skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is easier to work with people when you've met in person as well, but remote works if you put in extra effort to make sure that everyone is up to speed. I also forgot to mention that we to meet up with other team members once every couple of months, and that helps too.

The standup meetings ensure that everyone on the team gets to share what they're working on and if they need some assistance every day, and Donut calls provide a good way to get to know people better and be more aware of what everyone is working on - that way it's easier to approach a person if you could use their help on a project.
>The short answer is, we'd rather a programmer does the small effort to learn GDScript so he or she later has a seamless experience, than attracting him or her with a familiar programming language that results in a worse experience.

The implication here being that all other programming languages used in game development are bound to be worse than GDScript?

I'm learning Godot and while I'm not an expert at either yet, by any means, GDScript has yet to live up to that degree of hype for me. The only advantage it has over other languages is its status as the default for the engine, but I don't see it as an objectively better language than, say, C, C++, C# or Lua.
At least with a cli you can usually invoke help and visually scan the text for what you want. With audio chatbots, listening to a list of options quickly becomes tedious.
Japan is much smaller than the US or the EU.

IMO, there are certain advantages to regulating things at a higher level. It's easier for AirBNB to comply with one set of rules instead of many. An individual in Japan can take advantage of a single, well-written how-to guide instead of learning his or her local laws.

That being said, where I live, I made sure the HOA explicitly forbids AirBNB-style rentals.
> w. People seem to forget that people actually liking your company is important for long term profits

This hasn't been the case with Microsoft. They had their most successful era, and created (at the time) the richest man in the world, all while we hated them.
The most probable reason is income inequality + public education system mostly paid by local real estate taxes. This creates the chicken & egg problem where poor neighborhood causes bad education which causes poverty.
The typical thing where a seemingly cool technology that is really hard to do correctly outside of a few toy examples gets overhyped.
Absolutely, plus I find their UI to be way more usable
Show HN: First app I've built. A free World Cup league game
> ... and I think this policy is the output of a calculated risk assessment where Google determined that the effect of the PR would be greater than the cash.

Huh? It sounds like they're not changing course at all, but just spinning what their doing in a less SkyNet light.

> Which affects shareholders more? The potential negative PR or the potential government contracts?

Considering several of the most valuable companies in the world are U.S. defense contractors, I don't think there's much of question about what affects shareholders more.
I started learning React a little over a month ago (with limited prior programming skills) and here's what I've built.

CupKit is a free world cup league game you can play with colleagues, friends, or family. There's no sign-up necessary, and it's stupidly easy to play. Just create a league, pick your teams, then invite everyone else.

It's based on a game my grandfather came up with 20-odd years ago that we played in our family. Back then he used a massive paper spreadsheet and a calculator. It's since evolved to Excel and now this: a real-time, offline-ready PWA.

For those interested, I'm using React, MobX, Firebase (CF, hosting, & Firestore), and MUI.
To raise VC money or not? A framework to think it through
People relax. If M$ really does go Weyland-Yutani on us with GitHub we'll just move to another git hosting service and they'll be out 7.5B. Unfortunately for them as a company they need costumers to exist, and we are those costumers, so, we just have to keep an eye out for shady stuff and act on them. Like always.
Or immediately hitting "0" once the prompt begins.
> New York doesn't enforce double parking, jaywalking, and other "good neighbor" and safety laws

I am not disturbed by double parkers or jaywalkers. I was disturbed by unit 4F and 7B's weekly round of "drunk Europeans screaming in the hallway at 3AM".
Microsoft has incredible CI/CD tooling -- check out Visual Studio App Center, Azure App Insights, HockeyApp -- and many enterprise customers use this along with VSTS. However, many companies will never use VSTS, especially non-Microsoft-stack companies so making a big deal about how Microsoft's CI/CD tools work for non-Microsoft projects hosted at places like GitHub or any other hosting provider that supports the issuing of webhooks on checkin/merge events (eg: BitBucket, GitLab, Kiln, etc).

Did you realize that your Java/Android Studio project in GitHub could be connected to App Center such that for every source check-in the project is built, unit tested (code-level), UI-tested on physical hardware (Xamarin Test Cloud), and if all tests pass the build is pushed to beta testers via HockeyApp which also captures reams of telemetry and debugging information? App Center can even be set up to automatically push the app all the way to Google Play automatically when you merge down to your release branch.

Ditto iOS apps written with Swift in Xcode.

If you think Microsoft doesn't have massive amounts of CI/CD tooling that is agnostic to language and platform you should check it out.

https://www.visualstudio.com/app-center/
At least they're not in the memory business.
I guess a size-able fine to both AirBnb and the apartment renters with repeat offences to be considered as criminal may help.
I seem to recall earlier, in 2016 I think, that Microsoft already acquired The Linux Foundation.

