skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
EbookFoundation/free-programming-books: Freely available programming books
I'd say it's really about size.

My wife assures me that size doesn't matter, it's actually the way you use your configs to manage your environmental vars.

(sorry, I just couldn't help myself...)
Coda is awesome!
Secure P2P Messenger Releases First Version, Receives New Funding
Teaching accreditation exams show grading biases favor women in male disciplines
Because it popped up as a notification on my phone and the spoiler was the terse subject line
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System

The interstate highway system got passed in 1956. It is now comprised of almost 50,000 miles of highway, and cost almost $500 Billion in todays dollars.

There would have been a whole lot of rebar used in the construction of all the concrete - bridges, overpasses, the concrete sections in Los Angeles and other high volume areas
I'm actually a fan of Musk and applaud his efforts with SpaceX and Boring. It's just that I'm holding on to my 10 yr old Prius waiting for the $35K Model 3 for 2 years and the delivery date just keeps sliding 6-9 months every time I check. And then to see him trying to help (personally flying out- not just tweet-wondering) in the Thai cave case and now the Flint case makes me wonder what other world problem he's going to go after (and there are many he can) before he delivers on what he promised with the Model 3.
Ask our users if they feel similarly about it not being useful. https://slack.comma.ai
Reading the comment under TFA it seems macbook keyboards have no water resistance? Seems a bit weird for such an expensive device.
When in doubt from the title:

unknown domains, blogspot.com, some known high-quality sites > Github > general news/media sites > medium.com, hackernoon.com, dev.to

I tend to look at Show HN. I look at the new queue a lot, less so at the front page.
This is in-line with the the 'under promise and over deliver" mantra I was taught at Apple Retail. Don't make any promises you can't keep, and silently start to fix issues like this.

Apple having a hardware fix for their keyboard disasters in this revision is also inline with their repair program they just issued.
They have their advantages over config files and command line options. They're better than config files because you can ask for different behavior in different invocations, and they're better than command line options because it allows you to control a program even when you don't invoke it directly.

Consider, for example, wanting different options for less between when it's called by you, or by man, or by git, or by journalctl, or any other utility.

alias man='LESS="X$LESS" man'
alias journalctl='LESS="S$LESS" journalctl'

It's also useful when you want all processes that follow from an invocation to share a certain configuration, and when they follow from another invocation to have another. An example of this is $DISPLAY. I startx on my tty1 and that invokes the Xorg server, exports DISPLAY with the display of the server, typically :0, and executes my window manager. When I press certain shortcut keys, applications will be called, and they, in turn, might call other applications, and they all need to know that when they open up a window it should be on display :0. If I login remotely through ssh, forwarding my X11 service, the applications that I call on the same machine where other processes of the same applications opened their windows on :0, should now open their windows on localhost:10, so I get to see them on the laptop I'm logging in from. If someone else wants to use their account on the same computer, they might switch to tty2 and startx themselves, and all the applications they open should open on their Xorg server process with display :1, not mixing with the other windows I opened locally or on the laptop.

This is also why $LANG, $HOME, $USER, and $TERM are useful. They're stuff that should shared by process trees. Their purpose can't be fulfilled by configuration files or command line options.
> investment banker

As someone who was a software engineer in a brokerage and had to deal with clients excel sheets: open/libre office not letting you do that is a feature.

We would be given excel sheet that would depend on a specific version of Excel. We had sheets in the hundreds of megabytes. We had sheets that would take overnight to run. We had sheets with sheet dependencies. We had sheets that needed to be run in a specific order manually. We had sheets with 13,000 manually entered rows, each with 53 columns.

These things, and I use the term thing since eldritch abominations does not convey the horror of using them, were responsible for investing hundreds of millions of dollars.

The day excel dies is a day I will celebrate.
If you visit https://www.indiehackers.com/ or https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/ you'll find plenty of people desperate for a technical co-founder.

