River Reservation including the Reservation's wild rice beds. And if you think "what's a little wild rice?", well, aside from treaty obligations (are we really going to continue to break those?), consider it a harbinger of broader impact, as well as taking away self-sufficiency and cultural heritage from a chronically, coercively disadvantaged population.

And consider that, long term, the environment holds much more opportunity -- including essential health -- than a mine that will ruin same while exporting most of its economic gains outside the community.
> They've had your data for years (and were previously not only irresponsible but likely shared it with countless other partners), what has changed now?

To be honest, it's already in the wild when they where hacked and everything was stolen. 3 billion accounts. [1]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/04/how-the-yahoo-hack-stacks-up...
> But all the decent programmers you know must be really quite good.

That may well be. The question for the hiring process then becomes, how do we distinguish between people who lack keywords but could adapt, and people who lack keywords and can't. (Alas, the keywords don't solve anything - because I've interviewed quite a few people with all the right keywords whom I wouldn't consider decent programmers at all)

Programming is one of the disciplines that suffers from the fact that the initial skills hurdle is very low, but the mountain of knowledge is high. And constantly shifting. What we all want, ideally, are people who can navigate the shifting landscape easily. I'm not sure resumes easily give us that. (Unless it's a reasonable long career. If you've got 30 years of adapting to new tech, it's easy to infer you'll probably learn the next one, too. If you've got 3 years, nobody can tell)
I was resume screened/rejected from many no name companies. Google was one of the only few who took a chance on me and I think that's so cool.
Blueprint your Footprint

Observe your AWS footprint. Dump it as CloudFormation, or hook up a tool like http://hava.io or http://www.visualops.io/ to get a spatial representation of your infrastructure.

They both have powerful costing tools. Use this data in conjunction with your baseline performance metrics (memory/CPU/disk consumption) and see if there are any broad savings to be made by refactoring your platform.

If you have been steadily adding components (and their SG dependencies), its likely there is no clear understanding of the End-to-End scope of your AWS footprint.

From all this data comes your Blueprint. You choose what's necessary; VPC, ELB, AZ, RDS, S3, R53 and so on.

Use something that is not the AWS console to define and capture a new, blueprinted environment and deploy it. See if it does the job by running your availability and performance suite on it.

Start doing Blue/Green Deploys so your costs are reflective of your application.
Hey! I’m one of the creators of Manager checklist and co-founder at Teambit.

Back in 2013, our first startup grew from 4 to 9 people in a matter of months and, as first time managers, we found ourselves completely clueless on how to best support our team.

Being a manager, especially a first time manager is tough. There are simply so many of things you need to keep in mind and so many things you just don’t know.

Manager checklist is our effort at making the weight of being a manager more bearable. You can look through it once and copy to your to do list or you can regularly come back here to check stuff, but hopefully it will help you make sure you’re supporting your reports in the best way possible.

I’m here to answer any of your questions!
Techies are famously apolitical. Nose-down in the code is where most of them like it, and as long as they can make the big bucks or work on interesting stuff at the likes of Facebook, Apple or Google, they'll avoid thinking too hard about the ethics of what they're enabling.
Many offices don't. Mine does, but it's always struck me as a little unusual. A few people use it, but most don't. I used to use it as a changing room to change shirts when I went walking on my break.
So those roads would require lower speed limits?
Snort.
> I think type systems that try to "close" aggregates (i.e. saying "an Employee is these fields that have these types and no more") kind of do contribute to the problem. I

They are part of the problem if such types are shared among components; perhaps because of a design in which messages or data transfer object types are tightly coupled with the working representations in components.

But that's an unnecessary form of coupling.
Well, I guess its too ambitious to really start "where it all began". But for most people, where it was 500-years ago (1500s or so) is a good approximation. Even if this approximation is English / Protestant -centric

The article is concise enough to cover a few topics here and there as a reminder of history. I can't say that I necessarily "learned" anything new of the article, but it touches upon some concepts that I haven't heard for decades... since my grade-school education.
Current solar panels have nothing in common with this manufacturing method. It uses a machine based on obsolete amorphous thin-film silicon solar cells. The article just indicates that the technology is understood, not that solar manufacturers can produce batteries.