Acquired might be replaced with other euphemisms like "joined" or "became a member of".
The idea might seem uncomfortable, but realize that on airplanes today most windows are closed for the majority of the flight and people seem perfectly alright with it.
If you’re not getting the most dollars you can for each hour you work, you’re shorting yourself.
There may be some kind of step too far somewhere in the space of things that can be done for cheaper flights, but so far everything the airlines do that leads to paying less for a ticket has led to lots of grumbling and no shortage of sales :)

No windows in exchange for a discounted ticket; I think people will happily eat it up! If you sit in the middle of a row of ten seats (plus two aisles) the windows were just blobs of light in the distance anyway.
> strong relationship between suicide and mental illness

You're not wrong, but do note that the first paper you cited was from 2003. The CDC results published recently [1] indicate a strong rise in suicide since 1999. And more than half of the people didn't have a known mental health condition. It looks like things are changing.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/suicide/index.html
It seems like the intended use-case would be for the database to be appended after the executable that is using it. But writing to a file that's being executed seems (to my naive view - I'm not terribly experienced) like it could cause issues.

What am I missing?
California has water issues - that is why they were seriously considering composting toilets.
> In effect, those willing to pay the most are replaced by a random subset of those willing to pay PRICE_CAP or more.

This is precisely the effect. And many would consider this fairer. I think it depends on whether you people's willingness to pay as being determined more by their preferences (between say convenient transport or having a bigger house), or their income level. If it's the latter, then I think it's fair to question for each good and service, why should someone with a greater income be prioritized?
Don’t forget that UWP is the bastard child of WPF
Wasn't their public reaction as it was due to liability concerns? i.e. if they admitted that something was wrong with their chips, they may have gotten into significant legal / financial trouble?
If they provide the savings outlined, those savings will be pocketed as profit. Productivity improvements don't mean employees get to work less, either.
> Why, oh why, would any rational person think that this kind of technology was about to suddenly take over everything?

Because the boardroom got a huge boner when realizing they can do major cost cutting in the human department.
and aim direct connect is still better for sending large files than anything we have now.
> AMP is filling a role -- a minimal web for document publishing

I always thought HTML 1.0 filled that role.
'Next big things' are never the next big thing.

What happened with Chatbots was the result of some very very poor 'ui translation' from Asian apps. The product designers and managers of the western world looked at 'mega chat apps' like WeChat and Line that have all these built in apps and interfaces and tried to replicate that. Instead somehow they thought they were textual chat interfaces (buy plane tickets in natural language) when in reality they all had their own GUI with buttons and things to press.

Then all the businesses and agencies and consultants that thought they could cash in on this opportunity saw it and started pushing it even harder.

There was never any real user problem that this was solving - just businesses trying to cash in.
> Microsoft donates more dev time to open source then they will EVER get out of their own use of it.

This can't be true, or they wouldn't be doing it. They put dollar signs on positive attention. Obviously.
Also annoying is never knowing how deep the menu tree is. I have to write down (or hold my fingers out) what the best option/number at the time, because its likely to change as the resolution of options refines.
> I fail to be convinced that flipping through a hundred slides impresses either part of anyone's brain.

I think I agree, however.

A hundred slides might not impress anyone, but it means that anyone who wants to attack the presenter has too many targets to pick from. This is especially true if many of the terms in the slides are unfamiliar to the listener.

It goes by too fast. If you have an objection on slide 43, then by the time you get an opportunity to object you're already on slide 76. Maybe you forget all of the details that you were upset about. And the presenter can claim that your specific objection is handle somewhere in the other 99 slides. Somewhere that you're unlikely to fully understand the details and/or terminology.

Nobody likes the guy who gets hung up on one tiny detail and refuses to let it go even though the presenter claims other details resolve the issue. And everybody knows that nobody likes that guy. So everyone is going to be much more reserved about raising objections.

You could alternatively attack the presentation holistically, but this becomes potentially exponentially hard as the length of the presentation increases. Depending on how the details interact.

Sure, he might believe that the clients only want to know that the vendor is able to create all those slides. And this might be because when they present the slides they get the deals. But the reality might be that when they present the slides the result is that the people who would make important objections are intimidated into keeping quite. And that's why the deals are going through.
I've worked for a non-profit in a controversial space (interaction of faith and science). While my colleagues always strived to tell what they saw as truth, there was always an acknowledgement—unstated—that donors' reactions informed our approaches to addressing issues. Not that we compromised our values, but we couldn't operate in a vacuum.
Leaking classified information is good. This is the only way people can get a peek behind the scenes and understand that the state absolutely doesn't work in a way it wants people to believe it does.
A fun hack on a lot of these systems is to start cursing a lot. It's like dialing "0" for operator.
In a way, that's fine. You don't need to prosecute all offenders for a law to be useful. The law gives you some way to shut down bad operators which otherwise would be difficult to stop. Compare tax law. By law, anyone profiting from illegal activity has to report it as income on their taxes. This isn't because they actually expect anyone to report it, it's because it gives another avenue for prosecution.

