skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Most open-source licenses explicitly say that the software is provided as-is, and there is no warranty, express or implied, nor any obligation to continue to provide support or for it even to work.

Certainly, but notwithstanding those disclaimers, if the project's README or homepage describes it as intended and fit for a particular purpose, the user invests some time into learning to use the code in question based on the description, and it turns out that the description was... shall we say, overly optimistic, isn't the user entitled to be pissed off at the maintainer?

There may not be any legal liability, but the maintainer can incur social obligations by fostering expectations.

As an analogy, what do you think will happen if you tell someone you will help them move their stuff to a new apartment and that you'll bring a dolly, but you bail on them, or even just don't show up[0]? They chose to rely on you to provide the dolly rather than find some other alternative, after all.

So of course social obligations aren't something you can be sued over, but they are indeed real, and ignoring or violating them does have a cost: People get pissed off at you, which they may choose to express uncouthly in your general direction or vicinity, and your reputation suffers.

It is worth noting that this is far from a blank check for them to hurl invective at you. Their reputation may suffer as well, depending on just how uncouth they are.

Such is life.

[0] I am NOT saying that GvR has done the equivalent. In point of fact, he has left no outstanding commitments behind, and has fostered the growth of a robust group of core committers that are well up to the task of continuing to steer the project in his stead, though perhaps without his particular aesthetic sense.
> "The most important "program" that reads your source code is probably in your brain."

Not if you have a good Integrated Development Environment (or IDE for short)! That's an even better "program" than your brain, because it shows syntax errors and other warnings right next to your code. It will literally put little red squiggly lines right under `if (x = 1)` and show the file as red in your file explorer side-bar, and when you hover over this line it will give you a tool tip saying "this assigns a new value, it's probably not what you meant, I can either turn it into x == 1 or ((x = 1)), which one do you want?" That is the power of IDEs and they are amazing. We should consider them an integral part of writing code and not fight them or be afraid of them!
It's a bit more complicated than that.

Rather than try or pretend to be neutral, Swedish newspapers tend to outright state their political affiliations/biases. (e.g. "Skånska Dagbladet is close to the Centre Party"[0] "Aftonbladet describes itself as an independent social-democratic newspaper"[1]). This results in the newspapers having protection of the parties they support, rather than the legislature-du-jour, and an attempt by the government to influence an opposing newspaper would quickly gain political attention.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skånska_Dagbladet

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aftonbladet
How to build an NPM worm
I'm totally going to say it your way from now on. But only for currency: "boku bucks", "watashi won", and "ore reals".
There's also a saying that if a bridge cracks 1/3 of the way through, that is not a safety factor of 3.
I'm happy to see more adoption of Bitcoin Cash!
How would this work legally in a two party consent state? Can a house guest sue for being recorded?
That’s the point I was making: it’s not so cut-and-dry as the parent assumed. Depending on the jurisdiction, some actions (or inaction, as the case may be) have consequences. And not all disclaimers are lawful, especially with regards to disclaimers of warranty.
I use a fairly customized ConEmu.

I actually just got a new Dell XPS and took the opportunity to setup my shell exactly the way I wanted it.

https://imgur.com/a/GhemUQG

I use psreadline, oneget, conemu, powershell, oh-my-posh and posh-git.
The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham is an all time classic and I loved reading the book
If you don't have a general understanding, how can you decide who is competent? Staying informed and aware is hard, but necessary, work. Our reliance on pundits to recommend "experts" in the information age has led to our current society - where the overwhelming majority of voters are pushed, pulled, and manipulated by various government and corporate interests. I would contend that in order to judge who is competent to lead we as a people have to work harder to have a far better grasp of all the issues. We have fallen short in this way and we are suffering the consequences, on every level of government.
Jeff Bezos has more money than the entire Apollo program funding and then some
God, I hate the touchbar. I constantly brush it, which is particularly frustrating when I'm typing something in Chrome and it accidentally focuses the address bar or creates a new tab. Drives me up a wall! The lack of real function keys is another huge annoyance. Also had a couple keys on the keyboard get stuck. I've had it for a year now and I'd throw it out the window in a second if I thought there was a decent shot I could get a 2015 replacement.

