skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've volunteered with a group that replants native oak seedlings in the hills of San Mateo county. What's needed there is protection from being eaten by fauna while still seedlings. The solution? Use wire cages to surround the seedlings. By the time they outgrow the cages, they are too thick to make for easy snacks.
>nothing is maintainable, just delete it and start over when we need to make an important change

Good! That's why we have microservices, classes, or interchangeable parts in any engineering discipline: rather than laboriously extricating a deeply integrated, tightly coupled component (or worse, give up and throw away the whole system), we get to rip out one specific component, throw it away, and replace it with something that conforms to the same interface while keeping the rest. If you can routinely delete and replace specific services, your microservices architecture is working beautifully. Just as, when you can routinely overhaul specific classes, your OO design is working well.

In the physical world, maintenance and repair hardly ever consist of coaxing the same matter into working state. It's extracting old parts, throwing them away, and putting in new ones.
Imagine a Beowolf cluster of SCO lawyers.
Here is a real invisible box challenge. (Double boxes)
The problems we face today are not explained by the difference between studying or smoking dope. There's something more pernicious involved.

Yes, if you smoke dope all the time your outcomes in life will probably be worse than if you study some "rarified" skill, to borrow your phrase.

But studying takes resources, and time, and those are bought through money and social connections and luck. And increasingly, despite what we read about MOOCs and the new educational order, it doesn't matter if we study and learn, what matters is that we have a certificate of studying, a placeholder. And those placeholders are not the same as our knowledge, or one's ability to learn, and are subject to corruption and greasing like every other placeholder.

And in the end, what does this say about how much value we should place on that rarified skill? Does our society really allocate financial reward according to actual value? Does Amazon really improve my life that much compared to the plumber or electrician who fixed my house? Is Facebook a net benefit to society? If it disappeared tomorrow, would nothing replace it? Could our healthcare be delivered under a different provider structure? Do I pay my ISP because it's the best of many choices, or because it's acceptable enough to not go without internet access? Is Amazon successful because of Bezos in particular? If Bezos was going around spouting all the ideas in his head, marshaling an army of imaginary workers, without any actual labor, would we still have Amazon?

The point of this article is it's trivial to point out that hard work should and often is compensated. The problem is that the compensation structures in many fields are completely absurd in many cases relative to the actual value created.
Examples of anti-Russian propaganda in western media
Minitel: what should have been a cautionary tale. Allowing "service providers" to charge money for every last little thing anyone does on a service results in, first a race to the bottom, as prices are compared. Second, a rush to ways to generate extra revenue through various irritating and scammy ways (the Yellow pages were full, and I do mean to the brim, of scams, same for the "porn" (mostly text or chat based, some very creative "graphical" stuff), ...). Then those scams become so pervasive that trust in the system is completely lost, which makes it useless. Three, rapid mass abandonment when even a lower quality "free" alternative becomes available (internet over slow modems, hell, even BBSes posed a serious challenge to minitel).

The thing people always forget to mention is that minitel was metered. Every second you spent on minitel was charged, with some part of that charge shared with the content provider. There were also content providers (ie. "webshops") that paid for the customers to be able to be on their site for free.

The reaction to increased scams ? Why France Telecom stared charging more, of course, making the scams worse ... and worse ... and worse. Then suddenly all was abandoned in 2003 or so, with only paid-for sites remaining (essentially web banking, and some stock broker type stuff that's similar but more complex than web banking).

Of course, the whole exercise was repeated with "value added services" on Cell phones in the late 90s and early 2000s (also charged by the "time spent online", and also filled to the brim with scams), and now again with android and iphone.
Create a digital voice that sounds like you with only one minute of audio
Please don't post like this to HN.
Is Operational Sympathy a (Good) Thing?
I hope they are not talking about those 15 to 20 min flight time drones.
I'd say you're either pretty new, or you've been pretty lucky for this to have been your experience.

It's not that other developers are "maniacs or idiots". The issue is much finer-grained than that. Without strong technical leadership and responsible system architecture, it is easy for any project to go afield, no matter how talented the individual developers are in isolation.

Independently, most professional developers who've had a job for a while and jumped across a few different companies will be able to write acceptably reasonable code for the type of problems they're used to seeing. Even if they're using the cutting-edgiest, most fragile tooling, it will basically be fine within the context of a small demo and/or side project. Like you said, most of them are not maniacs, nor are they idiots, and they can easily manage something that is entirely under their sole control.

