skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've definitely seen the pattern you describe many times.

The couple that manages this best is one where Sun--Wed is single friends time and Thurs--Sat is couples friends time. Probably not for everyone but this seems to work remarkably well for them.

Kids would probably change things though.
As one who can hear these sounds, I can attest to how maddening it is. It's even worse when (most of) the people around you can't hear it, and they don't believe you.

Earplugs only make it worse, because they filter out ambient noise that otherwise helps distract you from the incessant hum. Daytime is not as bad as night because of the natural activity sounds of a city.

I have read that waves and underwater currents hitting the shore (or below the shore) can cause vibrations that will translate through the earth. That could be a cause of such sounds in some parts of the world.

When I lived in the mountains of Colorado, with few people around and no industrial equipment anywhere, this hum would come and go and drive me nuts at night. I finally came to the theory that it was certain wind conditions going over the mountain ridge (across the valley), creating a pressure differential on the other side of the ridge. After the differential would reach a certain threshold, the air pattern would break up and create a pooof. This is sort of like if you are sitting in front of a campfire and the flame is going mostly on just one side of a log, but every second or so it breaks around both sides. The sound is identical, but singular. Although if it happens at a fast enough rhythm, it becomes a frequency that sounds very similar to a "hum". Of course the fire burns the wood and the conditions that make that happen change soon.

I have wondered what kind of measurement equipment it would take to try to identify the source... triangulate it somehow. I really wish I knew the definitive answers to some of these hums.
I lived through this when i went to the University of Windsor, it's hard to describe to people it doesn't bother. The hum would keep me up and my girlfriend at the time almost never noticed. It was like being at a loud concert where you can feel the vibrations in your chest.
Flagging this, I don't think HN should be used to link to copyrighted books.
To me, this is like pointing out that car ownership is a lousy investment: it may be true, but it seems beside the point. If I want to have a car that I'm planning to hang onto for a long time, and which I can do whatever I want with, I want to buy a car instead of leasing it. Sure, I won't make money that way, and I might even come out ahead financially if I were to lease, but then it isn't my car, it belongs to someone else, and there are going to be a bunch of rules associated with that. To me, owning a house is the same thing, but with the added bonus that there is actually a chance of making some money. But that's purely a bonus; comparing it with buying stocks or bonds seems ...odd to me.
Ask HN: What is your technical documentation strategy?
So I am looking at a reset for our documentation portal and I am curious on to what others are using for documentation.

Mainly, my questions are:
1. What tools do you use for internal technical documentation?

2. What tools do you use for external technical documentation?

3. What kind of documentation review process do you follow?

4. What format does engineers prefer for writing the content that they actually hate writing?
There's a book written about this entire subject which just came out late last year: The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History.

It was well written and very interesting if folks are more interested in the folks involved and how all of this went down and their personalities etc.

https://amzn.com/0062452983
I wonder how much the current concept of a "friend" is the by product of 20th century media. Much like adolescence was not what we know it as before mid-20th century, I can't help but feel that the role of friend (especially adult friend) was largely shaped by sitcoms. I think the expectation that you would have adult friends ala Friends (the show) is largely manufactured and giving people false expectations.
Counter argument http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/...

"Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It's one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men's shirt buttons on the right and women's on the left. Every major style guide—including the Modern Language Association Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of Style—prescribes a single space after a period."
yet another Thing That We All Must Do in this endless technological death march called progress.

I get sick of companies claiming that whatever stupid remix of existing techniques (wow, page prerendering! I had an app like that for my dial-up modem...) is worthy of the kind of "innovation" that we the people love so, and all the extra work, secondary, and tertiary effects that it entails.

An entire generation grows up in the bazaar, and ends up running for the cathedrals sigh
I don't think that Windsor was compiled with the debug flags turned on.
Ah, the future... Where all cars are Indian taxis which take you round the back streets to their brother's carpet shop.
Another known case of this is the Bristol Hum: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35344544
There's an interesting way of looking at this, which is that a prime is a number, p, such that when p divides into a product, it divides into one of the factors of the product.

Then 1 divides into the empty product, but not into any of its factors.
I'm still not sold personally—it seems like the in-memory persistence is only useful for the intermediate case where my data is slow enough to generate/obtain that I don't want to run the code every time to do so, but fast enough that I don't mind running it every time I launch the editor. Most of the data I have that's worth caching due to speed is worth caching to disk. Combined with unpredictable side effects of variables persisting whilst I'm actively hacking on the code and implicit in-memory persistence is pretty off-putting.