I've got a 2015 for personal use and a 2016 for work and I can honestly say that at the end of the day I'm thrilled to work on a machine that doesn't get in my way. They had it so right and really, really dropped the ball for me.

I'd absolutely buy a new $3000 MBP if it was the new specs inside the 2015 body. As-is, I think my next machine will be Windows.
I'd be interested to read a write-up of this.
Not published yet but High Growth Handbook [1] looks like a great read.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/High-Growth-Handbook-Elad-Gil-ebook/d...
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, is an incredible look into the benefits of getting good amounts of sleep. Everything he talks about is also backed up by his own research.

It has convinced me to improve my sleeping habits, and I've been feeling much better because of it.

Highly recommended!
It's peculiar for an English language book to have the text on the spine bottom to top, but it's normal for French and German books.

There was a discussion on HN about this last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14448636
It’s not accurate at all.

In the U.S., a doctor has no affirmative duty to provide medical assistance to injured persons if they have not established a special relationship with the individual.
yes, amazonGO. a shop where you enter, systems detect you via your phone or wireless card, you pick up what you want and leave. items show up on your credit card.
I have to agree: Mistborn is an amazing experience.
I like it but I think its terms are contradictory.

- "You don't have to do X but if you don't do X you're being a jerk."

- "Don't be a jerk."

If I don't do X, have I violated the license terms or not?
Ask HN: Take a lower base salary to work for one of the big 5
I'm currently at a startup, but I just got an offer from one of the big 5 which will be comparable to my current salary, but with a much lower base. The difference is covered by a generous stock grant.

Short term, the move will hurt but the long term benefits and stock refreshes will eventually outclass my current earnings.

Has anyone had a similar experience? Did you regret your decision one way or the other?
> now go look up the density of the city proper

Nah, I don't accept homework assignments from condescending people on the internet, sorry. Feel free to dig up the numbers yourself and post them here, though.

While you're at it, you might be interested in looking up New York City, which is far denser than Paris. What do you think would happen if all the skyscrapers in NYC were flattened out? Where should those people go? Shall we pack them into the city's existing footprint with all the other sardines?
Not the benevolent part

(regarding his style of communication)
the ONLY reason they don't pass today is because they are not exporting to the US today. that argument is pedantic.
That's how you get the choir to sing.
That's my main issue with the touchbar as well, not this specific light issue, but the fact that it drags the rest of the computer down with it.

I would have preferred buttons, but I'm pretty adaptable and can deal with the touchbar if I have too. But what really gets me is that mine frequently crashes and when it crashes it's impossible to control system volume. And since trying to mute or lower the volume is one of the specific situations that causes it to crash, it results in one of the worst user experiences you could have.
I mean that the phenomenon of assignment happens as a side-effect of an expression.

Just look at PEP 572 and consider the huge number of examples it gives where it says “valid, but not great style” or “valid but confusing” or “valid but probably never useful.”

It’s bewildering to read, and this is in the highly controlled environment of the very PEP that defines it! Imagine how inscrutable it would be out in the wild, whether through unanticipated confusion from well-meaning authors, or through people trying to be clever and squeeze useless one-liner concision out of it, or nesting its usage and using assignment expression inside positional argument lists all over.

It’s unquestionable that this opens a Pandora’s box of problems for reasoning about code. But it is questionable exactly when or why it ever offers a serious advantage over just breaking assignment statements up into a separate line or an explicitly side-effectful function call (so it can be done inside a lambda, etc).
Is there any good insight on how to improve the quality of said sleep? Or is the amount of sleep the determinant factor of it?
Apply for the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program 2018 at the Stanford University
If you want to keep up with the maths, the main prerequisites for more rigorous ML is typically undergrad-level calculus, linear algebra, and bit of basic probability and statistics.