Without strong technical authorities and coordination in a team setting, however, you get these independent units trying to plug together, only to find that the couplers are fundamentally incompatible. Lots of individual developers are doing things that are reasonable in isolation and within the constraints of their specific timelines and concerns (some of these concerns are personal but still work-related, e.g., looking smart to peers), but which require huge effort to fix and make cross-compatible.

This is not just a matter of matching an API, though that may be part of it. The processes, incentives, and overall mindsets have to fit together well. Dev X needs to be able to read Dev Y's code from last week and understand what they were trying to do.

It's harder to read code than to write it, since writing is just an attempt to brain dump a structure you already hold, whereas reading is attempting to load a structure of someone else's conception -- a totally foreign construct -- based only on the slow, imperfect dump they were able to get on the day they wrote the code. You'll sometimes hear talk of catharsis in writing code, because it's a pleasure to express this mental model in a convenient reproducible context. You basically never hear the same of reading code.

Now, if you get Dev Y and Dev X on the same wavelength, then this isn't too big of an obstacle, and you have a sane, productive, happy group that is working under strong technical leadership to make cohesive, reasonable choices in the context of the broader team and company needs.

But if you can't synchronize the wavelengths, Dev Y moans about how stupid Dev X is the whole time, how it's better to use Pet Thing Z instead of Pet Thing A, so anything he touches gets its PTA ripped out for a PTZ, and how dev W should be moved over to replace dev X, since they're much more cooperative.

This continues for months and years. Stack enough of this together and it all just starts to blur. By the time you get to the wide scale view of the company's whole ecosystem, you're ready to trade in your keyboard for a mop and become a janitor.

tl;dr "a person is smart; people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it".
Which is about the farthest thing possible from an expert in cryptography.
Someone must pay them to maintain public infrastructure. Taxing is out of vogue.
Original article: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/1/eaao5961.full
Please don't post unsubstantive dismissive comments to HN, especially in response to someone's work. If you don't like it, there are many other interesting things to read here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html
Please do not post snarky dismissals to HN, especially in response to someone's work. Even if you're right, there's nothing wrong with people making interesting things out of the basics, nor with posting their learning projects here. There is, however, something wrong with taking swipes at others.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

Edit: since you've repeatedly posted uncivil and unsubstantive comments and ignored multiple requests to stop, I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Is there an updated plot going up to 2017?
Many (most?) trees are efficient at making seed, but what they really lack is the ability to get those seeds far enough away that they won't be out-competed for nutrients, water, and light by the parent tree.

Somewhere downhill and relatively nearby is a 'solved problem' for most trees -- but uphill, further afield, with appropriate soil depth for the seed size, in sufficient numbers, with less competition, etc. Aside -- ridges are one of the most useful places to focus reforestation efforts, in no small part because once established there, trees can generally propagate themselves across the rest of the slope.

Fending off predators is a concern, of course, but that's why you go for the large quantity approach when propagating by seed.

The claim these things can 'plant 100,000 trees a day' is clearly hyperbole. What they can do is plant 100,000 seeds a day, presumably at a much higher density than fully grown trees would be able to thrive, on the assumption that a useful number will actually establish.

While trees are mostly efficient at making new trees, that's not useful in areas that are heavily deforested -- and I suspect that's where this kind of technology would be most useful. Dungog in AU (as noted as a trial site in TFA) is a good example (gold rushes were especially bad for local flora, and in hot arid climates it can take centuries to recover). The breathtakingly vast plains west of Beijing that have been deforested, and now result in massive quantities of top soil being blown into the ocean each year would be a fantastic candidate for this kind of mass spray-and-pray planting.

Also, when re-foresting, pioneer trees are chosen - typically these are acacias (or similar) that have a relatively short life (10-20) years, are hardy, fast growing, and fix nitrogen. In degenerated older forests you may not find many of these around to produce seed naturally.
More functional: A story in refactoring a 2d vector library
That's why installation options exist, no?
Strava is a public-by-default social networking website that happens to focus on athletics. Given that, it's no surprise some users happen to work in the military (they're also on Facebook).

It seems like the various militaries need to do a better job of informing and enforcing social media policy, including auditing websites like Strava. You could also argue that Strava should be private by default, but I don't think you'd have much success persuading them of that.
>What makes you imagine your government has any jurisdiction over me?

It doesn't. But once you enter Europe expect to be in trouble (if there is anything going on against you). Also forget to do business in Europe (with EU citizens).

