skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Plasma TVs do it to me also. It used to drive me nuts to go into a Best Buy and look at a wall of plasma TVs.

Looking up the retina displays, I see they are either IPS or OLED. The IPS likely has an LED backlight, and OLED is...LED. So a flicker is possible if they used PWM to limit the current to the LEDs.

Did you notice any change in the effect at different brightness levels?
The one thing I don't understand about Venmo is that it, based on my (limited) use, seems to show transactions amongst users in a "social networking" manner. I believe you are able to make your activity private, but why would anyone want it any other way? Am I the only one who thinks this is absolutely absurd? I am a very happy user of Square Cash as a result.
As somebody who literally lives in Boise I think my city is a shining example of poor urban planning, our public transit system is ill equipped to properly service our population which is spread out far too thin making it economically challenging to do so; at the same time we live in a fish bowl of a valley and nasty inversions are becoming more frequent as more cars get on the road every year due to our growing population.

I hope other municipalities learn from our mistakes before it becomes too late, I’m planning on leaving the area after living here almost my entire life because it’s unsustainable.
the purpose of a library is to indefinitely store important information for easy public access and cull the fat. They are curators and information stores.

The need for curation has only increased in the information overload stage and libraries are still desperately needed. Libraries need to operate more like the internet archive.
Penn State had a national scandal involving its extracurriculars just a few years ago, so the level of scrutiny there might be higher.
Forget XML. You can argue that JSON is better because it’s simpler, and while I’m conflicted, I know I enjoy working with JSON more.

The real question is: with the benefit of hindsight, could you define a better but similarly simple format?

Would an alternative to JSON that specified the supported numeric ranges be less simple? Not really. Would it be better? Yes. The current fact that you can try to represent integers bigger than 2^53, but they lose data, makes no sense except in light of the fact that JSON was defined to work with the quirks of JavaScript.

It's true that different tools are adapted for different uses. But sometimes one tool could have been better without giving up any of what made it useful for its niche.
> potentially leading to their bankruptcy

Whoa, you have to go bankrupt to stop paying a mortgage in Canada? In the US, these are (in my experience) secured, non-recourse loans. That means that the bank's final option is to take the house, but if they do that, you owe them nothing else.
Correction: 4.5 hours, not 2.5 hours.
I actually rate Solaris last among the Lem works I've read. Below things like Hospital of the Transfiguration, which are pretty far off the beaten track for Lem. I actually stayed away from Lem for years because the (2002) Solaris movie made me think he's just waffling and hasn't any SF ideas worth looking at. Hardly could have been more misleading.

A Perfect Vacuum is I think the pinnacle of Lem's achievement. Why write a book and leave others to criticise what you did, when you can imagine the finished book and write a critique of _that_ yourself? Imaginary Magnitude is a similar idea, and I like that too, but I think Vacuum ends up the cleverer of the two even though Golem XIV (from Magnitude) is better than most Singularitarian fiction you'll see today.
This is excellent analysis. Every one of the bullet points is correct, and you've picked one to debate (and misinterpreted the argument): relative to virtually every other investment you can make, homes are heavily taxed. Arguing that you can (possibly) deduct some of those taxes misses the point. I don't have to pay my state and local governments annual taxes on the stocks and bonds that I own.

On average, homes in the US appreciate at about the rate of inflation, and the choice to rent vs. buy is favorable in some markets, unfavorable in many others. It's nowhere near as clear-cut as the comments in this thread would lead you to believe.
not just information, but useful information. libraries have an important curation role as well, in addition to storage. We cant let the internet archive be the only modern day library.
It could also be argued that comment quality could be improved by allowing people to delete comments at any time, not just for 2 hours after creation of that comment.

People should be allowed to look back on a discussion and say "hmmm.... seems an ill considered and negative comment, I'm going to delete it".

As it stands, an ill considered comment is set in stone after 2 hours.
It's the most natural expectation. If it's only going to check status code, Response.status_code.ok would be more reasonable.

Except that the status line is literally "HTTP 200 OK", and the 'ok' check is simply using the domain terminology. This is not a bad thing. And having 'request.ok' be a general "I have examined every possible aspect of this response for problems and found none" is probably impossible, despite being what you apparently expect.

The solution is not to rename the method, it's to also warn or error when there's something fishy in the response. Which is apparently what requests 3.x will do.

There's also the issue that the Content-Length header, while generally well-adopted, is optional (sending either Content-Length or Transfer-Encoding is a SHOULD in RFC 7230, not a MUST), and sending an incorrect Content-Length, while annoying, is not actually against the RFC (the only MUST NOT prohibitions on an incorrect Content-Length value in the response are when the request was a HEAD or a conditional GET).
Most of this drama is stirred up by just two people.
I think what Eelo is trying to achieve is interesting. They forked LineageOS, but they understood that nowadays a smartphone is not that smart without services (email, map, contact/cal sync, etc), so they plan to develop their own services that respect privacy.