For calculus, google "MIT 18.01", "MIT 18.02", (and "MIT 18.03" if you like), which are all freely available on youtube. You should be comfortable with single-variable calculus, and at least familiar with multi-variable techniques.

For linear algebra, try "MIT 18.06", which is Gilbert Strang's MIT course. Or try 3blue1brown's "The essence of linear algebra" series, which is the best explanation I've ever seen of many concepts, but it is shorter and less in-depth than a full course.

For basic statistics, try Khan Academy's "AP Statistics" sequence.
How do you know what consumers want without offering choice?
The original Macintosh stored executable code in "code resources" that were a maximum of 32K each, as I recall. You could not only have more than 32K total, you could have more than your total RAM. If you were ambitious you could manage what was in memory for efficiency.
Bridges vs. Interposers: Momentum Grows for Alternatives to Interposers
> all an open source maintainer owes you is a P.R. review.

What? Given what you said in your first sentence, this seems a bit contradictory. When I post some code online, nothing forces me to review PRs other than an implicit social contract.

The likelihood of a rational person ignoring PRs/issues seems pretty low, since one typically wants improve their software. Nonetheless, it definitely happens for one reason or another and it's not something worth complaining about unless you're given some sort of a priori quality assurance.

I'm sure there are thousands of projects on Github which have a 0% response rate for PRs/issues. This isn't bad -- it just is. It's entirely someone's right to post a project and forget about it, regardless of how popular it got later on. Radio-silent projects will almost never get popular, since there's an implicit meta contract around support, feedback, etc.
Not necessarily. Have NPM store the public key, and require a lot of red tape and time to update it (versioning with delays).

Require multiple keys to sign or vouch for a package before publishing is complete (log of reverse dependencies +1 maybe).

There are lots of options.
Depends what your math level is. Start with https://www.expii.com/ which is Po-Shen Loh's site and see where you are. If you can do the algebra and basic calculus problem sets there you could also try these specific ML background books https://sites.google.com/site/10715advancedmlintro2017f/read...

Expii is a great resource because it determines from your success solving problems if you need more practice to get a concept
There is a comment somewhere on HN from the guy that wrote the mapping trick that Word (or WordPerfect) invented way back. They were saving changes to the file rather than flattening. I wish I could find it now.
Run :terminal.

Run ed.
Exotic ‘non-classical paths’ affect quantum interference, experiment confirms
Why Climate Change Seems to Have Faded from the News
That seems like an artificial distinction made up for economics. In physics there are plenty of theory papers that make very clear and concise predictions. If these papers hold then they are very much both. E.g. the original special relativity paper goes out of its way to make predictions and calculations at the state of the art of the time, which are quite jarring today.
Programmer: An Assault on Bugs (1977)
War By Other Means (by Robert D. Blackwill and Jennifer M. Harris) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01EAGEYI8/
"People are more rational when the cost to them of being irrational is larger."

We may need a source on that. Are you are familiar with Thaler's work?
It’s awesome to see that a mere post of an article is enough to conclude that the whole of Hacker News is transphobic, let alone the poster. Mia culpa—I will delete the post soon; I will also burn the article if I can by some means find it in book form.
Red shift only comes into play for distant galaxies. Nothing in our galaxy, or nearby galaxies, is going to be red shifted in any significant way.

> visible spectrum has been shifted into x-ray spectrum.

No, x-rays are way more energetic than visible light (MUCH shorter wavelenths..). Red shift, as the name implies, refers to shifting of wavelengths to the red/infrared side of the spectrum, not towards the blue/ultraviolet/x-ray/gamma ray side. The most distant, oldest thing we can see is in the microwave wavelengths, and that's the remnants of the big bang.

The real issue is with dust, and the inverse square law (that the intensity of radiation follows).