It's worth noting that this distinction between who technically isn't complying and who will actually get prosecuted is a big part of why people have such different feelings about GDPR. Some people are focusing on the difficulty of complying and the penalties that could be assessed; others are focusing on the unlikelihood of small, mostly-compliant, well-meaning operations being targeted.

Also worth noting, this kind of selective enforcement can absolutely be used in a harmful way or have unintended negative consequences. I'm just trying to point out why a jurisdiction might pass a law even if they don't expect anyone to abide by it.
Chatbots are an infantilization. Just give me a list of commands I can type straight in and quit with the fake human bit.

Chatbots are basically command lines with some guidance for non expert users. Convenient when you don’t want to build a bunch of custom GUI for new features but often gives a worse user experience when the commands are dreadfully buried in long winded conversations.
Reminds me of this:

https://www.techworm.net/2016/06/programmer-automates-job-si...
The fact that Microsoft tried as many times as they did to push Windows Phone -- even buying Nokia to have a captive device maker -- shows how committed they can be to losing money.
and what is your use case ( development ? iOS development ? anything else ? ) for this machine ?
"I think that a combination of GUI with a keyboard can be great too."

Yup. Spreadsheets proved this many years ago.
Mashing # works well too.

Usually you'll get it try to say stuff, give up and then say "Thanks, I'll put you through to one of our team"
The awful thing is that the old Infocom parser was better at figuring out what you are saying than many of these sexy new NLP systems...
" I will own responsibility for some of that as I spent a good part of my career at the Linux Foundation poking fun at Microsoft (which, at times, prior management made way too easy). But times have changed and it’s time to recognize that we have all grown up – the industry, the open source community, even me."

What is this guy talking about? Maybe he's changed but Microsoft hasn't: they're still a company doing evil things on a large scale that simply sees more value (for them) increased FOSS support. I'll especially highlight the patent suits with them pulling billions of dollars from Android vendors despite them not contributing anything to Android. They were working on displacing it with Windows Phone. Yet, they use legal threats to pull hundreds of millions a year for their "inventions" on paper from those actually building things we want to buy.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2015/11/01/microsoft...

Both stevelord and I had a few more examples at the link below where we last discussed it:

https://lobste.rs/s/zknzmj/microsoft_acquire_github_for_7_5_...

EDIT: In case anyone wonders, I was hoping a company like Red Hat acquired them. One that is a bit less evil with more incentive to keep high investments in FOSS. Given the numbers involved, one can't hope for much more.
Funny, that is exactly my experience at Home Depot. I'd say 8 or 9 times out of 10, if I asked someone where something was, they knew or were able to quickly cross-check from their hand-held. And yet in other cases, employees could recommend something about a particular product or explain how it would be used for my specific situation. Or if they didn't know, they knew exactly who did and went and got them.

So perhaps it's possible to chalk it up to some stores being better and worse at it.

One nice thing is now the Home Depot mobile app will let you search for items in the store's inventory and will show you visually where exactly in the store the item is. Saves you from having to flag down an employee as sometimes they may be busy helping someone else.
Every big company tries to claim they have changed, will change and are currently in a process of change.

This is insightful, and in addition to this, culture change can and does happen at companies.

Just because they're evil today, doesn't mean they'll be evil tomorrow.

Similarly, just because they're good today, doesn't mean they'll be good tomorrow.

We should always look with suspicion at megacorps acting with what appears to be outrageous altruism. Companies don't throw around $7.5 billion without expecting to profit from it.
With CLI, you usually can type help or add a -h to the command or something like that and you'll be presented with options and examples.

You really don't have this option with voice. On the other hand, when I visited my mother I was surprised that she figured out that Google Assistant can provide her with nutrition information. She would have never figured out by herself on a CLI or menu because it's very intimidating.

This somewhat contradicts my previous comment about how much I dislike voice interfaces but they probably have some strengths.
Oh, if only that had been my experience, I'd probably hate these things a lot less.
Recognising Handwritten Digits with Scala
I think we set the goals way to high. It seems like everyone expected "chatbots" to be in their final form right away. Currently, the best "chatbots" aren't really chatbots, but act of as sort of human backed, virtual assistant in a narrow but widening domain. For example, real estate. Most real estate companies have an insides sales agents that does lead qualification, sets appointments, etc. There's a company in the space doing this now and judging from their website, they are doing alright.

https://structurely.com

I don't see one mention of "chatbot" on their page, it's always virtual assistant. Even just checking out their marketing material it looks pretty compelling. https://research.structurely.com/customers
Well, "uses": it seems that in the case of E.H., the lidar was there but its output was discarded in the end.
I'm from Germany. A few decades ago, farmers were still several percent of the population, so I'm not that special. Germany is small and dense and infrastructure is decent everywhere, so you don't start with a big disadvantage coming from a farm.

