skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don’t worry Matthew, I live there. We can start our own company and hire each other, and we’ll never talk to customers, ever. We sell silence. Come to Matthew’s head and pay us not to talk to you. It’s like Disneyland for grown ups.
Silly me, I forgot! Thanks for the reminder, friend.
REPLs are a great tool for exploring your ideas, and poking your software to test it "right now" but once you're happy with a small piece of code, nothing beats a suite of unit tests to help you refactor with confidence as your implementation gets a bit too hairy and you need to rejigger it in order to progress in a direction you didn't see coming.
Not really sure why all the downvotes... I understand he wasn't speaking on behalf of YC, but the man started YC. His opinions matter, and it appears to have changed from when he started YC, and it's an interesting thought to discuss.
I’m curious too. What’s the solution? Life expectancy keeps going up, but the age at which our bodies can no longer work has stayed relatively flat. People are living long past when they can no longer work. Fact. Society needs to solve this or we risk letting the elderly starve on the street.
When I want to make sure my kids understand what they read, I stop after a page and ask couple of questions. Questions that can't be answered directly by reading the text, but by understanding. You can try this in yourself.

For retention, the more times you recall the same information, the more it is ingrained in your brain. Recalling literally builds neural pathways.

http://www.human-memory.net/processes_recall.html
Ah sorry, not sure where I got that idea from, then. I may've been confused by various subreddit mods establishing rules along the lines of "the downvote is not a disagree button".
I commented elsewhere, but Roman culture was distinctively not Greek. The Romans valued virtue, filial duty, martial strength, etc. While the Eastern empire gradually became more "Greek" (in the same sort of cultural syncretism which "Sinocized" the Ming), this wasn't true of the Romans as a whole.

The Goths in Rome explicitly modeled their state after Rome, to the point where they considered the Western half to have survived. The organization of early Frankish kingdoms is a direct result of Roman estates, as experienced administrators were all... Roman. Rinse and repeat. It's not so much that it "informed" their institutions as that dux->duke, because they were the same position, and Diocletian's dioceses obviously survived as organizational units, along with Diocletian's organization of the empire (of which feudalism is a direct result).

During the Renaissance, ideas of liberty and democracy aped the Romans, but none of this was a cargo cult, as the ideas spread in the Renaissance drew directly from Roman historical sources (including arguments for why they did/did not work) rather than any cargo cult mythology.
OMG I read a lot about them last night...Swim less than 1 mile an hour, yet somehow eat seals and sometimes whole reindeer, migrate as far as the Gulf of Mexico..

I woke up this morning with my every thought invaded by those horrific parasites the vast majority of Greenland sharks have hanging from both eyes like macabre baggage tags that feed on the surface of their eyes, blinding them..
already exists, I did that a few weeks ago at WF, but I forgot the search terms (no, it didn't seem intuitive enough, but I suspect that will improve)
Ahem. "www" comes from the times, when you had to have a dedicated machine, or, at least, a dedicated network interface, for each service. Hence, you had an FTP server, creatively named "ftp", and your WWW service ran on a host surprisingly named "www". A concept similar to well-known addresses.
MaterialFox userChrome.css makes Firefox look just like the new Chrome 69
This is a nicely polished theme that mimics the new Chrome chrome really well, and it includes a dark mode. I didn't realize Firefox themes could look this nice, and I hope we see more designs like this as FF gains attention.
Yeah I like that. Personally I don't indent the join conditions either because of syntax highlighting, but at least yours is readable. The indentation in the "joins" and "subqueries" sections of the style guide are fucking atrocities. Who writes SQL like that?
I wouldn't know what role Christensen played for MBAs back when "Innovator's Dilemma" was published since I was strongly disinterested in business back then. But I don't think the two books and the two authors compare.

Having read it and having dealt with a lot of MBAs in "large businesses in areas under disruption pressure"-settings in the last decade I'm not under the impression that it is a book that had much of an effect.

Then again, the average MBA in big business isn't exactly a reader.
This should be the top comment. Users (including technical users) all behave weirdly by writing "www." depending on their mood or previous experiences. Developers setting up webpages do the same and often manage to screw up a CNAME on the www subdomain or to have two valid certificates for the www. And the non-www. Also, once you rotate cert you now have two to rotate. It's a mess and chrome's change is aiming at normalizing this. The complaints make zero sense.
seems like you created a strawman you created and are arguing against that.

>> and know that the inability to save for the vast majority of people is just bullshit. Its an inability to sacrifice and “suffer” in a consumerist society.

How do you know this? median income (50th %) in US is 37k before taxes. The average rent is 1k, so 33% of pretax is going to housing but its definitely lazy people?

