skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would rather have the projects advocate IRC with some nice frontend, I get there are some benefits of slack for developers, but this is thin ice - unless the projects are prepared to pay for channels that have thousands of users.
I claimed it was ergonomic (at least more ergonomic than IRC since that was the comparison), not flawless.

And many of those ergonomic points come from features that IRC clients don't even have.
Just to be clear:

We don't need a referendum on every issue, we just need a way to

- change your representative every week or so

- override your representative's vote within a given time window
Right, it obfuscates class distinctions between those who control capital and policy versus those who just have money. I'm somewhat cynical but I think this is an intended obfuscation.

It's important for petit bourgeois and wealthy skilled workers to understand their position in the class hierarchy, but calling a class whose power is dwarfed by the capitalist class an aristocracy is fluffy rhetoric.
IF you never cut anyone's wage because there's no fair way to measure performance, then there's also no reason to give anyone a raise. But people do get raises, even when they might not deserve them. The more raises an employee has received, the more likely it is that some of them weren't justified. Without wage cuts, you end up with people who are overpaid because their productivity didn't increase with their pay, not because their productivity actually declined.
Ask HN: What is your personal/corporate Google Drive use case?
Hello,

Trying to understand my customers better since I'd like to offer a paid service based on Google Drive usage so I have a question.

So, if you please can answer some questions below, I'll be very happy.

- What is the size of your google drive storage?

- How many members use your google drive?

- What is the usual scenario of google drive usage? (I mean just to keep files in the cloud, or day to day work with upload/download/ share with clients e.g. an agency can keep design templates made for customers)

Thank you in advance.
The counterexample here would be Mastodon, which I believe now has more users than IRC and seems to be growing quite healthily. (And, AFAIK, isn't funded by any megacorps; it's actual grassroots FOSS.)

When it comes to social media software, people care about two tightly-coupled things: if the people they need to talk to can be reached with it, and if the UX is good. (People abandoned IRC because its UX, which was never good, degraded to unusability in a multi-device not-always-online embedded-media world.)

But there's nothing about federation that inherently requires bad UX. But federation generally means open-source (because there's no market pressure for interoperability), and open-source means bad UX. Mastodon owes 80% of its success to having been principally developed by somebody who knows how to make a goddamned webpage. The other 20% is that it's pretty easy to host.

I think the really interesting takeaway is that the giants only don't support interoperability because they have a monopoly on good UX. If something highly usable and open-source appeared in the chat space and started gaining serious traction, the enterprise players would have to entertain the notion of playing ball and supporting the protocol – and if one of them did it, the rest would follow.
This is an important point to stress. However the moment people want to get more complicated than bind and return while doing IO the "C" word inevitably creeps into scope.

So while you don't need to know anything about abstract algebras to do Haskell, that knowledge is lurking so close to the surface that it is really more of an issue than is generally acknowledged.
> bcrypt is constant-time, not because it truncates at 72 characters. It's constant-time, because it slurps the password and salt once into the state (initial setup)

And why do you think that initial setup is constant-time? Because it truncates at 72 characters! Otherwise it would be O(n), and so bcrypt overall would be O(n) + O(m) (if n is password length and m is cost factor).

It's quite simply impossible to have any hash function not be at least O(n) without truncation. That would imply that the data does not even need to be read to compute the hash.

Your point is still relevant in that without truncation, shacrypt would be O(n*m) and bcrypt would be O(n) + O(m), but NEITHER is O(m) without truncation. If shacrypt truncated, it would be O(m), just like bcrypt is O(m) with truncation. If both prehash instead of truncate, then both are O(n) + O(m).
I try this with beer from time to time, the hangover isn't enough to make me quit for any significant amount of time :p.
And I'd rather use Vim.
Same applies for house fans -- you want the intake fan to be slightly stronger than the exhaust fan. Else the negative pressure will draw outside air in through cracks and all the fun smells that come from those places.

(I have a combination energy recovery ventilator/HEPA filter that has has a restriction filter on its exhaust for this reason. Else it would just suck crappy air in from the basement instead of fresh air through the filter.)

If you have to choose one, choose an intake fan for this reason. Best if you can leave another window slightly ajar.
They're unsearchable (with google), require an account just to read and have no seperation of discussion besides channels. I prefer forums.
Blockchains were designed to prevent double-spending, and not to solve other problems. Most blockchain enthusiasm is misplaced.

One subjective (but powerful) reason for blockchain implementations, is that we're all human, and our egos want to avoid making someone else's database The Big Platform. Or maybe that's our rational sense (looking at GOOG/FB), we don't want our application controlled by someone else.

This article spells out a few reasons why new categories of securities make sense to implement on a blockchain:

https://hackernoon.com/the-security-token-thesis-4c590476106...

