skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Boredom leads to creative and introspective thought and rumination. Boredom is necessary.

That is a great point and takeaway - maybe even a great summary of the point that these articles and books are trying to make. Your favorite TV show or book or video game wouldn't exist without someone who couldn't come up with anything better to do with their time.

It's like we're going out of our way to fill all the bright and sparkly corners of our minds with gruel.
How the ‘Original Internet Godfather’ walked away from his cybercrime past
Our teenage son carries a flip phone. Always has, always will, until he can pay for something else.
Much more powerful magnets, so electric motors would get even smaller and more powerful.

Currently a big limitation on small electric motors is heat, so a fully superconducting motor could handle huge loads.
If it's internal then don't write shit that will get you fired. I think forwarding it is a shitty thing to do, but he should have kept in mind that potential.
> As in the first synthesis, this involved the production of only a few centigrams of the compound.

At ~0.1mg per dose, this translates to "only" a few hundred doses.
Snow shovelling can kill
Your argument that “inclusivity-in-tech [is] ableist for wanting to destroy this niche in the pursuit of making the programming niche more welcoming to other groups” is interesting and probably a much better way to represent a claim similar to Damore in a far less offensive way to women. I can personally name a handful of non-neuro-typical people who would wholeheartedly agree (half of them females because my friends are frustratingly non-representative).

However, if you check the ratio of people even moderately high on the Asperger’s scale among programmers, it is much higher than other more social profession but still a small portion overall. That difference doesn’t come close to explaining the gender gap. Maybe you care for all introverts (who resent interruptions) including the majority of introverts who are neuro-typical. I do believe most programmers are introvert but I’m not familiar with the gender distribution of introversion but I’d be surprised if it were large enough to explain the gender disparity in tech.
Google Memo Author James Damore Sues Google for Discrimination
The alt attribute text for the large "G Pay" logo is not "Google Pay" as one would expect but the cheerful "Google Pay Lockup". Who or what is being locked up is up for you to decide.
I'm pretty sure my current phone (Samsung Galaxy S5) literally has a Kid Mode that does a lot of this stuff. And that came out, like, 4 or 5 years ago?
When I moved to SF, I was shocked to find out most 3000+$/month apartments didn't have their own washing machine.
iOS has a Guided Access mode that does some/alternatives of what you said like lockout timer: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202612. I always use it when I let my kid use my iPhone/iPad.
The Solo was rushed into production in order to try and compete with DJI's new Phantom 3 line.

The Phantom 3 was way ahead of the Solo in nearly every spec. Better camera (4K vs. 1080p), longer battery, longer range and better GPS. Many users I know attribute the controller issues with the fact 3DR used some proprietary GPS instead of the more common one the DJI models used.

The nail in the coffin though was the gimbal. The P3 came with a three axis gimbal, even on their entry model. The Solo, because it was rushed, at first didn't even ship with a gimbal and they said they would sell it separately as an add-on. Then it shipped with one that didn't move at all (http://macnn.mnmcdn.com/article_images/128157-md-26378-Solo_...), and when they finally got the three axis one on there, it was already too late. I also found out later a lot of the demo's they did the Solo's they were using had souped up GPS and other software they didn't have on the retail models people were getting.

My Solo had a lot of the common issues. It would take off fine, but only go about 75ft and then hover, then the gps would cut in and out and I'd panic and have to land it. Sent it back a few times and nothing was ever resolved. After my third replacement, I threw in the towel. My Iris+ was far more dependable and I only ever had really minor issues with it. A simple re-calibration always fixed any issues. I had a three axis gimbal on it with a gopro Hero 5 and it was always dependable. I ended up selling it because I could go from hauling around a huge Pelican 1650 case to my backpack with the Mavic.

After having both, I finally came to the conclusion DJI has a far superior product. They're innovating faster, and packing way more tech into their drones than any other company. Add in the fact they're making these things smaller and smaller. It makes it WAY easier to transport. Like I said, I can toss my chrome bag over my shoulder, walk into the city, unpack and get my Spark up in a matter of minutes, get some footage and get out before the cops show up. No way I could do that with either the Solo or the Iris. The startup time for both was several minutes (anywhere from 2-5 mins) to get a GPS lock. With the Spark and Mavic its almost instantaneous.

Hope this helps. My advice is to stick with DJI, even their entry models are better than most mid range drone models from other companies.
Okay, replace engineering with management and that's exactly the argument he made.
I would say their wording is pretty sympathetic here, when the context we're talking about is new militias operating checkpoints in Mexico.
Humira doesn't cure diseases; it only treats them. Many drug companies have stopped funding cures because biologics like humira are just too profitable. Why charge a one time fee when you could bill someone for life?
>People with power and money are much more cynical that we'd like to believe.