Whether it's wise to pair with such people is another topic.
I just hold my phone at half an arms length from my ear in quiet conditions.
Ask HN: How do I standardize my music specification so people can use it?
I have a music notation I am making called HexNoteG9, where 0-9 are modifiers and a-f are notes, 9 is the note g.

This is Twinkle Twinkle Little Star:
24 | this sets default note to a 2^2 quarter note

24 c c g g a a 1g f f e e d d 1c g g f f e e 1d g g f f e e 1d c c g g a a 1g f f e e d d 1c

now , just replace all g's with 9's and you have hex. The 1's are 1/2^1 = 1/2 notes

I have an example of minuet played in HexNoteG9 as well as more details on the modifiers, how to do rests, octaves, sharps, flats, dotted half notes, dynamics, looping, and comments:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1atnHKK4mbMjGrJFFhCk76e9YaTAkiv5y/view?usp=sharing

I want to make a specification that is peer reviewed similar to how the JSON specification looks https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7159

My end goal is to standardize a specification so that other people can adopt and use it. It would be nice to build tools off of this with other people.
No, we're supposed to be mad because they still refuse to acknowledge that it was a real problem to begin with.
Re-read the comment you're replying to. It's a joke.
There is a service program to replace these keyboards for free. They are even refunding people who paid to get their keyboards fixed before the program launched. This is almost a non-issue at this point if you can use a replacement computer while they fix yours.
This reminds me about the drain conduits (aqueducts?) in the thinkpads: liquids poured on the keyboard are diverted away from the electronics
Marry me
They switched to the butterfly keyboard in 2016. Apple fixed my 2016 MBP Touchbar for free. If you're having issues w/ a 2015 model that's unrelated to the issue the author and most others recently have referenced.
You make some interesting assertions, but 1) they contradict everything I have learned from painful experience and 2) they seem to make no sense.

> It's actually quite important to keep metadata about the config / params / etc. specifically out of those files, so that they are absolutely nothing but value files. Information about why a file contains those values belongs elsewhere

Okay, I'll bite: Why? In every area of programming, we learn that mental context changes are harmful. We learn to avoid gotos, not abuse exceptions, add meaningful comments, and seperate concerns all in large part so when we look at a file, we can understand what's going on without referencing other files.

Now you say "oh, unless there are some config values in that file, then it's important for it to be as cryptic as possible!" Surely you see why that sounds a bit odd? Should we also base64 encode the file? Do you also hate descriptive variable names in config files?
6NF gives flexibility since every thing is decoupled until you bring it in. It makes evolving the schema easier, makes optimizations easier. I also have a hunch that with such a focus it would be easier to find an interesting design space for new relational programming models since it’s, in a sense, “purer”.

But I guess it depends on the use case. For normal oltp style save/fetch entity 3NF makes sense. But it kind of makes sense in the way an ORM would make sense. Which makes you question if you really need relational database at all.
Yes, if you were living in a world where the bank would only give an account to the first person named "John" to sign up, you should have researched names first. It will be fun dealing with file associations over the .xar extension.

Companies used to coordinate to make sure they didn't conflict on port numbers, Apple used to run a database for ensuring that creator codes were unique, etc. Now one of the biggest tech companies can't be bothered to check if they collide with another large tech company in a sparsely populated namespace.
I'm sorry, but are people actually more concerned with the sound of the keyboard than the arrow keys?

It took me a week to get used to the sound. Six months in and I still can't reliably hit the arrow keys. It's as if they're designed to be as difficult as possible.
Just the authoritarian “conservative” movement that seeks to concentrate power.

I am actually a conservative on many issues, including UBI, work rules, tariffs, caution when making new law and regulations, and appropriate pricing of risk. However the real conservative movement has been redirected as a way to link wealthy donors’ interests with identity politics, for votes. Part and parcel of that is a huge propaganda machine which spouts lies. That propaganda is corrupting the West and I am afraid for its effect on democracy and average people.
Amazon is enemy #1 of small business. It blows my mind that people don’t see this and are so quick to don a badge of how many items they order per week.
They were in fact charged as US IC agents; they weren't US IC officers, though.
> Pay an ever increasing rate for 2 day shipping per year

Just get a prime subscription and never pay for shipping again.