> “Do we need a blockchain for this? Couldn’t this be done with a database?” The answer is yes, some of it could be done with a centralized database, but it begs the question “why hasn’t it already been done?” The answer is that the current centralized solutions for electronic value transfer lack compatibility — they don’t talk to each other. I can’t send value from PayPal to Venmo, or from E*Trade to RealtyShares. These layers aren’t interoperable.
Stellar is this
The supreme court and the constitution would beg to differ.
They also hop because of growth stagnation. If you have young employees working on the same outdated technology every year, don't be surprised when they quickly leave, even if you have "competitive wages and benefits". A large part of an engineers' compensation is in marketable skills and experience.
Function + return seems like a good solution, but I'd rather not keep additional state or use `raise` (ie socially acceptable GOTO) when the language has a primitive for this.

You shouldn't use a feature just because a language has it, you should use it because it's a simple, well-defined primitive that's less complex than alternatives.
May be, but I also don't use any projects that have you searching chat logs (even if they exist) for future roadmap information, for example.

I think the point of log history search is fair but overrated.

It's easy to point out the feature, but I'm not convinced that regular chat search is part of anybody's centerpiece day-to-day bug-hunting strategy even on platforms with chat history.

Also, some things are better off on the forum. For example, Elm has a Slack and a forum. If you need to assume that all project discussion happens on Slack to find weaknesses in Slack, then I don't find those very compelling. It's just forum vs chatroom discussion and of course there are differences, just like how chat history doesn't make a chatroom competitive with a forum.

I know it looks like I'm going out of my way to "defend Slack" in the comments section here, but I think that Slack vs IRC arguments are the perfect example of how many developers are clueless about UX and things the end-user cares about. I just responded someone who couldn't think of a single reason someone would use Slack beyond "hipsterism" whatever that means (btw, I thought hipsters liked old stuff like vinyl records and Polaroids). It's something I see as a big problem in our field along with the stereotype of how developers cannot design products (not just visually) -- these arguments tends to validate those stereotypes.
We'd get the largest baseline when the Sun is between the planets. This of course blocks interplanetary communication.

Another commenter mentions the 0.5 mm precision needed[0] - how would we overcome the communications issue to get an accurate measurement?

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17171476
>if the GDPR didn't apply to that, then that would be a massive loophole, so I'm pretty sure it does.

Well, they are seperate entities so the loophole exists for how the US handles it but in the EU there is no loophole.

>In any case, the real question is perhaps commercialness

Last I checked you don't need commercial elements like ads, donations or anything like that to be considered commercial. Running your own git server with open registrations would be considered commercial (there is additional seperation in that you don't have to pay taxes unless you are profit-interested).

>I strongly suspect the GDPR applies to some noncommercial activity too-

Monitoring of any kind that is strictly outside private interest.
When I'm in a snowfield under the sun I'll smear snow on myself and stuff it down my shirt. Has the same effect.
Your page is showing European ads and you are earning money of those. For me, as a user, the ad network is an implementation choice of your business.

Probably you can offload some challenges to the ad network, if they don't tell you enough of their business, but that's between you and them. For me I'm accessing your site.
Whenever I remove ants from the kitchen, I grab them gently between my fingers, to keep them from escaping. Otherwise, they will often jump out of my hands.

I'm sure that 5 feet is long enough to reach ant terminal velocity. So clearly ants know that falling 5 feet, or 1000 feet, is no big deal.
For cats it's better to fall off a higher floor than a lower one because they have more time to turn feet down and increase their air drag thus getting under the terminal velocity and allow them to survive the fall.

For humans a jump from the third floor is where safe ticket to afterlife start, though head first will end it just as fine from the second or even first floor.
> So anyone muscular is obese per BMI.

And that's why I said

> unless you're obviously an exception

Most of the time complaining about BMI is just an excuse for overweight individuals

If needed body fat can be assessed separately.
There are a lot of solutions out there that tackle billing but they may not necessarily be open source. Examples being chargify [0], recurly [1] etc.

A couple of open source solutions that I found are killbill[2], laravel spark [3], bullettrain [4], opensourcebilling [5]. Again, they may not necessarily be 100% free but they are open source.

Also, billing is a very subjective term. Do you mean subscription billing or just plain old invoice type solutions or a combination ? There are tons of invoicing tools like invoiceninja [6] and plenty others.

[0] https://chargify.com

[1] https://recurly.com

[2] https://killbill.io

[3] https://spark.laravel.com (billing plus SAAS)

[4] https://bullettrain.co (billing plus SAAS)

[5] https://opensourcebilling.org

[6] https://invoiceninja.com
especially when you load the cookies and trackers before the showing the consent dialog :D
Saber.js – A minimalistic framework for building static websites using Vue.js
Good for him! But even if he "wins", I'm guessing all of the past criminality will remain unpunished - as opposed to throwing the kidnappers in jail, and civilly compensating all of their victims, and similarly prosecuting the leaders for conspiracy. When asked to oversee agents of USG itself, courts seem to take the attitude that eg telling a murderer to not do it again is good enough.