Some objects are obscured by dust, and so the only way to see them is by looking at wavelengths that are able to penetrate the dust.

The further an object is, the less intense the radiation is reaching us, so we have to stare at it for a very long time in order to collect enough photons to form good images. This is why views of Andromeda through a telescope with your eyeballs do not look like this visible light image of Andromeda: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap991114.html

Instead it looks more like this under the absolute best viewing conditions on Earth with a quality telescope (nominal is a blurred version of this): http://www.deepskywatch.com/images/articles/see-in-telescope...
I spent two hours scratching my head today because I had put

"/path/to/thing/**"

in a nuspec file instead of

"\path\to\thing\**"

The backslash was escaping the wildcard characters :(
Other comment here correctly clarifies point of agreement.
Epic Games retroactively gives more money to Unreal Engine Marketplace creators
I don't understand how NPM is such a dumpster fire. Countless other languages use package systems for a decade without constant issues.

I get the feeling pure JS is too dynamic for such a large codebase to be reliable. We switched to Typescript a few years back because of the same issue and I'll never look back.

All our JS/TS projects inevitably end up with rm -rf node_modules as the first build step. This has been a constant since NPM 1.X, and somehow at Node 9.0 it's still needed. I never used another package manager that was so unreliable that you need to delete all your packages just to build.

And the horrific error messages when things get messed up. I would rather debug assembly.

The regular leftpad level circus events are just icing on the cake. Please somebody replace NPM. It's even worse than the constant framework churn
RobinTrack – Discover trends in the popularities of stocks on Robinhood
Firebase is great, but in my little experience, as it's database grows, it becomes clunky to sort and query, especially since everything is pretty much done client side.
The Nexus Trilogy, by Ramez Naam. Rereading it at the moment, my favourite modern sci-fi series by far.
is that a fact or are you guessing?
I think people who say other languages "just don't get it right" are living in a fantasy world. At the end of the day, Smalltalk is a pretty extreme language. The insistence that, e.g., every integer value is an object that can be sent messages, or that every code block is an object, or that every code block can introspect its caller, all lead to a pretty extreme amount of flexibility but an inability to write efficient code or do much optimization.

At the end of the day, languages that were less extreme won the popularity contest. Ruby and Python, for example, are just more accessible and full-featured.
This is also one of the reasons that MacOS keyboard UX is objectively better than Windows UX. Seeing this keyboard shortcuts like this not supported in an application in MacOS would be surprising.
There’s quite a few reasons, but I suspect the largest is lack of a corporate sponsor. People use what they know of, and few things have shipped with smalltalk.

And honestly, the language itself isn’t that remarkable by today’s standards; there’s so many dialects floating around most of the features have made their way into mainstream languages. It’s the tooling that I dream of. Sadly, it’s probably also another reason why it never took off: people couldn’t easily incrementally adopt it.
Then no decision would be made, which is a decision.

When was the last time someone got a supermajority with more than a small number of voters?
Apple have surpassed themselves with wallet-gouging markup on SSD and RAM upgrades. £360 for an extra 16GB RAM (£160 retail) and £360 for an extra 500GB SSD (£95 retail). This locking down every component is big business. Nothing like hacking-off your pro customer base.
Didn't mean to condescend. Anyway, Paris has 21,498 people/km^2 [0], twice that of New York (10,933 people/km^2), and without an equivalent Manhattan. For the majority of large cities in the USA (14 of the top 20), the given density is under 2,000 people/km^2 [1], including Dallas (1,493 people/km^2). That's the kind of thing I was referring to. Of course, New York and San Francisco are much denser; I was not talking about them, but the average American city. I'd like to give the article the benefit of the doubt that so were they.

ED: I should add that I don't consider New York an average American city because it's a success!