> Sift through an onslaught of phony reviews and hope You get some working cheap crap

I read reviews from all over the web and then just buy it from Amazon. Never got a fake product.
HIPAA doesn't really begin to address APTs with 0-days. The controls it specifies are necessary, not sufficient.
Do you expect a systems administrator to be familiar with the source of every software he maintains?
Things You Should Not Google
There is a difference between the interpretation of the phrase "personal data" within the context of the GDPR and outside the context of GDPR. At least I think there is a difference.

For example, consider a website that maintains a collection of birthdays for public figures derived from public sources (historical documents, news accounts, social media posts from the public figures themselves, etc.). In many jurisdictions the birth dates might even be available via public record searches.

Clearly the birth dates are "personal data" in the colloquial sense of the phrase, but I don't think that the data as held by the website operator would be subject to the GDPR provisions, right?
Glad to see someone is addressing the bloat problem. Kinda sucks that every time we improve blockchain design we have to start from scratch with a new chain though.
Yes, and the whole browser<->plugin and plugin<->applet communication layers are missing, WASM runtime is embedded directly in V8 so the WASM code literally is ran closer to the metal.
It only seems reasonable to be tongue-in-cheek mad. But, we, who hoped that the early reporting that Apple had done nothing to address the contaminent ingress issue may now be quietly relieved.
I wouldn't want the system to keep information about me having been anywhere unless I'm a criminal. How would that information be helpful in updating the model. It already worked correctly.
So, if I send in my computer, does the replacement keyboard have a fix to keep it from breaking again?
It depends on how you define small business.

Under a different definition, Amazon is the best friend of small business e-commerce: https://services.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon/benefits.h...
This thread conflates two problems: how identity is managed on the internet, and corporate responsibilities in the face of that.

True age verification on the internet is a funny business. Unless we get some kind of government-backed ID, you have to trust what the user is telling you. It's a company's responsibility to take reported age seriously. Lying on age breaks the user agreement no one reads.

But if you tell the truth, and you're using an app designed for kids, your data will be protected according to the law, which is very pro-consumer.

In the end, if you choose to lie about your identity on the internet, that's your business.
I'm also excited about this aspect of WebAssembly, but interoperability will hard without a well-defined ABI. There are only four types in wasm: int32, int64, float32, and float64. Anything other than that needs to be encoded somehow, either as multiple values or in memory.

For example, say you want to pass a 16-byte struct as an argument: how do you do it? Do you store the struct in memory and pass an int32 pointer to its start address? Or an int64 pointer? Maybe you encode it as two int64s? Once you've made a choice, good luck calling functions generated by a compiler that made a different one!

Another problem (in the web context) is blocking--Emscripten runs into this one. You can't suspend WebAssembly execution in the middle of calling out to an imported function. If a WebAssembly program wants to read keypresses interactively, it can't use a blocking function like read(). You have to pass the keypresses in at the outer level--or reimplement the call stack yourself like Go did (https://docs.google.com/document/d/131vjr4DH6JFnb-blm_uRdaC0...).

In general, WebAssembly code today is very tied to the JavaScript code that manages its interaction with the outside world. You can't just write a WebAssembly program that uses OpenGL. You also need to write the JavaScript that turns those calls into WebGL calls. I don't think this is a fundamental problem--we just haven't seen standards develop yet. As platforms start to define their API directly in terms of WebAssembly, without a JavaScript layer, we may see more of a "standard ABI" develop. Until then, it's hard to know what kind of APIs to target or support as an application or compiler writer.
I do not care about good. I care about good enough. I would want to use that, on systemd nspawns (or whatever the current name of systemd container is) to see if I could get more performance than nginx for APIs returning fixed length things.

