skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Netgate is far, far more expensive than PC Engines (do you see anything near $100 or 100 EUR here? [1] No, you don't). It isn't even remotely in the same league. An 8 port model at home is overkill, and expensive. You're better off using a switch plus an appliance.

If we're casually mentioning alternatives to PC Engines (who provide, AFAIK, the cheapest solution and are using Coreboot):

https://opnsense.org/about/about-opnsense/ developed & supported by Deciso BV. Still supports x86-32, unlike pfSense. Their official hardware is also expensive though, just like Netgate.

If you want a cheap PC Engines alternative running Linux I can recommend Ubiquiti gear instead. The entry level products are cheap (ER-L, for example, has 3 ports and costs ~100 EUR), and the Unifi products are user-friendly, while the EdgeMAX allow more freedom/control at the price of user-friendliness. Although it isn't DIY like the other solutions, that could be an advantage. But if you're going the DIY route anyway, PC Engines gives the best bang for the buck unless you need 4G modem support.

[1] https://store.netgate.com/
1st of all, the automated pinsetter is not very old, it's WWII era invention.

2nd where I work, I can clearly see how the 50+ yo engineers think differently than the 40+ yo, who also think differently than the rest.

So yes I don't think the 20-30 yo population would conceive of the pinsetter. I actually doubt they could even describe how the current one works. However the 50+ yo would not do anything else but that, and they could improvise one immediately.

It's a difference between being purpose built and efficient, vs need to thinker. The thinkering aimlessly stops at ~40 yo, when you figured you spent a fair amount of your life goofing around for no good reason (other than sex, money, and your social profile). At one point your realize than you might juts be able to leverage all your assets into something useful.

Okay that last bit was both utopia and off-topic, but it feels good...
Elon Musk 'Can Stick His Submarine Where It Hurts,' Says Diver
Scientific Uses of the MANIAC (1986) [pdf]
I hate how everything has to be public nowadays. If you do something silly or embarrassing you need to take into account that everybody have cameras with them at all times, and enough people have no qualms about posting others private moments online for the world to see. I'm a private person, I don't want videos or pictures of me available for everyone. To be constantly surrounded by internet connected cameras definitely makes me less likely to risk look like an ass, even among friends.
Exactly. People tend to worship personalities all-in just because they are successful. However it might well be the case that they're successful despite their personality issues, instead of "because of" them. When I was reading Peter Thiel's startup notes I kept thinking: He is successful, but it doesn't mean many of his thoughts make much sense or are actually applicable. Maybe he just succeeded despite holding some wrong beliefs.

I would hypothesize that some founders succeeded despite being jerks, but most jerks are not successful founders, and most successful founders aren't jerks.

In any case, if somebody has excellent ability in performing correct inferences and a healthy dose of self belief as he knows what he's doing and knows he has indeed accumulated more than many others trying the same thing, those can indeed be positive personality traits. However if one goes as far as really to "distort" the reality/self perception, I don't think it can end well at all and might well wreck havoc and can even be classic signs of depression. Objectively evaluating evidence, understanding that human beings are not fundamentally different, genuinely listening to others and immediately acknowledging own folly can only be a plus in all sorts of scenarios.
This has huge promise and I'm eager to try it more myself. I think it would make an awesome Slack bot. But the the now button is enlightening.[1]

> Do away with the complex UIs of IFTTT or Zapier

The interfaces on those sites can be complicated because the services they interact with can be complicated.

This was my demo experience with Almond:

> me: post a tweet about cats

> Almond: What caption do you want? [list of boxes of choices]

The choices are:
- Use the image id from Thecatapi
- Use URL from Thecatapi
- Use description
- Use the link from Thecatapi
- None of the above

To me that is a "complicated UI". If I'm non-technical I have no idea what a URL is. Even as a technical person I don't know how "link" and "url" are different. I have no idea what "Thecatapi" is, why it was chosen to fulfill my request, or what it will tweet about.