Now, will these services be on par with Google's? Of course not, but if they're good enough, it could be a game changer.
My understanding is that Uglify is just a JS to JS transform, and there isn't a way for Reason to supply type information. At least, I don't see anything about it in the README: https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS

Also note that, at least with Flow and TypeScript, type information isn't guaranteed to be correct, so it's a bit dangerous to do type-based optimizations (although tools certainly could try, with the caveat that if your types are wrong, your code may break even more than it otherwise would).
Class and income are related but distinct. People with advanced degrees and high-autonomy white collar jobs ("upper middle class") are a distinct sociological cohort from people in the trades.

You may think this is bullshit, but class has some decent explanatory power for otherwise-puzzling observations, like how the children of the first cohort defy their own economic incentives to avoid the behaviors of the second.

It offends modern liberal sensibilities to treat class hierarchy as normative ("classism"), but most acknowledge its existence and utility as a descriptive concept, one which is a lot more nuanced than bands on the income spectrum.
Blockchains can reduce counterparty risk in a transaction, but there's no technical solution to the fact that trust is required between, for example, a lender and a borrower. The idea that you can just sprinkle some blockchain dust and avoid financial crises is naive.
you should be linking to the video!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ
Banks’ answer to Venmo proves vulnerable to fraud
Pedro essentially highlights the fact that different cultures are taking different political, academic and commercial approaches to the space.

I found some of his comments insightful: If you think about it, democracy is still in the 19th century. Your communication with your representatives and ministers amounts to a few bits per year. It's ridiculous. and Just like Americans believe in lawyers, the Chinese believe in engineers. However, I resent the needlessly antagonistic us-and-them closing paragraph, which is not constructive. In Buddhism it is said that "right speech" unites people instead of dividing them, and the conclusion to the "scary technology" article transfers the scary to China and is fundamentally divisive.

Back in the real world, as a nominal German starting an AI-backed startup in China, I also found it refreshing and healthy that he can directly criticize Germany for its cultural conservatism in a widely read German publication. We don't see much of that in Australia, New Zealand or China, all of whom, I would argue, consider themselves as a culture significantly less homogenous and conservative than they really are.

Perhaps the world is a far more nuanced place than any of its commentators can fathom, or to quote another German - Einstein (speaking perhaps prophetically for 20th century humanity on the cusp of the self-styled information era): The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
Uh, helicopter parenting is "simple risk management".
Also, not having the certificate can make it more likely the app will continue to work in future. Apple had an incident where App Store apps stopped working when the App Store certificate was replaced. I lost a few apps that I'd purchased that way (though some developers graciously gave me a non App Store version to work around it):

https://techcrunch.com/2015/11/12/all-mac-store-apps-stopped...
This was essentially what Cyanogen was doing before they went bust (in cooperation with microsoft).

Providing a "good enough" service in a sustainable way is very, very difficult. Maybe you can make the service happen, but services require a continuing revenue stream, and that is hard. Especially when you don't own the platform, you don't own the hardware, and your only selling point is that you'll promise to ignore the biggest potential revenue source.
I've seen others do similar things (including beginners I was trying to teach), although in languages like C/C++, and I do not think it is a good idea at all. It leads to "tunnel vision" and concentrating on small pieces at a time while ignoring the "big picture" as well as mindless fiddling with code in an attempt to "get it to work", which pretty much leads to worse code quality overall and a decrease in productivity. I suppose it may feel productive to be making lots of small changes and seeing the results immediately, and somewhat addictive too, but my experience says that it's not. I recall helping a coworker who had spent several hours messing around with a small fragment of code that he was sure was causing a bug; he had made lots of little changes and yet the problem remained, but was reluctant to look somewhere else because he was almost addicted to that allure of "just one more little change... hope this fixes it...!" I told him to stop doing that and think more about the data coming into that piece of code and going out, which it turns out in its original unmodified form was perfectly fine --- the problem was actually somewhere else, and later was fixed in a few minutes after he made that realisation. If I hadn't intervened I would not be surprised if he spent another few days of fruitless labour.

The other thing that this sort of interactivity/short-edit-continue-cycling is heavily promoted for is learning, which IMHO is probably the worst way to do it; it's essentially encouraging programmers to write code without actually understanding what they're writing, and when it doesn't work, to try random things until it does. That's no way to write good software.

It's better to spend more time thinking about the problem, writing, and then proofreading code before even trying to compile and run it, than try to write something you vaguely think may work and then spend much more time debugging and "fixing" it. Those from the latter school of thought are often surprised when they see me write several hundred lines of code and it works perfectly the first time. To me, it's the other way around... seeing those who can't write more than a few words without making blatant syntax or logic errors.