>> I’ve been so poor my calculated net per month was minus $1000 for about 16 years while supporting a family. I worked and saved my way out of it

How did you save while having a net of -$1000/month?
Sorry, I should have compared C-major and C-minor keys. If I play a C-major scale, and then a C-minor scale, C-minor sounds sadder in comparison. But if I just play ascending thirds (R 3 2 4 3 5 4 6 5 7 6 R) in C-minor, it doesn't sound sad to me. Moreover, it's easy to make C-major sound sad by playing descending thirds (reverse of above).
ugh!!!!! this is killing me
That's a fair point. What would be the correct term? A user of a website or a customer of sufficiently-large business not dealing with only one single human being, but a multitude of them behind a few human and computer agents. The user or customer could judge the system or organization's decision-making ability based on the difference between the expected and actual outcome with respect to the "humanness" the outcome.
Hey HN, site author here! I was asked to repost this by the HN mods (read about the second-chance queue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380).

---

So, the context for this site is that I was reminiscing about the days of Geocities and Angelfire, when the web was quirky and fun. In those days, sites often used the <bgsound> HTML tag to include an auto-playing song in the background of a page. Usually the song was in the MIDI file format.

It’s hard to describe MIDI files if you’ve never heard them before. The MIDI aesthetic is synth-laced, nostalgia-inducing, old-school, and endearing. It’s mixed up with the first DOS video games I ever played and the first websites that I visited as a small child in ‘95 and '96. A textual description can’t adequetly capture the feeling of listening to a MIDI.

I was surprised and sad to learn that all major web browsers have removed MIDI file support. Perhaps this happened at the same time that the <bgsound> HTML tag was removed? This explains why I haven’t heard a MIDI in many years!

So, I really wanted to play a MIDI file. When I searching the web for a MIDI websites, I discovered that existing websites were quite disappointing. It was difficult to find a site with a decent user experience. Almost all the top sites were unmaintained or broken in various ways. Most sites could not play back the files directly in the site, requiring them to be downloaded and played in an external program instead.

Quicktime also dropped support for MIDI when Quicktime X was released in 2009 which inconvenienced many musicians and probably stopped many users from playing back (or discovering!) this wonderful file format. Technically, Apple still offers Quicktime 7 for download, which can play MIDI. But it’s a 32-bit app so it will likely stop working once the macOS version after 10.14 Mojave is released. Also, embarrassingly, the Quicktime 7 download link uses insecure HTTP!

Even the venerable VLC failed to play back the MIDI files I threw at it. (I later learned that VLC can actually play MIDIs and I just got unlucky with the few I tried, hah!)

There were some websites that could convert MIDI to low-quality MP3, and some sites offered inline MIDI playback using Adobe Flash, but they were flaky and impossible to get working in Chrome. Other websites implemented MIDI players in JavaScript, but they were usually missing instruments or extremely ineffecient multi-megabyte cross-compiled Emscripten libraries.

I eventually found a .ZIP archive with around 100,000 MIDI files. I wanted a way to search through them and share the best ones with friends. So I decided to build a site to address the shortcomings of existing MIDI sites.

And that’s BitMidi. A free way to browse and play MIDI files!

Feedback welcome!
This always seemed like one of the biggest tangible advantages of being a white dude. When someone criticizes me or shits on my idea, it never even crosses my mind that it might be because of my race or gender.
What problems does Russia share with UAE with respect to hate speech law? They seem pretty far apart.
> Given that the explicit "master" and "slave" relationship definition lacks any other common meanings in any other technical field of English (that I'm aware of), I'm not quite sure I understand your point.

There are plenty of other uses in technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master/slave_(technology)
Even that is too much ABI change. It would take another 20 years for real world embrace the change.

For the record. It took 20 years for GCC to change std::string implementation to COW-based to SSO-based.
So the “real” world is one ruled by corporations where the decision maker on all policies is someone that never comes within earshot of an actual customer transaction?

I guess that is arguably the world we have been trending towards but it’s not the only viable world.
The logic kind of makes sense if you consider that customers will only find a small fraction of the bugs that your team will. Sometimes the cost of removing all bugs is greater than the cost of losing customers to the few unlucky bugs that get found.

But you really need experienced people deciding where that tradeoff lies for each company and project.
Panda Express kicks this up a notch and has a little bell they ring whenever someone donates their change adding an element of social pressure/shame, super scummy
Yes, WF prices are often cheaper for the exact same products vs. other stores, it's just that they also carry a more expensive organic natural chemical-free locally sourced indie niche upgrade of the same thing next to it.
> All I want is lunch.

All they want is to know whether they need to explain to you in detail or if you already have a sense of the menu.

Not sure what you find odd with people trying to provide you good service. smh
An artist in New York took a picture out his window almost every day for 11 years with a large-format film camera. He indeed caught something notable. https://www.amazon.com/Window-Septembers-1995-2005-Reiner-Le...
Did you read the whole article?