I can see how this may be useful for tech people but this strikes me as more of a super high level programming language than an actual assistant.

[1] https://almond.stanford.edu/get-almond
I really like Confluence from Atlassian
To be clear: Org format is just plaintext, and you can use it mostly in the same way you use Markdown. It's nowhere near as popular, but if all you want is Markdown feature parity, then there is growing support in other editors and places. It's only when you want to go beyond Markdown that this becomes "Emacs or the highway".
Show HN: An A/B testing engine (node.js)
I had the same confusion until I read the proof, though maybe I missed something earlier too. This corresponds to the validity condition in the last section.

Both generals start with either 0 or 1, and the condition is that if both started with 0 (i.e., initially wanted to individually retreat), they should both output 0. Likewise for 1. The thing about Eve deciding which value the generals start with may also be confusing; a better way to think of it is that 'no matter what both generals start with, this validity condition holds'.
Here I'm getting a "This embedded plot has reached the maximum allowable views given the owner's current subscription"
Thanks for the explanation and correction!
Given it's 18.04, you could've `snap install go --channel=edge` to get go from master.

(all praise mwhudson for maintaining the Go snaps -- `snap info go` for the whole story).
A farmer in India commits suicide about every 30 minutes.

But that's still a tiny fraction of India's population.

India's population is so big any problem short of a rampaging plague epidemic can be dismissed with that logic.
True to a degree, but most would say there is a difference between standard bank "x" and a company that has billions in trades going through it. A fine lined distinction though.

Most banks don't have lots of people writing complex algorithms for their day to day job.
I wonder if they originally intended on letting people bring their memory cards into a store to get additional games.
Intrinsic motivation and deliberate practice strengthen each other (2016)
Agreed. Don't want to agree, but reality is not giving me many options. The way to fix this is to make quick public examples of the bad actors.

Truth be told, in the Akku Yadav case, I don't know how I would have reacted if I was there.
> afraid

That's quite the value judgement. Emacs, when compared with Atom and Sublime Text, has a tremendous learning curve for little payback. It's extensible? So are they, and with programming languages that are useful outside the editor, no less. It's powerful? So are they.

And more, they implement something resembling a common UI to the rest of the applications on your system. Sure, you can emulate that with the proper installation of modes into Emacs, but at that point you're already down the rabbit hole.

Emacs may still be the king of the hill, but it's a really nasty hill to climb. And with Atom and Sublime text sitting just a little below the summit with a nice, paved road to them it's going to take more than just being a bit better than them to justify that final hill climb.

So, no, people aren't afraid. Emacs is just not worth most people's time.

Sincerely, a VIM and emacs user.
Kayaking in Tenerife
Lessons learned from my journey as a self-taught developer
No need to do silly or embarrassing things - an "amusing" voice over commentary will be enough to bury you.
> why this is on HN

Because [0]

> machine learning

> Bayesian

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variational_Bayesian_methods
For general notes not directly linked to some project with it's own document hierarchy and so on I use a paper notebook with hard covers. Seriously - it's so much more convenient than any digital alternative. The only discipline I need is to write the date before any new entry so I can backtrack on what I wrote.

For projects I use plain txt files unless I really, really, really need something more complex
Yeah, but that's the same thing process wise -- just the calls change.
This is missing an extremely difficult to grasp thing - namespaces and binding. https://docs.python.org/3/reference/executionmodel.html#nami...

#example:
scalers = {}
for k in range(1,55):
scalers[k] = lambda x: x*k
print( scaler[2](3))
#Above does not work, or worse, sometimes it may work..
#eo-example

And without it, it's all just another procedural indents-instead-of-brackets thingie
It's the interface that counts though (write X at offset Y), not where the storage is.