In other words, "reducing the cost of mistakes" may only encourage making them; and in any case, does not discourage it.
Containerization and spot instances.
His Master's Voice is the most philosophically rigorous and profound piece of Sci-Fi I've read. Yes, it's hard to get through. It doesn't really have a plot. But wow, Lem really thought through the difficulties and implications of the scenario, and the science in the fiction is either intelligent and plausible or simply correct. And to top it all off, he appreciates how much the socio-political dimension of science impact the trajectory of the project, and explains the dynamics of that side of it really well.
A site which misquotes people seems like a really bad source for a bunch of quotes.
To clarify, Tito is event management software which the parent commenter used to organize the Longhorn PHP event. I thought this was some random spam before clicking through the links.
This is not just an oversimplification, it is also incorrect. Military installations are put in rural areas because nobody wants artillery practice to happen near their houses. That money comes from the DoD, not generally classed as 'infrastructure spending.'

Futhermore, all interstate freeways are built with federal investment, and HUD is heavily involved in funding development of low-income housing nationwide -- this is also subject to staggering amounts of NIMBYism. Mass transit is even worse -- there are major American cities who want to build, and have lined up federal funding, only to be blocked by state government intervention on behalf of more NIMBY. Baltimore's Red Line is the most recent example of this that springs to mind.

So yes, this is very much a problem for city and state politics to solve -- the federal government can't invest without their cooperation.

As for comparisons to Asian cities, I can only thank God that we don't handle our development that way here. Our rural residents have enough problems without repeating the mistakes of India here.
I've known a few people who accidentally stopped an automotive production line. The plant manager will be there in minutes to see why the F$%* production is falling short to the tune of 5 figures per minute.

When I was younger I had a less severe but equally enlightening experience. A transmission case line with 24 CNC stations had our UI software running on PCs to make them easier to use. They could run fine without the fancy UI but it was how the operators had come to run things. I went in one afternoon to load a software update from floppy disk. The plant manager came out. "What are you doing?" "I'm updating this UI software." "You work for $company?" "Yes." "Is there gonna be a $company guy on site for 3rd shift tonight if something goes wrong with that software?" "No." "You aren't gonna update it then." I went home.

Go fast and break things doesn't work in that environment, and yes the critical processes work far more than 99% of the time because as you say there wouldn't be much output. It sounds like that's the exact lesson Tesla is learning now.

[edit] the reason all the processes on the line have to work is because it's basically impossible to store a bunch of cars (or doors or engines) anywhere until things get fixed. Ad-hoc fixes are just not feasible at that scale.
> Programming in the debugger is a massively overlooked paradigm.

I wonder if the tool I mentioned in [1] facilitates the workflow you have in mind? It promotes a workflow of setting a breakpoint at the beginning of a function, attach a jupyter notebook to it, dump your code into a jupyter notebook, edit the code in there, and then paste the result back into the code buffer (once you've verified everything checks out locally).

One reason I suspect the debugger is not seen as part of the software engineering process (i.e. to extend or modify code) is because of the editing capabilities within a debugger CLI are usually very primitive. At least with pynt, the "debugger" (i.e. the jupyter notebook) is still in emacs so you can leverage all the strengths of your editor while doing interactive programming.

> let alone making programmability more important than interactivity, something I believe in

Can you elaborate on what you mean here? Maybe give an example of a programmable gdb feature that you think would be useful?

- [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16899023
I recently sold and bought a house, and as far as I know I paid no taxes on it, and I am still deducting mortgage payments. I could pay off my mortgage tomorrow (it's Sunday here, so I'd have to wait for my bank to open) but my accountant tells me that's a horrible idea.
We shouldn't need incremental builds to be fast. Incremental builds have their own problems, which I'd rather avoid if at all possible. (They're more complex and leave more room for error than rebuilding everything every time.)

I want to compile 100K lines of code or more in less than one second. Compared to that, C++ is slow as molasses.
Why is it your business what a college decides to make their culture? Isn't it your choice to go to that college or not? Where is the libertarian logic for imposing your own beliefs on others?
Your claim about fluorine being essential for organophosphate nerve agents is incorrect. The original nerve agent, tabun, contains no fluorine at all for example. Neither do VX, parathion, or paraoxon.

Sarin does, and the article is talking about sarin. Either way I’m sure you’d agree that isopropanol isn’t a precursor to sarin, yes? You’d also probably admit that you’re not getting methylphosphonyldifluoride from fucking toothpaste. Lecture about the mechanisms of organophosphates on AChE aside.
Stores that rent formal wear for weddings and similar events are clothing libraries of a sort, although you pay the "library" directly instead of through your taxes.
Even in Tokyo, much of the place is single family homes or mid rise apartment and condo complexes. There are a number of huge skyscrapers here and there, but they are not as densely packed as manhattans.
Coraline Ada Ehmke.
How long did you hold it? Where was the home located?
It was not that there was one or few employers. There were many companies, large and small, operating in Calgary, Edmonton, and the rest of Alberta. The problem was that the lion's share of the economy was directly or indirectly related to a single industry: oil and gas. When the price of oil went down, they all suffered.