A recent workflow I've had for a data analysis project is to have each stage of data processing in a separate function, with all the functions called in order from an " if __name__ == '__main__'" block, with all but the function I'm presently working on commented out. Each function returns nothing, but saves its data to an HDF5 file. Other functions read the inputs they need from the HDF5 file and write their outputs to the same file, and if I want a fresh run I just delete the file, uncomment everything in the '__main__' block and run again.

The functions also save output plots to subfolders.

This is compatible with version control, and caching on disk rather than just in memory.

The biggest downside compared to Jupyter notebooks is lack of interactivity in the saved plots (I can make interactive plots pop up of course but they're all in separate windows all at once so it's less clear which part of the code each plot came from), and lack of LaTeX in code comments - I still will have external LaTeX documents explaining what algorithm I'm using somewhere.

So for now, the downsides of notebooks with respect to version control, data caching and extra state that I have to remember in order to not hit subtle bugs in my code as I hack on it, seem to outweigh the upsides.

Maybe what I would like is an editor that renders LaTeX in comments, and which embeds arbitrary plot windows at given points in the code, but without any data persistence, and without the embedded plots actually being saved anywhere - your file is still a normal Python file and it's just the editor rendering things that way based on magic comments or something.

Or maybe I should just write a decorator that renders a function's docstring as LaTeX and embeds any matplotlib windows produced into one scrolling document with the sections named after the decorated functions. Decorator could take an argument telling it whether to include the full source of the function, the comments of which it could also render as LaTeX. Then you have input code compatible with your favourite text editor and version control, and an output document which optionally includes the code.
Creating and Publishing Web Components with Stencil
It’s funny in life that a person who may not be able to that type raise again doesn’t need to do one (ie. has enough money to never work again)
They have it narrowed down to a few thousand feet. To call it "unknown" is just unfair. They might not know which steel plant is producing it, but they can narrow it down to a small handful, far from "unknown". They have enough evidence of which company is producing the sound (United States Steel), so the only thing stopping them from getting police or lawmakers involved is the fact that no one on the US side cares enough. The article could have mentioned this caveat, but after the couple sentences about the likely cause, it's followed by more "It’s like chasing a ghost" rhetoric.
Is it possible that what people are hearing is a resonant frequency from the low-frequency vibrations?

It could even be causing the bones in their heads to resonate, like how those kids toothbrushes that make you hear music[1] work.

That would explain the difficulty in locating the source.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tooth_Tunes
This is only effective if the microphone and speakers (inverse wave) are where you are... such as on your head. And it depends on the microphone's ability to detect VLF. Even then, the speakers probably don't do well generating 20Hz or lower.

To make it even more challenging, because this is a subtle sensitivity issue, and because most of us don't have identical hearing in both ears, you can't just pipe in the same volume of inverse wave to both ears. It's a really hard problem to solve.

Plus it's not very comfortable trying to sleep with big headphones on; and nighttime is the worst time for this problem.
Wow, you know that certainly made ME think and also made me flash back to the face my wife pulled when I remarked how my lack of friends doesn't bother me.

Perhaps it should.

I'm an immigrant too, although no language issues, so I have lots of friends in my home country and not many here, a lot of those were expats or work connected and the rest are via my wife and her work - she didn't grow up around here either but is American.

I'd hate to go down that road you talked about and I've seen people do so. We've not been able to have kids either so don't have that path of getting out of our bubble.

Food for thought indeed.
I’ve always rendered that PKD quote as:

Reality is that which, when ‘I’ stop believing in it, ‘refuses’ to go away.

Much better.
Well there's the start [value^=a], the end [value$=a] and the "anywhere" [value*=a] selectors.

In something like 13000 selectors you could easily get the first 2, last 2, and any characters in the middle that are in the password making targeted attacks significantly easier. (This is based on very-very rough napkin math assuming an ~80 character dictionary for upper/lower, numbers, and "symbols" since I didn't want to count)

That's a lot, but it's well within the realm of possibility (it looks like that would end up as about a 1mb css file)
What do you mean by "typically" easier to absorb?

Do you have any scientific research to back up that claim?
Yeah, I don't think this is exactly rocket science. I'm a pretty introverted and socially anxious person normally (so I don't like hanging out at random parties or talking to complete strangers or whatever) but I've made quite a lot of new friends consistently year over year. All it takes is putting in a bit of effort to do it. Engage in a few activities now and then, keep in touch with people, organize a thing once in a while. It turns out you can make lots of friends via friends of friends, coworkers, people you meet through various activities, etc.