That's an implementation detail.
Why the airplane romance that went viral should worry everyone
Good luck with that when contacting Comcast or AT&T.
Can realy recommend https://joplin.cozic.net/.
It speaks md. Can do usefull syncing with many different services. has a firefox and chrome website importer and seems open-source on first sight. I use it now after a lot of other trys. i like it
A great read. It made me want to read Clarice again.
Perhaps, but you can see how this is not necessarily a situation where what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
SSC on Friston and the free energy principle: http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/04/god-help-us-lets-try-to...

The consensus seems to be that there could be something to it but darn Friston doesn’t make it easy for others to understand.
Learn to optimize Eloquent queries to reduce memory consumption in Laravel 5
Experts Disagree on Top Applications for 5G
Because low cost smart phones is not their market.
It gets rather bothersome. My professional life at least is pretty public and it's sort of my job. But I'm pretty happy that there weren't ubiquitous cameras and videos around when I was younger.

In practice, most of us are somewhat protected by sheer numbers and the fact that people move on and a lot of information does effectively rot over time.

Balanced against that though is the increasingly number of cameras and automated recognition and categorization systems. And the whole mob mentality. Obviously in the cases where it has actually led to deaths. But also in the, perhaps rare, but well-documented cases where a stupid off-hand remark or action triggers the social media machine and the path of least resistance is career-ending firings and the like.
>for example .NET’s LINQ cannot be expressed in LISP, not unless you add a static type system

Doesn't that imply that Lisp, sans-static typing, is not Turing-Complete? Surely that is not the case.
>POSIX does constrict you. That is, it doesn't let you get the full performance you could get by talking directly to the hardware.

If it gave you that, it wouldn't be a standard anymore, just a bunch of instructions to talk to hardware.

So, of course it constricts you in some degree, but way lesser than the higher order abstractions the parent talk about.
... paid software certainly has its place, but with no clear pricing info, nor any concrete info about who's behind it, it makes me hesitate to jump on board. It does look really good though.
Peristaltic pump
The lesson of the story: don't say anything publicly to anyone ever, because everyone around has a camera in their pocket and is way too hungry for internet points.
There's no technological or legal solution to this problem (short of draconian), the solution is a cultural one.
The Moderator team relying on kickbacks for holidays?
A sound type system would have guaranteed that no program execution ever calls your function foo with the wrong type of argument. SBCL doesn't offer any such guarantee.

If some part of your program extracts values from a heterogeneous list and calls foo on one of them, SBCL will not be able to statically guarantee that it is a FIXNUM at runtime. It can't reject the program either, that would require seriously subsetting the language.
Agreed.

With that said, some none negligible chunk of the issues you linked fall into cosmetic (better error message), proposals, works as intended (docs could improve) or self inflicted misconfigurations of running a go beta. 53 sounds worse than it is.

I don't know why this had so much drama around it to be honest. And yes, it is far from perfect, it will be approximately as crummy as python/ruby/node which is still an improvement.
Provides Different Google Service Accounts and Scopes for Pods Running on K8S
>Speaking of tests, recently I discovered that Zach Beane AKA Xach, an über-level Common Lisp hacker doesn’t usually write tests. FYI, he is the author of Quicklisp, that is something like (but not quite) Cabal or Stack. Quicklisp is de-facto the only widely used library manager in Common Lisp world, and so it’s written in Common Lisp and doesn’t have any tests. It’s a wonder for me how it’s not breaking!

Why is it "a wonder"? We could, and did, write robust code, for decades before testing and TDD became a thing.
The problem could be formulated better, basically it's about reaching consensus about what the state is right now through a lossy medium. Your suggestion is to have a default, which is a good idea, but it doesn't really solve the problem if you want both processes to react to the state (there's an opportunity for an attack now, let's attack).

What also makes it unsolvable is that you do not want to endanger more messengers than necessary, i.e you don't want to send the another messenger with a message already sent. It's impossible to always know whether or not the receiver really did get the last message.
I’m in Ireland and made a shed office in my garden. I’m aware being in an apartment probably means you are gardenless but I’ll throw my hat into the ring anyway.