"The focus right now, they say, is on identifying all the ways people use URLs to try to find an alternative that will enhance security and identity integrity on the web while also adding convenience for everyday tasks like sharing links on mobile devices."

My statement is clearly supported by the article. They paint a rosy picture of it, because this is a submarine piece, but they are definitely making moves against the url.
Sorry, what's wrong with REI? I've never been asked to donate to charity at my local REI...
It is pre-stressed concrete, it is working in compression against the cable tension.

This seems strange to me.

My understanding is that pre-stressed concrete is concrete with reinforcements inside that apply a compressive force on the concrete. As mentioned by GP, this is to mitigate the effect of tensile forces within the concrete since concrete performs poorly in tension.

Are you suggesting that the cables within the concrete are not just stays, but also the component of the pre-stressed concrete applying a compressive force? Or is the reinforcement some other component?

I would assume that if the cables themselves were applying compressive force to the concrete, then their use as stays releases some of this force since the stays are in tension. Since concrete itself performs poorly in tension, it's going to provide a negligible counter to reinforce the cables even if it is still compressed, since the compression forces are provided by the cables. It seems to me that putting pre-stressed concrete into tension via its reinforcements is defeating the purpose of having pre-stressed concrete in the first place.

Or is concrete in some compression able to respond better in tension by weight than say, a thicker cable at the same weight as the given cable and concrete combined?
Slack status: Connectivity issues
If I only lost 3.8 hr/week for "bad code"...
Unclear requirements are certainly a major cause of inefficiency and technical debt, but I would imagine that over-engineering is at least a close second, and that under-engineering, poor choice of tools and poor choice of processes probably fill out the top 5.

I believe that what is missing more than anything in our industry is the veterans who have gained knowledge and wisdom through both the breadth and the depth of their past roles and can now do better than the previous generation. In real engineering fields or other scientific disciplines like medicine, there is a culture of learning from experience, and the people doing the most challenging jobs often have decades of it. In software development, we laughably call someone with 5 years of experience split between 3 different jobs "senior", and a lot of developers in their 30s are already looking for an escape hatch before ageism halts their career development.

So another good way to leverage developers might be to improve their working environment so they don't all quit just as they're starting to figure out what they're doing.
We might even call it "favicon", for the fun of it… :-)
And this is wrong.
A member of the editorial board said that they wouldn’t do that with the Op Ed

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-daily/id1200361736?m...

Question asked at around 17:00
"SoundWaves" on fdroid. I just searched podcast and downloaded the most recently updated app and it was pretty good.
Fair point. You can argue that not regulating the internet at all is overall better than dealing with all of the bad proposals

It's pretty never ending, and legislators and regulators don't seem to clue in over time. The downsides are very often potentially huge, and the upsides are almost always questionable.

We get to question 2 with internet legislation all the time.

Rather like living someplace where you get to kill cockroaches all the time.

Legislation doesn't exist in a vacuum, and bad legislation is remedied in multiple ways, one of which is more legislation.

The solution to violence is more and better violence? The solution to hostility and hate is better backed and more potent hate? Laws and regulations are manipulated by big corporations to their advantage all the time, sometimes in direct contradiction to how the laws are sold to the public. The best move is to refuse them that power.

it's too fuzzy to be non-ideological, and, practically speaking, the world has already moved on from the question of whether to regulate the internet.

The formulation isn't fuzzy or ambiguous. The proper amount to regulate the internet is as little as possible.
Goto.com was collecting revenue on CPC in 1998 according to wikipedia.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search_Marketing
http://www.ghielectronics.com/products/ucm
They have to recoup the losses from all the free fortune cookies they give.
If you're broke. If you're in debt, you absolutely should be making some sacrifices to get out of debt. Once you have some money saved, feel free to spend on the luxuries you most desire.
That may be true, and while I wholeheartedly disagree with this change, those that are younger than the web are the next Shepard's of the web.

We're going to see more and more changes that the "old folks of the internet" are going to hate. Some, or even many, of these changes will actually be good changes. We shouldn't prejudice on age.

Again, to be clear, I think this particular change is horribly broken.
Note the IRS limit for 401k elective pre-tax contributions is $18,500 but the overall contribution limit, including After-Tax, is $55,000.
I don't know what generation you are from, but I don't see how that makes any difference.

Youtube is an everything-pool. It has garbage, it has wonderful. Generalizing about a site that large is foolish.