If you put no effort into it of course nobody is just going to randomly insert themselves into your life. And as you get older you don't have those common experiences of intermingling with lots of other people of similar ages or demographic backgrounds due to school, growing up, and so on. So put a little effort into it.
True which is why one of the more mature (timeline) SaaS companies, Dropbox, decided to in-house their infrastructure to bring costs down. While this was a massive undertaking that took many years, they were able to achieve it and are reporting various levels of profitability (free cash flow). Also if you dig in further to most SaaS companies P&L you'll see that infrastructure by and large isn't the biggest driver of losses, but sales & marketing is.

Personally I think companies still continue to overspend in sales in marketing and with SaaS they use a blended average of CAC which includes their organically acquired customers so that the blended CAC looks extremely low. But the reality is you are paying 10x more for "paid" customers than organic and adding an only incremental amount of growth (5-10%). I think that's where the real profitability of SaaS companies lies.
Yeah that sounds reasonable. I think you're totally right honestly. I think the hardest part of the problem is that everyone's talking in circles rather than getting to the root of the problem. "Tax the rich" is a vague and easy talking point, but it doesn't get at the true nature of things. What amount of wealth is rich? How did they earn it? How are they currently taxed? etc.

From my experience, it feels like there are so many pitfalls and financial traps designed to catch people moving from the middle class on up. Once you make it to 10 Million +, you can coast from there with no financial burdens, but until then there is always something to get you.
Your 300% return sadly doesn’t include the cost of renting.
If buying SPX would give me free housing I would be the first buyer, believe me.
But unless you are born very, very, privileged you need to buy an house or to pay a rental, unless you want to live with your parents, and your wife is happy to do so.
For me, as I repeat, it was a no-brainer.
If you want to live for the foreseeable future with your parents then obviously better to put money on some index rather than buying an house.
If you have a family I’m really not sure that it would be better even in Phoenix or in Castrovillari or wherever in the world you want.
Interesting perspective. For some it's a lot of effort to maintain social relationships and life is so busy, free time is precious and spent relaxing.
Here it is for one of the most often used functions:

https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/ggplot2/versions/2.2...

You think this is better than barely readable?
Maybe you heard ventilation. It matters where it's pointed and what's in the way more than how close it is.
I would love to hear how this happened.
I'm 42, and I wish someone told me in my 20's it would be harder to make new friends as I got older. I would have done things differently. I would have put more effort into making friends then.

I am able to make new friends, but they end up being more like acquaintances most of the time. Currently I am in grad school, and that's working out well for me. There's something about the shared camaraderie and shared suffering from the workload that builds real friendships.
I moved country when I was 21 for my first job, it was a complete culture shock to me and I didn't know anybody.

It is really hard to make friends even when you are young.
Living in shared apartment, playing sport you love, going for dance classes, etc. These activities definitely helps. It took me 1 year to finally crack the code.
And that's less than the return of the s&p in the same period (~880k).
It is frustrating, but we have to accept that a phone is not a security device.
Incognito holds onto cookies too (in a separate instance of course). Did you find a way to conveniently overcome that without causing the NYTimes not to work?
>pathetically ignorant

Read The Inmates are Running the Asylum, and you might understand that better. It helped me to see how pathetically unhelpful and badly designed interfaces are everywhere, something I accepted and took for granted before.

A couple of metaphors he uses, there or in About Face: Programmers are like those into extreme sports, revelling in the difficulties of working with computers, but most people aren't like that. When they board an aeroplane, they want to sit down and get where they're going without concerning themselves with the details. Programmers head for the cockpit.
In real VLF cases, earplugs make it worse because they block out all the other ambient noise, causing the hum to sound relatively louder.
I'm glad it made someone think :)

This is one of my fastest upvoted comments ever. I think it struck a chord. There's no way of knowing whether it was men or women upvoting, but I have a feeling I'm not the only who has had these thoughts.
> Why suffer through something so trivially fixable?

Because, in all likelyhood, they're not suffering at all.

People vary greatly in what causes them discomfort. I imagine the population that doesn't attend to chirping smoke detectors has a strong selection bias for not suffering due to it.

I don't mind carrying reasonably heavy things for miles on foot. I remember one weekend where I had some time to spare and needed to buy a chair, so I jogged about 3 miles to a strip mall, and carried the (boxed) chair back home.

Enough people negatively comment about the weight of laptops that I believe that it matters to some people, but I honestly won't care if my mbp weighed 2 or 3 times as much as it does. I can't understand how laptop weight bothers people without some medical condition, but I also believe them when they say that heavy laptops cause them discomfort.