My shed is 10x8 and insulated. It has double glazed windows I got from gumtree. I have power running from my house and an ethernet cable. Both above ground for most of their run.

I have a raspberry pi turning a 500w heater on/off using a relay and temperature probe. I have conquered the winter months but I have not been able to handle the recent heatwave. I’m working on this at the moment.

Being out of the way is important for both myself and my family. I don’t want to be disturbed by them or spoil the general atmosphere for them either.

We are blessed in Ireland with much green. Apologies if my answer is out of reach for you. I just like talking about my shed.
If you read up on the structure of an FPGA lookup table (LUT) in detail, you'll see that most of their size is taken up as memory. A Xilinx 7-series LUT6 Configurable Logic Block (CLB) is a 64-entry 1-bit sram, read out with a 6-bit address.

If you don't need the ability to reconfigure the system any more, you can hardwire each of those 64 entries to the VDD and VSS rails instead. Its not nearly as efficient as the circuits you can get with a set of dedicated logic cells, but its much more efficient than the baseline FPGA fabric.

If the customer has already validated their logic on FPGA fabric, then its also much cheaper. You just ask these guys to "burn" it into an ASIC and you suddenly get a few hundred extra MHz.

Why are they called 'vias'? Because ASIC layout is somewhat similar to PCB layout - transistors go on one layer, and there are a dozen or so layers of routing wires below them, with vias in between the layers. So you can replace the transistors that would have been implementing SRAM cells for read/write LUTs with vias to power/ground layers instead.
At first glance this seems like a silly idea. It requires raising over twice as much money, since at least half of it gets paid back to bondholders.

But I think what may be happening us that it allows the donors to delay payment? The charity gets the money right away and the donors can pay later.

I'm not sure the high-stakes incentives are a good idea? The donors have incentive to claim that the goals technically weren't met (even if they mostly were) while the bondholders have incentive to hide any problems. It would be interesting to know more about how the deal was designed.
Gosh is this guy an ass. So condescending.
I like MediaWiki for note taking. My Dreamhost account features a one-click install for that. I added https (DreamHost supports automated LetsEncrypt renewal), added a responsive theme and basic auth.
+1 for Paper, but how are you embedding PDF? I can only add it if it's already in my Dropbox, and it is not editable (notes, highlighting, etc..) Only thing missing for me to make it go from good to great.
I would suggest this is more of a forum software problem than a Python problem. Stripping indentation damages the readability of code in any language.
>Well there are more Haskell jobs than rust here, so I wouldn’t say more mainstream.

Only inside the echo bubble of Haskell.

Rust can be put to use in any place, without advertising it for it even -- and already powers widely used code across the world (and not just in Mozilla).

Haskell use mostly concerns a few financial institutions...
The problem statement in the article merely misses a clause to exclude this which it should have.
Finding a Passion in Programming
> She was made famous by somebody else without her knowledge and consent.

She was made famous by the attention-seeking couple, her "plane boyfriend" and the exploitive media.

It's amazing how such a nonstory was milked by everyone for publicity and profit. And the theatlantic is still going at it.

If the poor woman wants privacy, how about theatlantic stop writig about the "Plane-Bae Woman"? How about focus on the couple who "set her up" to gain media following? How about focus on the "plane boyfriend" who knew about the couple filming them and used that for publicity by appearing all over TV and hinting that the unsuspecting woman had sex with him in the plane bathroom ( probably because the producer told him they needed juicy story from him ).

Or most importantly, how about the atlantic shine a light on itself and the media which turn a non-story into a major story because they need to exploit everything and everyone for money?

The story should be on everyone but the woman and yet the title is "Plane-Bae Woman".

And the atlantic is lying when they say "unidentified" woman when the "boyfriend" identified her and the media spent an entire week exploiting this woman and this story.