I wonder how efficient it would be to spawn a few hundreds.
Perhaps because they never admitted there was an issue. Whoever bought the upgraded MacBook pros with the upgraded butterfly keyboard for the last 2-3 years are probably mad that they got a mediocre product advertised as superior. At least Apple should offer a keyboard replacement/fix program at a lower rate like they did with the iPhone battery.

Edit: Apple did announce a keyboard service program for affected users.

https://www.apple.com/support/keyboard-service-program-for-m...
> “New research indicates that avoiding meat is one of the biggest things an individual can do to reduce their personal environmental impact,” said McKelvey in the memo

I cannot imagine that scales - you cannot extrapolate from micro to macro here. No animals = no food for 7 billion people.[1] Definitely no vegetarian food without animals.

Do vegetarians not know how grains and legumes are grown? How fertilizer and soil amendments are made?

It would be incredibly destructive to the soil to use no animal products to grow 'vegetarian' food. Definitely impossible at scale, you'd just be strip mining the soil. On smaller scale farms the ideal is to give crop land a break by turning it into pasture for 1-2 years. A great way to "mulch" the crop leftovers (you don't eat the whole part of the corn plant, etc) is to use them as forage (cornstalk grazing).

Seems really odd to shun the "meat" aspect when we really are "using every part of the buffalo." And a big part of our animal use is making food for sanctimonious vegetarians.

[1] about half of the earth land surface is better suited to livestock farming than legumes/grains/other row crops. You know what grows well in cold, rocky New England soil? Pork, chicken, sheep, etc.
Aliens: Colonial Marines' stupid AI may have been caused by a single typo
It's all good. I've rather enjoyed reading the responses. IMHO this type of thing is what really makes languages appealing or not too different people.
I think HCL (Hashicorp Configuration Language) reads much better than TOML when there are nested sections in the config file.
It's easy. Just don't use Facebook.
Sometimes it's a good idea for a sysadmin to know how to decompose something complicated into something simpler.
Yes, I too have seen those spreadsheets, but it's not Excel that's at fault, it's the users. I've taken XLS behemoths and trimmed them down to a fraction of their size and optimised sheets that ran overnight, to recalculate in seconds. I get what you're saying about Excel giving too much power in incapable hands, but I feel, for certain use cases, OO is too little power in even the most capable hands.
That is a fair point.
I want to know how they plan to enforce it. Let's say I'm traveling and eat at an airport restaurant in the departure area. The receipt says "burger". I say I ordered the tofurkey burger. How can they prove I didn't?
You could have even more to spend by foregoing retirement savings, but would you? If you did, how would it feel?

Living large on an irresponsible budget is not the same as living well.

Or are you saying renting as a long-term plan actually is healthy/responsible? Maybe I have just internalized too much American Dream propaganda. But with SF's rate of rent and price growth, the calculators say "buy even if renting is free."
The figure I saw around maybe 2015 was that AWS (maybe Heroku) is 10x more expensive and bare metal is 10x more efficient/faster, lending a 100x difference in price-performance. Both factors are probably larger nowadays.
I recently read China Mieville's "The City and The City", which features two countries - each the size of a large city - that cohabitate the same physical space, but are otherwise entirely different legal entities, with national borders.

I don't want to say too much about it, because slowly learning more about this system and society is one of the fun parts of the book, but you can Google for a brief synopsis of how it works.
If you meausred just calories per dollar you'd have everyone eating out of a communal 20 kilogram bucket of pure lard.
Yes, I understand that. And my perspective is different from your users. It is that of someone who is seeing (and attempting to help) big automotive companies. Companies in the shadow of Waymo, that had recently reached $135B valuation. It is also that of someone, who had been hacking code for medical equipment at 13, some 25 years back.

Do as you wish.

edit: correction. out of your project we are probably having more hackers that understand at least some aspect of the problem - you still might be doing something very useful.
First page of results was pretty good. I didn't go deeper.
> I recall when push button elevators were installed.