So if you don't care about these, then you don't have to care about this law.
Top JavaScript errors from 1000+ projects (and how to avoid them)
> they aren't doing a very good job of voting with their wallets

I'm tired of repeating this, but here it is:

Voting with your wallet. Is. Bullshit. Consumers don't pick from the space of all possible products, they choose from what's available on the market. Especially in software, it's producers who collectively determine trends. If they all fall into a fad, customers have no way of saying no.
I'm going by this definition: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/conspire

Claiming that across the US women get paid 20% less than men, for doing exactly the same work with exactly the same qualifications with everything aside from genitals being equal is not a conspiracy theory in your opinion? Claiming that society is sexist in that way is not a conspiracy theory?

Even if I grant you that I used harsh language, I take issue with your priorities, I would priorities truth over political correctness.
Climate change's PR problem
Your comment is even more fitting today (politics)
I had a bicycle accident once. My arm got swollen. I called nearby offices and couldn't find a single doctor who could see me immediately. I went to ER hoping they'd give me some ointment or whatever to sooth the pain.

I refused to undergo x-ray scanning (somehow I was sure there's nothing broken). And it's a good thing that I didn't go to the radiology block.

After about 50 minutes of waiting, doctor came and offered me bacitracin. I asked if there's anything stronger than that, alas there was nothing else he could offer me. I shrugged and said "alright then". Doctor applied it all over my arm and said it should be like that: "don't cover it!".
With that I went home. Bacitracin didn't help a bit. The pain was so strong, so I couldn't sleep for a few days.

Week later I got a bill. They charged $2800. Insurance covered only $1200 of that.
I tried to dispute it to no avail.

I learned my lesson - in the US, you never, ever should go to ER. Unless there's a knife sticking out of your skull. But even then you should maybe re-consider.
Plus there are some people who believe that to light a christmas tree after christmas, that this can in fact be accomplished using a flame slightly shorter than 50 feet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeiSDF83mXo
Well, that's a definition question :)

You're dead on -- proper "Server" solutions, like we see in architecture diagrams or on back-end tiers, are generally insensitive to startup times. As a rule they're spooled up before being connected to the larger app, or are 'the app' itself and have load balancing or operational pauses to mitigate up-time effects (where necessary).

In 2020, though, as people are working with microservices and containerized server deployments you end up with a lot of 'servers' where 'apps' used to be. Particularly for focused web apps initial startup time can be a major issue in a shared environment. That's where NGEN or AOT can come into play to happily minimize startup time and memory demands. Parallel computing and number crunching loads can also benefit if you're looking at lots of short lived servers, or a domain that challenges the compiler for whatever reason.
How is C++ support? Is it really first-class?
AFAIK Atomic Game Engine supports C++ as a first-class citizen.
What am I reading? Someone whining because an outdated and antique idea of having to pay for _standards_ is finally going away?
who will mange the per use-case blockchains (the distributed ledger for a given use-case)? I like decentralization... more power-to-all...but the reality is eventually there will be power-brokers (for example, miners in bitcoins or exchanges like coinbase) who has deep pockets to manage and scale these blockchains.... there will always be ripples and ethereums built blockchains which mostly maintained by single player... but then how is it any different than now... what am I missing?
You are not alone! From what I've seen many people struggle with Kalman filters. If you want to build in depth understanding of them I heard lots of good things about this online book: https://github.com/rlabbe/Kalman-and-Bayesian-Filters-in-Pyt...
You are aware that this does not make sense, since to do business with people from other countries you already have to comply with their laws in terms of taxes and accounting anyway.

Selling to EU customers as US business already requires you to have a VAT ID in EU, so what does this change for you? In the end the main provision is to only require and store customer data which is effectively needed for providing the services and goods you offer. If you are doing business responsibly, this should not affect you at large as it mainly formalises these processes and requires you to actually write down and document what data you need for what processing steps. If you can not do that, your business is already flawed and not because GDPR does not work for you.
I'm sorry you got downvoted like that, but there are different flavors of offtopicness on HN and some of them are quite welcome. Whimsical tangents, particularly, that veer off in some unpredictable direction, can be quite good for intellectual curiosity, which is the main value of this site.

The kind of offtopic discussions we really want to avoid are the generic and predictable ones. This includes vapid comments and ideological/political flames.
Man 5 months? I'm on two right now. Still getting idiotic automated responses from their customer support. I ping the ticket every couple of days, and nothing. Been thinking of going the Twitter route.