Even if that were true, this is a release by a company... they aren't going to give away their technology for other people to use.
> we can classify the integer into three states: less than zero, zero, greater than zero

Err, not quite. We're running on computers, remember. A comprehensive unit test that doesn't go through every possible integer input should still include:

maximum and minimum integer values for that size

maximum and minimum expected inputs

0, 1, -1

So, there's 7 test cases for a single integral input. And since you bring up banking, let's imagine you're working with a function with two inputs. Since most bugs come about because of the interaction between two variables [0], you'd want to check out each combination. So, 7 possible inputs for the first integer, 7 for the second: 49 test cases.

Why bother? You're working for a bank... imagine facing a client whose balance shot negative because of an overflow error and started accruing "overdraft coverage" fees.

Back to the original point: when was the last time anybody but the AFL tool wrote the "proper" 49+ unit tests for an "add_to_balance(int, int)" style function, when one test would give you 100% coverage for that function?

[0] https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/Automated-Combinatorial-Testi...
I was surprised to see Haskell in widespread use at several large enterprise companies in Singapore.
Driving in anything but mass transport or bikes is vastly energy inefficient. Even if you're driving a fully electric vehicle.

If you wish to explore how much, check out the good site: withouthotair.com chapter 3.
You could almost argue your data is safer with verizon than with the old yahoo! (Safer, with a hard R. Not safe, just less not-safe)
Right, like it says, "the payoff is often dwarfed by the investment of time/energy".
"How come we don't see 0.25 ns/op as advertised speed on a Processor?"

Because different operations take different numbers of cycles and have different latencies. See http://www.agner.org/optimize/instruction_tables.pdf for a table of such.
flat. compact. population not indoctrinated to believe that cars are avatars for their penis.
Hard service to offer. The guy who originally built this and sold it to Google has posted on HN a few times about the intricacies of the industry.
Been using the chip for a while and the current ATMega328PB variant is a better chip, dual UART and more IO, some people say they had XTAL issues but I have not come across them and also the internal 8Mhz Osc is accurate enough for reliable 9600 baud UART between 0 and 40 degrees. My point is it is also the cheapest it has ever been. I think the price rise was people stocking up after the buyout but I currently pay $1.02 ea for Qty 25 and there is a shit-tonne of stock.

My Annoyance is that to get more RAM/FLASH you tripple the price which is ridiculous. I also use PIC18K chips which are a similar price at 32KB/2KB but only cost $0.20 more to double the FLASH/RAM/CLOCK and so are much better value.

Clock for clock the AVR is a more efficient chip so Microchip have no real excuse not to do the decent thing and give us a 64K/4K version of it without the stupid price hike.

32 bit is so overkill for most applications but you just get so much more for your money with them.
What kind of parts of the US are you talking about? Amsterdam is reasonably dense (not compared to say, NYC, but that isn't "much of the US"). People often commute 30-60 minutes by bike there.
Since people have been complaining about this article/title
and a reader suggested https://www.nature.com/news/quantum-machine-goes-in-search-o... as a better post on the topic, we rolled back the clock on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15578617 and merged this thread there.
> Apple wouldn't even blink if a 50% better battery cost $60.

Apple seems content to merely maintain the status quo of barely a days battery life. I would not expect them to lead the way on this front.
I don't program and know nothing about video or video software or 'scripts'. My internet is ungodly slow and pc is incredibly old/weak. I don't know what grok or ffmpeg is.

The above is not me, but many other users.
How come none of these are about how absolutely flat Amsterdam is? I have never been to a more flat place in my life than the Netherlands. That definitely played into the decision for us to bike around everywhere while we were there, but continued to be uninterested at home.
> only ~1% of users are paying, it seems like very small changes in conversion rate could make or break the business.

Agreed. 4% to 5% seems to be the minimum for this sort of model to sustain and not die.

> Chris Anderson in his book “Free” explains that Freemium works on the 5 Percent Rule - where 5% of premium customers support the remaining 95% of free users and also the cost of servicing the 95% is close to zero.