[0]
(Wikipedia, but calculated from https://www.insee.fr/fr/recherche?idprec=3293086&q=paris&deb...)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
To be fair, ads got way less profitable for Youtubers recently. After the so-called "Adpocalypse", it's a total crapshoot whether any given video will be monetizable, so it makes sense that videomakers would resort to adding more paid-by-the-sponsor ads directly into the video rather than relying on revenue from Yoututbe's own ads.
Your tl;dr here is rather surgically picked. But forgiveable bc a lot easier than the challenge of contending with context and ideas...and a lazy developer is a good developer amirite?
Ask HN: How do you demonstrate experience and competence as a developer?
Hi all,

So this is something I've been thinking about quite a bit.

With clients, I usually mention a project that I've done which is similar to what they'd like to me to do (or that has used similar technologies).

But I'm wondering if there isn't a better way.

My work history is pretty sporadic. Having had many long periods of entrepreneurship as well as freelancing.

I also don't have any formal qualifications, though I've been programming professionally for over 10 years now.

For the freelancers and the recently employed on here.

How do you demonstrate your experience and competence as a developer?
select doesnt scale well.
‘Simulacrum and simulation’, ‘understanding media’, and ‘society of the spectacle’ right now. My focus this summer is on everything ever written about media and society. I am currently looking for works on social trends in response to radio and television.
Try Cloud Firestore, it has a lot of improvements with querying over the RTDB. I can also confirm sorting/querying is handled server-side. (Disclaimer: I'm the PM for it and use it for my own side-projects)
Bu the communication is not what the benelovent dictator means. It refers to something else.
> If someone had an iphone, they had a USB-A to lighnting cable. Now they need a USB-C to lightning cable.

iPhones don't come with these, so it basically means you have to go out and buy another cable, which won't work with any of the wall charger power bricks that came with your previous iPhones. I understand a change needs to be made at some point, but it's strange for Apple to ship computers with no ports that are compatible with their iPhones.
Ugly: no VPC secure access to Cloud Functions basically making it worthless to connect with legacy database systems hosted on GCP.
I use self-synced standalone 1Password for this reason. Much smaller attach surface.
I stopped reading before I got to that point thanks to the author’s argument on account of I took his advice. Thanks for the datum.
Indeed.

Secondly, lowest common denominator often creates difficult scenarios.

What I was capable of, at say age 14, was not the norm.

Fortunately, I lived in a time and place where that was accepted and there were few issues.

I once spent a few months writing assembly language. I heard get outside a few times, but that was it.

Later, spent another one fixing an old car, to be my first.

Then, out alone in the deep woods with a friend for a few days.

It was like that growing up. A wide range of experiences. Some easy, others not so easy. Danger was present. One paid attention, or faced it.

So pay attention. Rough, but valuable.

When I parented, I faced similar. Ran it about the same way. Some of my kids could handle it. Others could not, or did later.

The one who really could, a lor like me in that, currently travels the world.

Good.
I lot has changed in the last year or so, might be worth looking again. Most of the backend services are under GCP's terms of service, products like Cloud Firestore all do encryption at rest, etc.
High Performance 6: What will you do with the next 4,298 hours of your life?
No disagreement here.

There are, however, a number of people in the field that are all ops and have no development abilities. There is less and less of a need for those kinds of people.

This has been hashed about at length, but the inverse is also true. Developers must learn to operate their software in production.
I think they are over-optimizing a no-issue. Nobody around me complained over my MBP2015 keyboard noise, neither about my MBP2010
You might want to check: Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator -- written by the PR guy who kept American Apparel in infamy.
> If you want me to read the vast literature, cite me two papers that are exemplars of that literature. I will read them. If these two papers are full of mistakes and bad reasoning, I will feel free to skip the rest of the vast literature. Because if that’s the best you can do, I’ve seen enough.

This is one of worst ideas I've ever read. Wouldn't you just be cheating yourself?

How is tying your own learning to someone else's ability to find the best papers in any way a smart thing to do? It would be much better to doubt the person who gave you the papers (perhaps he miscalculated which two papers were the best), than to dismiss the entire field.
Cherenkov Effect