Sure there is software in agriculture today, mostly "ERP"-type, but I don't think there is an opportunity better than in other industries. Things are getting more exciting with autonomous tractors and drones and selective herbicide application based on image recognition. But the underlying technologies have applications in areas with more turnover.
I think the clang and gcc contributors consider all this in combination with “strict aliasing” and “type” consistency attitude effectively if you just wrote a double to a union member, you can’t expect that reading integer from the same union has any meaning at all so they optimized that away “per standard”. To come to that, it’s not what is explicitly written when you do a keyword search for “union” but what is not said that it “must work” in spite of other “must work” and “undefined” standard statements. But ask them for the details, I’m just following the topic and have no active involvement.
Hacker per whatsapp a pagamento – servizi hacker affidabili economico
Neither company commented on the situation with any detail. However, that account was not disputed by either party.
Well, any and every promising new thing gets overhyped.

(because the press, and experts -- whether real or just self-claimed -- and enthusiasts have plenty of incentives to hype new things and few reasons not to)

But that's independent of whether or not the new thing actually has merit.

Even when the new thing really is the next big thing, the hype almost invariably runs far ahead of schedule.

Personally, I think the jury is still out on chatbots.
Since my company uses .NET and a lot of MS products, I was tasked with learning SF in early-mid 2016. I don’t remember specifically what I didn’t like but it was probably poor documentation and slow build/deploy. It didn’t feel production ready.

Shortly after, we adopted Docker which was nice because we could run some Node.js services and some .NET Core services.

Although Docker introduced its own problems, namely orchestration.
Relevant, excellent blog post: http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2012/01/21/the-politics-of-...
I didn't say that it's only a result of mental illness, but lifelong depression is definitely a big factor.

Few living things who are physically healthy and with no history of suicide ideation just decide to die just because. Generally there's some underlying cause, whether it be a longterm plan to do so or some sudden stressor.
Bashing # several times quickly also works on a lot of systems. I always give it a go first time around - when it works, the voice bot typically says 'I didn't understand that, I will connect you with a.. [human]'.

Failing that I also resort to answering in one word answers. Bots can't handle any sort of ambiguity. Even when they manage to solve the language-parsing problem, people will still just bark one word answers at anything that looks or sounds remotely non-human[1] because that's how the early AI's trained us. The future-concept of people chatting away to robots is incredibly unlikely because to do that you need a level of empathy for the person/object you are talking to. We've clearly shown so far that we just don't have it for bots.

--

[1] Like the 19th century British Explorer shouting English at the natives.
I would imagine that most people losing it all in Nevada don't actually live there though.
I was born and raised half my life in Mexico, so I probably don’t have that trait.

I wonder if perhaps there’s something related though.
Thats literally his job ...
And Silverlight and WinRT. I still don't understand why they couldn't keep developing WPF instead of shipping a new framework every 2 years.
This is good. Old wood should die off, so new growth can replace it.
correct and it may be easier so you can move forward to let them do it regardless. Having been to China recently I didn't experience this but I did have to take out all my devices and have them looked at. It was done in front of me and no funny business.
Maybe we should rename it to artificial stupidity.
I had to prepare reports and such for the board to read before. I worked my ass off on them but never saw anyone actually reading them or even talking about them.

So I printed off random "techy" stuff and some cat pictures online and gave it to them to see if they even opened the document up. To this day they never noticed anything and I did that for 2 years before I left. I still did what I could at my job, but the time spent on those reports dropped to nothing after my test.

The was government though, but I have seen the same thing at many schools I worked at before.
Is there a competition between China and the US to drone the Middle East I don’t know about? I certainly won’t feel badly when the technology is instead developed by another company and used to bomb non-combatants in Pakistan.

It’s not miliatary contracts I have a problem with, it’s this particular program, this particular method.
I think they mean that GDScript is the best language for Godot. And at that time of writing it was, they tried several scripting languages(Lua, Python, Squirrel iirc) and none gave the 'seamless experience' that GDScript. Hell even the C# support at the beginning of Godot 3.0 was wonky.

But they listened to the community and added support for adding your own scripting language and Mono support. Which is still a big positive.
Education has insignificant effect on IQ, so this can't be true.