Instead of "Unidentified Plane-Bae Woman...", how about "Everything Wrong with the Media and Attention Seeking People"? Put the focus on the problem, not the victim.
> I've given up on using any sort of branded app for notetaking. At best it's open source and the maintainers will lose interest in a few years. When you write things down, you're investing in your future. It's silly to use software that isn't making that same investment.

I strongly agree with this. Actually I'm surprised that creating one's own tools is not more widespread in our industry as I consider this a quite unique trait of our profession.
So:
try {
lock()
} finally {
unlock()
}
In the same way, I've seen people involve Arduino's to solve simple electrical automation problems, when they could've just built a fairly simplistic circuit.
Emacs noob here. I came to Emacs through learning http://overtone.github.io/ and see a lot of personal knowledge management tools that use Emacs (Org mode). Can anyone recommend some engaging Emacs tutorials to help me find my bearings?
I haven’t followed the history of the feature, but could anyone explain why we had to wait until version 11 to be able to build a project from any location we wanted ? I’m having a hard time believing it’s purely for technical reasons, but then i don’t understand either what has changed that makes it a desirable feature now rather than before.
I’m currently working on adopting The Archive (https://www.cultofmac.com/535825/the-archive-is-the-best-pla...) into my workflow.

It ticks a lot of the boxes other people mention in this thread: markdown for interoperability, filebased and quick searches.
How is that mechanism not, itself, a lock? It's an unusual (and well suited) kind of lock, sure, but still a lock.
Just saw this intro to Emacs org mode. Thanks! I asked for some recommendations on getting started in a different section of thread. I appreciate the tip!
Could you elaborate a bit on how you learned sales by your self? Did you just start cold calling? I have no experience in this kind of thing what so ever and I think advice from someone with a similar background who has done it would be helpful.
I used to sell tape drives at Oracle. There is certainly a lot of smarts going into designing a tape drive, but 5k for an enterprise is cheap compared to 23k or more for a proprietary drive with double the read/write.

What I think really happened in this industry was that the higher ups laid off all the tape engineers (mostly US based) and just decided to go all in on the "everything on an SSD!" paradigm. It's outsourced to Asia, it works for maybe 90% of corporate workloads, and it makes the Big IT cartel a ton more money than LTO does :/
> The way to fix this is to make quick public examples of the bad actors.

Totally agree, I really thought Modi might do something but I was wrong.
What I Learned Working for Steve Ballmer
PE firms are like vultures. They are not going around and taking out healthy companies. Accelerating the demise of struggling companies could be argued as a good thing. Talking about Toys R Us specifically, yes a PE firm came in and finished them off, but they had plenty of problems before then. Video games used to be a huge revenue driver for TRU, but the move to digital downloads cut TRU out of the stream (a lot like Gamestop, and what happened to Blockbuster with movies).

Then you have Amazon which is assaulting every large retailer. Who has less time to visit a store than parents? The last thing a parent wants to do is make extra trips to stores when they do not have to.

When I heard about TRU going under recently, I was surprised. I had assumed they already went out of business years ago because of Amazon.
I would switch to Google Keep in an instant if it has a web clipper. I can't quite wrap my head around changing my workflow to do without one at this point. Probably should start paying Evernote to support them but still fall within their free tier (as much as they keep scaling that back).
> “Suggesting that most developers who use postgres should be familiar with its source code is madness.”

This is a glib strawman that has nothing to do with what I said at all.

If you intend to modify config files directly, then you should be able to find the relevant documentation, source code comments, etc., on what the config entries mean or why a value is chosen as the default without needing comments in the config file. This is in no way related to your wild idea that “most developers who use postgres should be familiar with its source code..” (which is not at all what I said and is not at all a reasonable characterization. Reading a tiny bit of source code or docs to find one type of comments is utterly and completely different than your gross mischaracterization that it’s somehow a claim that people would need to be deeply familiar with a bunch of source code.)