You may want to Google "Sturgeon's law".
(Also a white dude.) I think that's not quite the experience, though? I think it's more that members of outgroups feel imposter syndrome more intensely. In other words, the critique is felt more heavily by the individual, not the individual as a member of a specific group.
Organic does not mean healthier.
Interested to hear how you’re estimating these amounts?
Just curious why you explicitly "hope there is no cure"? Seems like an odd wish. If music has little to no effect on you now, why would you even care? Furthermore if a "cure" did exist, what would be the downside of trying it?
Haven't you been pushed about getting an REI membership? I think twice before asking any REI salesman for help, because I know they are going to push me to get a membership. They're doing their job since their incentives are tied to memberships to some degree, but it makes for a poor experience.

/edit:I'd rather be asked about a membership once at the cashier's than by every sales staff I talk to during my visit.
According to the article you linked, based on your age (I'm in the same cohort), the average 401k is worth $91,000. Are you not contributing at all to your 401k? Did you get a late start, or have some hardship that required you to break into the 401k (divorce in my case)?

I've never heard the 3x annual salary in savings, but that also seems super extreme. Assume a salary of $100K per year... No one I know has ~ $300K in their savings. Maybe they have equity in their house, or other equity assets that get them to that sort of number on paper, but I've never heard of someone in our age group (40-50) just having $300K liquid in a bank account.
You should at least build something with the assumption that it will break, and be able to reset and normal itself without loss.

Too much to ask of this generation of young programmers for something like messages on the iPhone. That's not a central feature of a smartphone anyways, right? Just let the user reboot.
> After the hearing and his behavior immediately after I’m guessing they were tired of defending him and having to answer these questions AGAIN.

Did you listen to the hearing?

Jack was being questioned for unfairly silencing conservatives.
You've perfectly discribed the system that already exists. There's a WF app, and there's also a page in the Amazon App that offers the QR Code. Sometimes the scanners installed on the customer side of the POS don't work, so the cashier has to scan it manually. Personally I love being asked if I have a prime account, because they only ask when I haven't already scanned my code, which is something I want to do.
Under 25k/year pre or post tax?
https://www.nealstephenson.com/why-i-am-a-bad-correspondent....

"There is little to nothing that I can offer readers above and beyond what appears in my published writings. It follows that I should devote all my efforts to writing more material for publication, rather than spending a few minutes here, a day there, answering e-mails or going to conferences."

And for the computer programmers:
"Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can’t concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless."

" I am faced with a stark choice between being a bad correspondent and being a good novelist. I am trying to be a good novelist, and hoping that people will forgive me for being a bad correspondent."
I absolutely hate their charity solicitation. If I’m going to donate to anything, it’s going to be a charity of my own choice after a thorough vetting with no middlemen. Next time I go there, I’m tempted to request they round down my total instead.
This is probably the worst update I have ever seen. If they fix the NoScript UI and remove the user agent leaking, I'll be happy. I use Whonix, so the Quantum design looks funky.
The magic number is currently 100 samples; the perturbation size is "adaptive" in that the perturbation size is changed when the expressions appear to equal but they're also close to zero.

The main goal is to make sure that we pass the tests listed in https://github.com/kisonecat/math-expressions/blob/master/sp...
A bit more info about how BitMidi is built...

First step, I needed to build a MIDI player in JavaScript. At first, I was determinted to write one from scratch in JavaScript and use the Web Audio API to synthesize all the instruments in code. I thought this would yield the the smallest possible JavaScript file size.

However, I didn’t really have the audio engineering skills to pull this off. So ended up settling for an approach that uses SoundFonts, which are basically instrument voices or files that contain all the possible notes an instrument can play.

BitMidi uses the instrument voices from the General MIDI sound set released by FreePats.

Then I compiled the best MIDI player written in C (libtimidity) to WebAssembly using Emscripten. I put in lots of effort to optimize the built size and include the minimal amount of code. The result of my efforts are available in the npm package timidity (https://github.com/feross/timidity). It’s quite lightweight – just 34 KB of JavaScript and 23 KB of lazy-loaded WebAssembly, smaller than anything I’ve seen on any other site.

Then I put a frontend on it, so it’s easy to browse all the files. BitMidi uses all the best techniques that I know about to make it super fast and snappy. The site gets perfect 100s on all categories on Chrome’s Lighthouse Performance benchmark, which is extremely non-trivial in my experience.

I plan to ingest a lot more MIDI files in the future, from sources like the Geocities MIDI archive on the Internet Archive and elsewhere.
And just because it's not a good practice doesn't mean that making both www and non www version look the same to the user and having it "just randomly not load" is a step forward for usability.
This is exactly why like programming with clojure, the REPL and the editor are the same thing, so you can send + execute code in the REPL from the editor. In practice, I'm never typing anything directly into the REPL, which is in contrast to say something like rails' console.
Unrelated to pagerduty directly but related to the pricing aspect. I couldn't convince the owner of a company that he should spend 50 bucks a month on a service that would literally save him 40 minutes every day. I guess his time was worth less than a buck an hour. The particular software was also amazingly easy to integrate into our ecosystem too.