In retrospect, growing up canoeing for a week every Summer on the Canadian border probably has something to do with it. By the time I was 16, for the longer portages, I'd be the one to take a lighter pack on my back and throw the canoe up on my shoulders. My dad and my brother would carry the heavier packs. Learning to tune out the discomfort of walking up to a bit over a mile over uneven ground through mosquito-infested woods with a 90 lb aluminum 3-man canoe on your shoulders plus a 20 to 30 lb pack probably causes both mental and physical changes that reduce your perception of discomfort from carrying things. There's also survivorship bias, where people inclined to feel discomfort carrying heaving things for distances are likely to not return year after year to canoe areas that require portaging.

Just because you're suffering doesn't mean all people in the same situation feel any discomfort.
>This is the first time the exam was done online and was run by the international IT company Pearson Vue on behalf of the RACP.

Not surprising. I remember dreading any university course that had online "tools" run by Pearson.
I had this one co-worker call me every day.

He would just yack, and yack. Some times I would put the phone down, and come back in 5 minutes, and he would still be talking. He was eccentric, had a horrid childhood, but genuinely nice.

I thought he was nuts, but nice.

We ended up becoming best friends. They used to call us the odd couple.

I ended up trusted him more than family. We just included each other in everthing without even thinking. My girlfriends were put off by him at first, but he would wear them down talking, and before I knew it, he was calling them daily. And when he missed a day, they would ask me if he is ok. He never crossed the line either.

He died a few years ago, but his friendship technique was something I thought was brilliant. Just wear the person down.

I can pass this along, I once heard a therapist say something like, make friends with people your own age, or younger. Her rationale was they will die before you.

When I was in my tewenties, I just didn't have much in common with my peers. I wasen't more mature, but didn't like my generation that much. My friends were just older. I really loved all of them.

If I had a do-over, I might have really tried to make friends with people my own age. I'm all alone now. It does suck.

Anyways, my eccentric friend knew how to make friends. I haven't tried his technique, but might?
I was also thinking along those lines, a way to LINT/validate form fields when JS is disabled, but seems like a very obscure and inefficient (use html5 validation + js, validate server side on submit)
Don't understand why this has been downvoted. The research behind helmets is exactly why in The Netherlands helmets aren't mandatory. For one, they reduce the amount of people who cycle. Thus they take a car with higher speed, etc. Secondly, wearing a helmet causes cars to be less risk adverse when interacting with you. Lastly, most helmets are utter crap. They tested various and the majority sold in shops are of very poor quality (don't help at all).

Strangely, in Denmark most cyclists do wear a helmet. To me it's very inconvenient. E.g. where to store the damn thing when going anywhere?
AMD Is Giving Free Processors to Users Facing Firmware Issues–How to Get Yours
It's still important for home buyers. If you go in knowing you probably won't make money on the car or house, you won't buy more than you need (unless you really want to). And maybe invest the rest?
Seattle might be due for a correction in the near future, but if you bought several years ago, it would be hard to not make money in real estate right now in Seattle. Did you see where average prices on Capitol Hill are now > $1MM? Ballard / Phinney Ridge everything is > $800K. Unless there are extenuating circumstances, you should be more than fine should you choose to sell.

To me the interesting question is, does one believe this growth will continue for several more years? IE: should one buy a (overpriced?) property today in one of these popular residential neighborhoods? Or, is one better off looking farther afield assuming that less desirable neighborhoods are going to eventually become desirable as most of us are priced out of places like Fremont or Ballard? In other words, are we at the top of market already?
Could it be an aeolian sound?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolian_sound
Essential a giant flute played by the wind.

I'm looking to make one of these out of bamboo.
Perhaps a car’s main benefit is the utility to make money in that it can transport you to work, sales, meetings.
Ah ok, I didn’t know.
Thanks, this explains a lot of things.
I don’t think he ever had to pay for his house if these are his ideas..
If that were the case, you would think that seismologists would already have answered this.
I think you need a noun to go with that adjective.
Now I am deeply curious! I’m a Detroiter and Zug Island is a quick drive south. Is it audible from the US side? I have a passport, but “I want to hear the Windsor hum” might not, unfortunately, fly at the border anymore.
I am going to ask a very dumb question, but if I am not an exploratory data scientist, what and how do i use jupyter/ipython for? I keep meaning to try it out but never quite got round to anything but toy stuff.

how does it fit into a developer workflow, or do i need a different mindset?

what should I try to do with this beta to get my mind right is probably the best question
douchiest comment I've ever read on HN

(note that at the time I made this comment, the parent had positive karma)
This is lousy calculation by armchair pundit. The main thing missing is all the rents you would have paid if you didn't owned the house. So if you have two scenarios, one where you just rented an apartment with ever increasing rents and other where you had a fixed mortgage for 30-year - you would most likely win by wide margin in 2nd scenario.