Than you'd like to believe. I have no illusions.
That mess started appearing at some point with kernel 4.14.x.

It's also isolated to upper area and doesn't take the whole screen, but it's more than two lines.
Wow... I would love have this mode on all the time.

(of course, it will never happen because such a mode "reduces engagement")
The Rylo camera looks amazing. If GoPro doesn't get something equivalent or better out in the next 6 months I think the Rylo camera will destroy them in the consumer market. It appears to take everything that's annoying about casually using a GoPro (aiming it, capturing steady video, tracking a subject) and make it go away, or be fixable in their app.

And you can buy it today.
That is brilliant. Some more accessible tooling for BPF is a huge gain.
It simply comes down to money.

Damore was fired because he was bad for business. Not because he's white, male, conservative, or the contents of his memo. Had the memo not been leaked publicly, I have no doubt he'd still be working at Google and his memo ignored and/or forgotten. He simply became too much of lightning rod for Google to continue to employ him.

Google will settle for the same reason. It is better for business to pay him off and make sure he never talks about it again, than to drag this out.

The only people who will be financially better off in this whole deal will be the lawyers, and nothing will be resolved in reference to the larger issues surrounding this case.
> You need not lose revenue from the content you create through alphabets' vague rules and products.

In fairness, Alphabet's "don't ever defraud us" rules are quite clear, and it's hardly surprising they don't trust someone with that on their record.
If you don't believe biology is the reason then it's a big difference.
SQLite's Use of Tcl (Richard Hipp)
I've been wondering the same thing. At a high level, I've been thinking about making myself a "firewall for attention". Here's what I've done so far: Talk openly with friends and family about how much better my life is without Facebook. Aggressively remove all advertising from my life (run ad blockers everywhere, pay to remove ads on Kindle, replace Roku with Apple TV, etc). Only read news that I pay for (I view this as paying for curation, in addition to the writing itself). Stop carrying an iPhone and use an Apple Watch with LTE instead.
My half-sister (13) got a new iPhone 7 for her birthday (which I find ridiculous, because expensive). I really feel like it's messing up her as a person. As soon as she holds it she's oblivious to the outside world.

I took it away from her on new-years eve and stuck it in a closet. She said she wanted to get it back at 12 am, I told her 12:15. At 12, she went outside with us, to watch the fireworks. She stayed outside until at least 12:30 and didn't ask for her phone once.

Pretty much every time her phone is placed out of sight, she turns into a fun, engaging person. But when it's in sight, she needs to have it, to mindlessly scroll, double tap in instagram, or whatever the latest app fad is.

The only way to possibly control this, is to talk about it to others. To spread awareness of what it does to kids and to make it normal for kids not to be stuck to their phones. Because most parents don't want their kid to be left out, so they do the same thing all parents to.

Pessimistically, though, I think this isn't going to happen. Too many parents are happy to have something that distracts their kids, so they can indulge in their own addictions. I feel like this will become the smoking of this generation and it will take decades for the real implications to become apparent. I'm just happy that it seems to coincide with autonomous cars, so at least the damage from texting and driving will get reduced.
It is an economic certainty. If more of the housing supply is tied up by rent controlled tenants who won't move out, supply and demand places the equilibrium price for available units far higher than it would be without rent control.

When you institute rent control, you save existing teachers some money, but when they retire, good luck finding new teachers willing to work in the new market with much higher rents.
I read Demores paper and I didn't get the impression that he thought that about female co workers. To me his main point seemed to be that women by number arnt as interested in tech as males are. On your second point it's easy to look back on the paper and pick at the way some of it comes across but I don't think he ever imagined it becoming the published and the political hot potato it became. Maybe he would have been more careful with the wording if he could have seen into the future, unfortunately we don't have that skill yet.
> But at the same time, I also think that smart devices can be extremely useful - speaking of attention, how great is it to not have to remember things like 'what is the density of steel'

I guess I'm growing old, but that's what I use my smart phone for and nothing more. It's a phone, it's a camera, it's a map, it got the three communication channels with my friends if we need to find each other in the city. And well it has a browser but I hate using the fucking keyboard on that thing. Oh and it has an app to look up which bus I should take.

From there, its extremely useful. Just a week ago I saved like an hour of commute because the bus app allowed me to circumvent a big traffic accident stopping a line. And maps with directions are great.

But on the other hand, my smartphone is 90% in my pocket easily, and that's different from a bunch of people I know. I use it when I need it or when someone with notification rights pages me. It's just an expensive thing otherwise.
You didn't have to write this whole article just to shill your own crypto game.

Edit: but I would like a dedicated link explaining it.
+1.

Most of the pieces about the memo didn't take time to highlight that "neuroticism" and "agreeableness" refer to Big-5 personality traits, not the everyday understanding of the words.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits

Most of the pieces didn't distinguish between descriptive and normative statements.