The designs for some of the first push button elevator circuitry was really cool tech.

It was a complicated problem because elevators could appear and disappear in a given building at will. Some would appear and operate within a building for only a few minutes. Otherwise could leave seconds after they arrived without signaling their departure. The circuitry had to account for this unreliability within the "network" of all possible elevators within a given city block.

The circuity in each elevator car also had to handle collision avoidance as new elevators appeared within the same shaft as other elevator cars that were already moving in that shaft.

It's fascinating to look at the designs:

www.archive.org/apples-and-oranges.html

Self-driving cars seem like a cake walk by comparison.
US wins the IMO third year in four years
Show HN: Help donors get maximum ROI for their donation by giving in tight races
Sometimes you need a push to break out of your comfort zone. And yes generally people into Pinot Grigio, even the best ones, could use a push. Alto Adige has fantastic and interesting other varietals.
I guess one kinda important difference is that you can see how bad the up/down arrows are going to be before you buy it.

Nobody predicted the failure rate.
Batteries, car parts and model-specific computer parts (laptop chargers, etc) also have high rates of fraud.
They didn't really fix it though, did they?
Everything but the small-battery Model 3 is now shipping, and everyone on the list is now able to configure and buy cars. If you want a car now, you can buy the Bolt, they have a ton of them on the lot.
Not the 2015, only the butterfly keyboards.
The fact that the membrane is still vented (labeled 321 in the diagram) suggests that this will only delay, and not fix the dust ingress problem. Indeed, it could make things worse by creating a tiny pump[1] that draws particles in on each keystroke.

I don't know why they didn't vent from the bottom instead, but that's how completely sealed (i.e. waterproof) keypads are vented.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaphragm_pump

Edit: wow, downvotes? Care to explain...?
There's a ton of mindnumbing testing and grinding work that honestly no one really wants to do, involving bit-level accuracy in many cases. We (https://sheetjs.com/) are attacking the file compatibility problem (our major open source project is https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx, used in stencila's spreadsheet converters) and it is painfully obvious that OO/LO cuts corners at certain places. For example, the mathematics of Calc is intentionally bugged:

> ignore the last two bits for many stuff to improve the user experience.

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83511

A successful alternative to Microsoft Office has to start from a level of compatibility that no current developer in existing solutions has expressed interest in attaining.
Before Python, before Perl, before I grew up and got a real job, I worked in a lab that relied upon the Ingres spreadsheet application to reduce experimental data. At the time, it was a Macintosh-only application, and its scripting support was actually very good, but validating the dsta was a very slow process and ran overnight.

I re-wrote the process in AWK, and was able to complete the data-reduction task in about 60 seconds on a DEC 5000 workstation. But my numbers did not match the spreadsheet results, and finding out why was an interesting process.

I then encountered small, remote offices of big international firms -- usually real-estate, insurance companies -- that had limited local IT support. It was Excel macros all the way down.

And then a large biotech firm, where it took KPMG analysts a few months to determine that our entire business relied upon this one guy's spreadsheet.

So yeah.

But:

Excel dies, let us suppose... What will these people come up with? Alexa queries?

I have preferences other than Python, but mostly I csn read code written by the scientists who wrote them. They may be abominations, like global state variables and magic numbers, but they are readable.

Is Python any reason to hope for a better world?

(Hmm. Off-topic, perhaps. Your story woke some memories of tough IT experiences.)
Take a picture of the menu after you double check your receipt, I guess. Or don't order risky items.

I doubt any restaurant would list a veggie burger as "Burger". There'd be a "V" or something, to explain why it was $2 extra.
But Anglo-American case law is very different from French or German law. The stated purpose of the Code civil was to do away with traditional French law, and it was indeed a great improvement over the previous state of affairs. This could at least be discussed.
You're still paying for shipping; Prime is not free.

(Not only that but not all items on Amazon are eligible for Prime)