And lacking the threat of punishment, the thugs will just move on to the next profitable harassment scheme that hasn't yet been cracked down on. Given that we've all been victims of this same pattern for decades, all I can really wonder is are those newfangled assassination markets ready yet? Kickstarter for justice seems to be the only way we'll be able to get it.
I think VO2 is a piece of a bigger fitness puzzle. With runners you also need to factor in lactate threshold. Not to mention running efficiency/economy.

At the high level I think of fitness as the combination of: Speed, Strength, Power, Endurance, Flexibility, and Balance.

Then athleticism would include all of the fitness indicators plus some sport-specific technique and skill (or proprioception).
And even Human Rights (tm) is interpreted differently :) Especially given how much of a failure UN is.

Also, world-government formation would be a blood shed not seen before. On top of that, all similar formations so far couldn't hold their shit together. USSR, British empire, Roman empire.. EU is struggling too. Even China has tumultuous history and they'd have issues the moment iron grip is loosened. USA is not exactly without internal rivalries either.

Why go through hassle of forming such entity if it will fail sooner or later?
Electronic signatures and environment
This inspires a high school physics test problem:

You are sitting in an apartment building and your cat sees a mouse on the window sill.

The mouse jumps out the window and lands on the ground unscathed.

The cat, seeing the mouse made the leap safely, and hoping for lunch, makes the same jump and suffers no injury.

You worried about your cat escaping, need to decide if you’ll jump as well.

Based on seeing the tiny mouse make it and even your bigger cat, can you assume you’ll be safe? Why or why not?
Where can we see it? It sounds fun!
24 bit color support on terminal!!
I strongly disagree on the setup with only one fan. Having only an exhaust fan in the room will draw nasty air in through cracks in the house's structure, possibly stuff with e.g. mold spores. My wife could never remember which way was which for our window fan; I could tell by smell when she had left it exhausting for more than an hour.

If you have only one, set it to intake and leave another window open a bit (maybe like half the fan size). You can confirm that air is exiting that way by hanging some strips of tissue paper in it.

Positive pressure (blowing in, from outdoors) is also the right thing to do if you are trying to keep smells from other rooms at bay. Whereas negative pressure (blowing out, to outdoors) is best to keep a smell confined to one room (e.g. this is how bathroom fans work).
Yeah sorry, 950 billion
That strikes me as a selling feature, not a problem. Everyone can talk to each other over email, but the choice of provider is still meaningful and you can pick one that suits your needs.
> ...you can't assume the intent by the result alone

The "disparate impact theory" in legal reasoning says the opposite, more or less:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact
نتيجة الشهادة الاعدادية محافظة المنوفية 2018 menoufia
Is there an option to arrange things with your wife so that you can geek out outdoors for a day (or couple hours) a week? Local workspace? Or even just a room in the house.
Classic example of the "big redesign in the sky". Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/
I blocked it. I wonder if that counts as a yes.
If you can't afford a superyacht, you are probably not Aristocracy.
It’s worth noting that I’ve seen poor families in France reusing plastic forks and knives. Like always, this kind of policy hurts the poor a lot more.
> They actually do, the german police for example, generally destroys any video or image footage they make after 24 hours if there is no reason to believe they would help solve a crime.

Source ? This, to me, seems unlikely in the extreme. I mean this is strict enough that even I would agree they would regularly shoot themselves in the foot with such a policy.

> Please note that the BND, the german intelligence service, recently shutdown a surveillance program after several thousands of people requested the deletion of their datasets.

I doubt it's the only one. Call me when they change the law back so they can't legally do this.

> I don't understand why you should be told that the police is trying to get evidence of you doing a crime? Or someone else's crime?

The idea, in the US, is that you get informed afterwards. How else will you sue the police if it wasn't reasonable at all ? How will abuses be discovered ?

Keep in mind that more than a few police officers have been sued for using surveillance on women they were merely interested in, in some cases then proceeding to beat up and harass other interested parties. I doubt that this behavior is in fact limited to (a few) US cops, we both know the truth is that (some) EU cops simply get away with it.
We have seen a 51% double spending attack on Bitcoin Gold just a few days ago. Can we stop claiming that blockchains prevent that?
For an adult, a fatal fall is possible from the standing position, it's just most of the time people are able to break the fall in some way when they do fall and not land on their head.
My experience with these communities is that they are very close to non-functional, for several reasons. I use paid Slack, to pretty good effect, every day at work.

First of all, they have to rely heavily on hacks to store information long-term because of the 10,000 message limit.