I think the majority opinion on HN is that unlike other industries like energy, auto manufacturing, agriculture, etc., tech is uniquely immune to downturns. My impression is that most people on HN believe that the tech scene in California is only ever going to get bigger and more lucrative, and with it property prices are always going to go up. Even suggesting that tech and SF bay area might end up like, say Detroit and auto manufacturing industry, would make many to dismiss your point entirely. But as an outsider who does not have a horse in this race, I don't share the same mindset. Only time will tell the truth. But I won't be surprised if the sustained tech boom goes bust at some point during the next half century.
But wouldn't saving an hour of time for $5 be a good deal?
Using ECMP to Access Kubernetes Services
Παιχνίδια με μικρή βαθμολογική σημασία
I think this is country specific. Whatsapp is used heavily in Europe and parts of Asia.

If I didn't have friends in other countries I'd just be using Facebook Messenger and iMessage as well. In the US it's predominantly Facebook Messenger.
Generating “A Bird in Flight” mathematically
What's the deal with you Americans and your magic numbers?

So you have your Social Security Number that you can't give for fear of someone impersonating you, your Credit Card Number you cannot give for someone might steal from you and now you tell me you can't even give your bank account number.

So you have all theses numbers you have to keep secret because they are the gateway to someone ruining your life, yet you still have to communicate them routinely to a number of institutions in order to function in society. Isn't that a bit crazy?
You know what's worse than homes when it comes to investments? Kids! They don't give you any return on investment at all until possibly late in life, depending on your culture and relationship (better hope they stay near you) and they make you a lot less mobile, both in terms of geography and career opportunities. They suck up a lot of your income and they probably shorten your life span due to lost sleep in the early years.

Stay away!
Not sure how many people are aware that Kubernetes nodes accept traffic to ClusterIPs at the node level. This gives us a way to utilize the built-in services primitive to do load balancing, instead of relying on external load balancers.
Saudi man stabs three daughters
I sold my primary residence after buying a new primary residence. California.

Homes are heavily taxes if you don't live in them, to the above poster's point.
> Is Manhattan considered a mistake

It's not so much a 'mistake' as it is an instant feeling of "no living thing could ever afford Manhattan". It's like a physical manifestation of the saying, "no one ever goes there anymore, it's too crowded".

> (Manhattan is) one of the most desirable residences and tourist destinations in the world, everyone is deathly allergic to even the slightest hint that someone might want to replicate it elsewhere.

Sure, absolutely. And Lamborghinis are some of the most desirable cars in the world. But if you told everyone in Milwaukee that all other cars were being destroyed ('upzoned' into Lambos) and all Milwaukee citizens would be forced to buy a Lambo or never drive in Milwaukee again -- residents would be freaking out in a similar way.

Personally, I actually like high-rises. I like the look, I like the use of space, and I like the lifestyle. But even as a person with a decent tech income, I could never afford to live in one (in any city, anywhere in the US). And I would be terrified if my city became even 10% more similar to Manhattan, because people already struggle to afford living here as it is.

Try telling families that can't afford $200k-$300k houses that their city should "be like Manhattan" and they hear "you should be paying 1 million to 4 million dollars for a 3 bed apartment, just like Manhattan".
A common story in manufacturing is an anti-union story: labour pricing itself above what capital wants to spend. And a common sub-story in this story, is trying to use automation as a big cudgel to beat labour, especially organized labour with.

And, Elon Musk is said (by unionists) to be pretty anti union. Silicon Valley is said to be pretty anti-union. New capital, the Ayn Randeans, they're pretty anti-union.

So, I suspect there is another side to this story: If you want to try and use robots to avoid confronting your labour issues, you need to understand the value labour brings to an endevour. There is no dumb labour, there is only expensive and cheap labour. Cheap labour is rarely worth it. Expensive labour is often necessary.

Cutting corners includes trying to avoid having to employ people.

Jeff Bizos is also very anti unions. But, he automated very slowly. I think his work floor practices in the packing mills he runs is very bad, but if we discount that, it is perhaps far more sensible: learn how to run supply chain logistics with the minimum sensible automation, then slowly increase.

I suspect had Musk swallowed his pride, and his anti union and anti labour views, and employed people, and organised labour, he might have avoided this problem. Of course, he would have walked into another problem: organised labour is not cheap.

But then, a tesla isn't cheap either.

How does he make rockets? Does he use robots, or people, or a blend of both?