No way to get in and retrieve the % of a coin that I bought a couple years ago. Quite a bit of a scam to accept money for storage, lock a user out, and then provide no support for getting back in while still taking on new customers.
There are probably plenty of places it's useful that I've just never been exposed to, but I bet for every one of those, there's two or more others using it who don't need it, but only because they were sold it by management consultants at a lean management training course or something like that.
At this point Strava should pull all of its public data. All of these location based services are wide open to attack, correlating across pairs of them, scary.
> It seems strange to me to have this enforcement of policies from countries that are not my own just because my website is accessible from those countries.

If you open shop in a different country, you follow their laws. Your website being accessible in a country is seen as the same thing. It's not hard to implement geo blocking if you want to show best effort and thereby opt out of it.
Please don't post shallow dismissals of other people's work. That's emblematic of what we don't want here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Being from Europe, this article was rather confusing to read, because it named a number of soda brands that I was sure belonged to The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo. So I looked Dr Pepper Snapple up on Wikipedia:

- The rights to Dr Pepper are owned by them in the U.S., but by The Coca-Cola Company mostly everywhere else.

- The rights to 7 Up (or 7up) are owned by them in the U.S., but by PepsiCo everywhere else.

- The only brand I see on their Wikipedia page that I know and that they also own in Europe appears to be Schweppes.
lol, Canada. I've always seen them, but they just look gross peel on or off. Little did I know, they're delicious.
Assuming the drone is only planting one tree at a time...
There's a site guideline specifically against this kind of comment. Could you please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow them?
Apple adding Service Worker support on iOS
Does this mean we will be able to do Web Push and notifications??
Please don't post ideological rants or personal attacks to Hacker News, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.

Also, could you please take the following guideline to heart in the future? "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." Not doing so leads to the bottom of the barrel, and we're trying to do a bit better than that here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
C# and for web applications, there's ASP.NET (Core or ASP.NET MVC 4/5)

* Visual Studio for debugging
* Unit Testing Tools
* Package manager (Nuget, NPM integrated for front-end if your doing client-side development as well)
A lot of the GDPR's provisions are admirable, and fundamentally good for citizens. I'd like (some) similar rules in my country.

I just wish they'd drop the absurd pretense that the EU is somehow capable of imposing their provincial laws on foreign companies with no physical presence in the EU.
Sure, but one is not selecting each single feature individually.

It would be an endless effort to modularize everything down to that level, and probably not many devs would take advantage of it, thus being a waste of money.

So the installation options are just tailored down to getting everything for a specific target system.
How to develop decentralized application clone for Instagram?
> ""Simpler" from the user's perspective does require additional complexity under the hood."

No, it doesn't, or at least it doesn't if you write the application in a language that is expressive enough to cater for the edge cases without bloating the code base.

Consider a language like Red, which allows you to write GUI applications in a few lines of code. Must be a large runtime behind the scenes enabling this, right? It's clear that this is not the case as the runtime, compiler and libraries fit within 2MB. How is it possible for Red to achieve so much with so little? I'll leave that for you to discover for yourself.
If you haven't read this masterpiece yet, I strongly recommend that you do. An adventure if there ever was one, and possibly the classic of revenge. The prison bit is particularly memorable. Who cares if Dumas didn't write the whole thing.
I sometimes wonder if this is actually damaging to American infrastructure in the same way that tariffs on RAM were to the US computing industry back in the day. The problem with RAM was that the cost of manufacturing required huge amounts of capital -- capital that was not forthcoming because the Japanese had already sewn up the market. I see a parallel here with solar panels and the Chinese. As solar becomes more popular (and it will), the capital cost required to stay competitive in the market will rise. Is there any US money available? If not, then you are simply making solar power more expensive -- and probably ultimately hurting your other manufacturing industries by taking away a future power source.

The one place I see the US having a lot of standing is in batteries. If I was planning strategy for the US, I would go "all in" with that. You already have a few capital rich players who are willing to invest in the technology. It is likely that batteries will be necessary in the mid term (though, I'm not certain how feasible chemical batteries will end up being long term). If the US decides to own that area, they can be competitive. If they decide to wait, then I suspect it will be too late (because it will become too capital intensive and too risky to go up against the established players).

Long story short: History will repeat itself and the US needs to be careful not to arrogantly ignore opportunities assuming that they can walk in and take over later.
Did your customers consent to what is effectively someone following them round the store with a clipboard?
Uh? This is already how the world works. It does not matter where you are located as long are you are transacting with EU citizens.

In extreme cases of non-compliance, avenues for enforcement that have been discussed reuse existing Anti Money Laundering mechanisms: once flagged in the system, banks will simply freeze your business assets connected to EU countries and you might be arrested upon crossing any EU border.