Most of the pieces didn't distinguish between statements about distribution of something within a population, and statements about all members of that population.
> Hey smartphone makers, if you're listening: Let me set an alternate PIN that unlocks the phone in a limited access mode, or "kid mode." Only pre-approved apps are available. Only pre-approved contacts can be called/texted. In-game purchases require the more secure PIN. Maybe when the phone is in this mode I can track its location easily, and make it emit a noise. The maximum volume is much lower than normal. A lockout timer auto-locks the phone after X minutes. If the battery dips below 20%, only the voice calling, texting, and tracking will work. Bandwidth caps. Et cetera.

I don’t understand how this is different from parental controls (speaking from iOS experience; perhaps this is lacking on Android?)
They did that when they were trying to be recognized as a state, which they were earnestly trying to do all the way to September 10th, 2001.

Without that prospect, they stopped bothering. The Taliban's popularity came despite the opium ban, not because of it. The poppy growers did not get high on their own supply.
Also, there's probably already Watsonesque bots out there to ruin the party.
This is an interesting view into just how quickly Seattle is changing.

I love Seattle, and I want to see it grow, but I worry about how it changes as it grows. I'd hate to see it follow San Francisco's path to inequality and social strife.
The LHC at CERN would be a lot easier to operate without requiring such an enormous amount of Helium as well as the long time it takes to cool down to superconductivity after maintenance.
This is what stuck out to me in the article:

> Lactation consultants in Canada and the United States have begun noticing the prevalence of women texting and scrolling through their phones while they breastfeed, breaking valuable eye contact with their baby.

Normally I'm in the skeptic camp on this issue. That screens are just the new generation's version of comic books or rock and roll rotting the minds of our youth, and headlines like these are making a mountain out of a molehill.

But that bit about mothers making less eye contact with their babies while breast feeding kind of made me do a double take. I could see real psychological damage coming from stuff like that and the broader idea that parents using devices and neglecting their kids more is the real problem (as opposed to those other boogey-men, where it was the kids' usage that was the problem).
What phone did you get? I've been considering exactly that switch myself, but finding a flip-phone which can do wifi/4G calls (some older designs are at risk of having their compatible cell towers shut off soon) and navigation (that's one convenience that's mighty hard to give up) has been a challenge. I've only found one or two suitable phones and they've all been over $300 which seems ludicrous for something that simple.
Never ever use averages in your stats. Use medians and percentiles.

Averages are a meaningless stat especially if you benchmark.
Unfortunately that page does not say when the comparison was made, and which version of each tool was tested. Also, which "grep" is that? I assume GNU grep? There are others, though...

All in all, it'd still be nice to have a more comprehensive performance comparison page, which gets regularly updated. Bonus points if it shows how speed changes over time, similar to http://speed.pypy.org (the code for that is available, by the way).

Wishful thinking, I know, but hey, who knows... :-)
Chinese forum post indicates Microsoft working on Surface Phone
I have a sneaking suspicion that HN users are far, far from being the majority of folks using smartphones.
This is one of the things that get all weird the more I think about it.

Trying to define an objective term like "simple" is of no use if you can't map it to something in human perception. Let's say we have some all-knowing oracle that can tell us which algorithm for problem X is the simplest one. If nobody would agree, what is the point? Or, if 51% of programmers would say A is simplest while the other 49% consider algorithm B more simple, should we just go "yay majority" and call it a day? In reality we have no way of knowing which one is objectively most simple, because at least regarding this domain, we as humans are unable to make an objective judgment.

Is the simplest solution always the one with the least lines of code? Least number of classes? Singletons vs static classes? Recursive approach vs. iterative approach? C style linked lists (next-pointer in data type) vs. "proper" list class? In general: Could we formalize this, ie. come up with an algorithm how to determine how simple code is?

Often times code that is easier to understand might be harder to work with, while more elaborated code with indirections and abstractions is harder to grasp (simply because it's more LoC/classes, just more reading), but once you got familiar with the code base, much easier to work with. So when you say objectively simple, do you mean "simple to understand so you can tell what it does", or "simple to understand wrt maintaining, extending and fixing"? And which kind of simple should I go for when writing code?
I think Lenore Skenazy [0] is forming a national group dedicated to facilitating unsupervised play for children, which if you want your kids to not have phones would certainly help them. I've heard anecdotally that one of the reasons phones are appealing is it's a way to break free of being constantly monitored by modern day helicopter parents.

Another program I've heard of but don't know much about is wait until 8th [1], which is people promising to not give their children a smartphone until at the earliest 8th grade.

[0] http://www.freerangekids.com/

[1] https://www.waituntil8th.org/
Literal antigravity is almost a requirement for safe personal flying devices though.

Literal antigravity that doesn't take an enormous amount of energy or do anything hard to control even.