Source: https://www.chargebee.com/blog/freemium-business-model/

When Dropbox launched they were surviving on their 4% of users who had converted from free subscription. Now their conversion rate is around 25% which is very impressive for a fremium product / service.
History of networks – Niall Ferguson
Show HN: Hacker News Comments Notifier Chrome Plugin
Ubisoft has a long history of using questionable DRM. I remember having problems uninstalling their Starforce crap after playing Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones.

If it's an Ubisoft game, it's worth paying attention when people complain about the DRM. It might not just be the pirates complaining.
Why does this matter for anyone not doing something that would attract the attention of a government agency? If you're running illegal weapons, sure. But if you're just trying to connect to your company's server or prevent Comcast from seeing your search history, this shouldn't matter. It reminds me of the recent uproar over Facebook supposedly listening though the mic at all times. It sounds like a severe lack of appreciation for how much data we leak at any given moment.

What I mean is that just by reading this thread, we've all been added to whatever VPN user list the (insert bad guy name here) has set up. From there it's just simple data mining. One of the easiest ways to link user to VPN service might be through tracking scripts, but that's not specific to the VPN sites. Presumably your're researching which VPN and then reading more on specific VPNs as you narrow down your choice. Then you want to be "anonymous" so you search for bitcoin info. Then you suddenly stop searching for bitcoin and VPN info. So, you have the data from all those searches (specific breadcrumbs), the length of time searched (length of time correlated to how serious and educated you are about the topic), the time the searches stopped (correlated to VPN subscription start), your previous un-anonymized topics of interest that led to the search for VPNs, the exit nodes of the VPN you probably chose, etc. That's on top of all the physical variables - when you're likely to be awake, schedule of connections, location, etc.

I would argue that just having a tracking script on the VPN provider's website is a drop in the bucket, even from a legal perspective - it's better to have a preponderance of evidence. You're not giving 'them' any more information than they'd already need for a search warrant, which is the real danger threshold for this conversation.

It's conflating an annoyance with a threat.
No, they intercepted the water far enough upstream of their settlements. Let's say you have a pueblo on a 200 ft mesa, above a river that's running at a 4% gradient. Your aqueduct needs a 2% gradient to maintain good flow -- the Hohokam were excellent at maintaining consistent gradients over very long distances -- so what you need to do is build a small check dam 200 / (4% - 2%) = 10,000 ft upstream, with the stone aqueduct wending its way "up" the side of the mesa from there. Ruins of these kind of structures can be seen all over the area.
For crossing tram tracks it's best to approach with an "angle of attack" greater than 30 deg. to avoid your wheels getting guided by the track slots.
That's the way things have been for a very long time. And yet, isn't the tech industry all about changing the way things are?
Yes. American workplaces rarely have showers to use. That's one of those things you are expected to do at home.

I'm still a bit shocked that my temporary factory job here in Norway provides safety shoes and launders the uniforms, let alone having showers on-site to use.
> 1.4 The Belief that Tests are Smarter than Code Telegraphs Latent Fear or a Bad Process

That's not why you write unit tests. They are, in a roundabout way, programming's way of double-entry bookkeeping. Tests and code both are there to double check the other one. Neither one is "smarter" than the other.
QSB seems to be circling back into the limelight recently here:

What Is QSB Stock and Why Does It Matter for Startups? | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15495873 (2017Oct;21comments) <- content is 2016Jul grellas

>When you do qualify, the benefit can be up to $2M

Ask HN: How do I minimize the taxes from selling my startup? | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2502623 (2011May;52comments)

>proceeds of the original and the new investment are treated as long term capital gains [...] if the proceeds stay in a QSB for more than 5 years, the whole thing is tax free

Tell HN: 100% exemption for angel investors extended through 2011 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018041 (2010Dec;16comments)

>grellas: My two cents ...
Part of Googles killing all of ITA public facing software and keeping the rest to itself. Google purchased ITA in 2010. QPX was used by a lot of online travel companies.[1]

Already canceled was the flight booking software for airlines.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITA_Software

oddly the guy teaching the hadoop class is retired from ITA and talked about them a little in class last night.