Second, even with fairly diligent use of Google Docs for important stuff, tons of info is still lost. I've got a slack where I have DMs with four different people starred. But for two of the four, I have no idea why, because I don't recognize the names and the entire conversation history is gone.

Third, where the message limit is less of an issue, and low barrier to entry is important -- ones with a lower activity rate, and where the community is not super close-knit -- tend to suffer from constant challenges to the group's norms. People drift in and out, wanting to argue again and again about how it's OK for them to use exclusively male pronouns all the time, or how it's OK for them to discuss irrelevant topics. This takes up a ton of the message history, and lowers the information density.

Like it or not, IRC, with a web client, and a publicly available archive that is searchable, is far more functional for this situation. Paid Slack is a pretty good tool for work communication, but the free version, for now, doesn't translate well to open communities.
With monopoly cases, it's all about market share. In the late 90s, Windows had 95%+ of the market[0]. I believe (but may be mistaken) that the legal threshold often used is 75%. Apple isn't there, but Windows certainly was.

[0] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/articles/culture/total-share.med...
I wish physical movement was somehow integrated with software engineering more. Weak solutions like standing desks don't make it the cardio equivalent of something like a cleaning job.

It's sad that we sacrifice health for more money only to spend it on health-related issues we accumulate from our career choice.

I always thought that maybe having to carry a medicine ball up a hill in order to deploy a service would be fun.
Android Game Programming and Development for Beginners
Poverty reduction programs, not trashing the planet, is the correct response to that
This comment contains more snark than content, but I'll reply anyway:

Goto is considered harmful, but it's important to recognize the context of that decision rather than parroting the idea. It's not an obvious idea and if the discussion had happened today with modern languages[0] instead it's not at all obvious the same conclusions would be reached.

This write-up does a pretty fair job of translating the original paper to something more modern without a lot of bias. http://david.tribble.com/text/goto.html

[0]: Modern languages of course learned from this paper, so that's not a fair comparison. In fact golang contains a goto, but it behaves well according to Dijkstra's concerns and occasionally results in more readable code. I would be shocked if Dijkstra took any issue with go's implementation.
> Don’t bank transfers take 3-4 days?

Uh, what? What does this have to do with interstate commerce? ACH doesn't operate on a state by state basis.

ACH can take a couple of days to clear (usually 2), but that's not really relevant, because most business isn't done through bank transfers. And for invoices that are due net 30 or 90, having a two day latency for the final transaction doesn't make a difference.

Interstate commerce in the US is generally trivial, mostly because the Constitution makes it very clear that states have next to no ability to regulate or prevent it. The only main exceptions are industries that are heavily regulated within a state (ie, if you want to set up a new health insurer in a state, most states require you to get a license from that state - which isn't really regulating interstate commerce, but having state-specific regulations you need to be aware of. This is uncommon).

For general businesses like we usually talk about on HN, there are very few barriers to interstate commerce in the US, especially compared to the EU.
> if I make some breakthrough making billions for my employer

That is a completely hypothetical situation and always never happens in the real world. Billion dollar ideas take many years to develop and many more failed attempts to successfully commercialize with lots of highly skilled individuals contributing to the project.

In a well-run company, nobody is irreplaceable. Research is always incremental with everyone adding a little bit to the work done by their predecessors. Breakthroughs do not happen in a vacuum.

As the article mentions: "But Masuoka was not around to enjoy that success. He left Toshiba in 1994, before commercial production of the chips got rolling. A decade later, Masuoka filed a lawsuit against Toshiba, demanding 1 billion yen in compensation for his work in developing flash memory."

Turns out Toshiba got along just fine after Masuka rage quit. Do you think if the technology failed (which happens all the time) Musaka would come back a decade later to ask for ¥1bn?

The only thing that is rewarded in business is RISK. The founders who quit their cushy jobs to start a company out of their garage or the early stage investor who took a chance on this untested and unproven venture and put their capital at risk are the true movers and shakers.

If you are not putting your time and capital at risk you should not expect to be making billions of $.

<Ideas are cheap .. implementation is everything>
Engineering a diamond spin-qubit with a nano-electro-mechanical system
It's copied straight from ZDNet's cookie management modal.
Post me some edibles over and 'll be happy to oblige. Never had that effect when I tried them before. Usually larger doses just made me giggly and put me to sleep.
Your argument against crypto is one of the more compelling I've read. I like the "deep local optimum" visual you painted. I definitely agree if you're comparing "crypto" directly to centralized companies doing traditional things -- they're not going anywhere.

However, I think it solves a different problem. It's a geopolitical problem. Blockchain technology provide a bulletproof (so far) way of exchanging value across borders without having to trust any middlemen.

There's a quote, I believe by Erik Voorhees, saying roughly: "Bitcoin is separation of money and state".
I agree with all the other negative comments here plus one more - Slack just isn't very good software, it frequently bugs out or outright crashes and is rediculously slow.