The closest thing we have to a real jetpack runs on nearly pure hydrogen peroxide. For about 30 seconds.
That's a really great insight. The fact that such good intentions often lead to bigger problems is what concerns me about UBI - it will surely have huge second-order effects. I'm not sure what they will be, but rent control in a city is tiny compared to the effect a universal change like UBI would introduce.
Propoganda bullshit
I think it's necessary to expand on the authors definition of "complex" vs "simple"... Things can be "complex" and thus hard to read for many difference reasons:

At one extreme the reader is definitely responsible for things like understanding an underlying algorithm - the algorithm chosen might be a good choice, but it might also be very complex. It's not always possible to clearly convey an efficient implementation of a complex algorithm in code - It could be argued at the most that the author should name the algo in a comment, but litering the implementation with comments describing the algorithm would make it harder to read for someone who is familiar with the algorithm.

At the other extreme there are all kinds of unnecessary complexity that make it hard to read, some by poorly suited forced design patterns, some by cruft that accumulates and some by un-refactored growth (big ball of mud).

One of my pet hates is highly layered object oriented code where someone has gone to painful ends to generalise and modularise the fuck out of every single routine to the point that the overhead of traversing the hierarchy to determine what actually happens in what order with what side effects when you call one of the outer layers of that ginormous onion is humanly impractical. I'd call that unreadable code due to complexity that the authors are responsible for.
Not only this, but women still dominate nursing and many other healthcare professions, and women are increasingly preferred for certain specialist roles (e.g., OB-GYNs).

Nursing is one of the best all-around careers in the US when you take all factors into account (barriers to entry, pay, potential advancement, availability of jobs in both urban and rural areas, lack of ageism, long-term stability, etc.). Certain specialist nurses like CRNAs can make $150k+. Nurse practitioners also have a higher median salary than software developers in the US according to the BLS.
>this computer era is problem trying to find its solutions.

I don't think this is true. I watched a local mechanic fixing my car, and YouTube was an important tool for them. Watching someone else fix a car was much more effective than reading a schematic. Finding part numbers was easy. Ordering them was easy. I strongly suspect that health care people do the same thing (but don't want to admit it and do it behind closed doors). Certainly lawyers do this, via Lexis Nexis.

For anyone doing creative technical work, the Internet is wonderful. You can find authors, papers, howtos, videos, etc. Of course a good 80% of this content is awful bordering on harmful, but that 20% is vast. For software, HN manages to capture a large fraction of that 20%, IMHO.

It's also true that smartphones have brought addictive gaming behavior to the masses. But if you can avoid this then you've got a great resource.
But rent control only benefits the renters already in place. It hurts new renters to the area, by driving up costs.

You've got to address a moral judgement you've implicitly made: What makes the current renters of a city more deserving than the future renters who might move to the city?
Mozilla isn't exactly in the best state, even before he left, so maybe it's turning out better for him. Not to mention that Brave just launched a ICO.
How hard would it be to make a pull-up alarm instead?
Your comment doesn't really address my point. The argument the article presents has less to do with free market fundamentalism than it does with landlords trying to get tenants of rent controlled units to leave in order to get market rates. That seems like the issue. Blaming rent control sounds a lot to me like blaming the victim for the crime.
Yes, most people are definitely willing to talk, IF you show that you value their time, and give them some context about why you're asking.

Show that you value their time by setting the space upfront, and when you're 10 minutes away, tell them "We have 10 minutes left, and I want to respect your time...". They'll decide to keep rambling or not.

Re: numbers, you can also preface with "I'm not looking to know anything confidential, but since I don't know your industry, as we talk, it would be great to have numbers with some context.

Here is my verbatim intro for learning more about cities+construction:

"Hi! I'm a technologist who left the tech world, and I'm focusing on how I can help cities. Particularly helping cities make better decisions with Data.

To prevent building something that doesn't help cities, I'm listening to key people in your space and understanding the problems they face. I'd really like to get an understanding of your role and the issues you face, particularly around the permitting process, and code compliance.

The conversation is less than an hour, and I can meet you in person, or over the phone. The questions are lightweight, no quizzes here. :)"

- nic
Daily Sketches in 2017 by Zach Lieberman
It’s extremely confusing because sometimes they just take something and rebrand it, sometimes they combine multiple things under one brand, etc.
That's an interesting way of putting things; y'know, sometimes it seems like a false sense of accomplishment lies at the core of lots of types of addictions. But I guess that's sort of the definition of an addiction, right? Behavior which hijacks the brain's feedback loops to sustain itself over anything else. Mental cancers.

It sort of makes you wonder at what point people started to unironically view their jobs as engineering addictions. Was it around the Myspace era? Earlier? Or was Facebook what really set the mold for that stated goal?