skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Crowdsourcing problems in different professions
Hello. My name is Sunil Kumar C and I love building new tools through technology that solve everyday problems we face.
Until now I used to build tools to solve my own problems. But lately I've been thinking if we have a curated list of problems that different professionals face in their daily life, it would help all the programmers like me to come up with different products that can solve those problems.

Through this post I'm trying to crowdsource those problems/pain points that you guys face. Please go ahead and list the problems that you would like to be solved. If you do not see the profession you're looking for, feel free to add a new column :)

Questions which will help you think about problems: What stops you being more profitable? What tasks do you do everyday? What can be automated? What do you hate doing in your business? What product can help you save 2-4 hours per week of your time? etc...

Link - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eDaw3smJ0pvKRm2lc8NkZncTeZr1tjilv7eZuxJnf6s/edit?usp=sharing

I'm really looking forward to see some inputs from all of you!
The big tech/medical records companies will have to lead the charge here. Imagine that big tech sets the standard, and the hospitals who are abiding by the standard receive an "Apple Health Certified" stamp of approval.

These certified hospitals have increased visibility within the curated marketplace and gain greater access to patients. This then naturally creates an incentive for hospitals to catch the standard, lest they be left behind. The tech companies are willing to put in the effort, it gives them access to a new marketplace.
> US is often in top 10, or at least mid-tier.

Yet US govt healthcare spending is absurdly high and far out of line with the rest of the world either per person or by gdp.

Seems to suggest that efficiency is terrible and that's still ignoring the out of pocket costs to the end consumer.
I owe my understanding of TCP/IP to running at 1200 bauds, half duplex, with poor collision detection.

http://www.ka9q.net/code/ka9qnos/
14 New Features in MacOS 10.14 Mojave
Here's the log I keep which tracks what I did every day I worked on it (except for a few months in the beginning when the project was still kind of nebulous):

https://github.com/munificent/craftinginterpreters/blob/mast...
My Go v1.11 compiler still emits symbols from `musl-libc` for static builds on linux. I had to dig through on object dump just on friday.
That's not strictly true. The schools each have one time when mandatory attendance starts, and one time when mandatory attendance ends, but they all open their doors earlier, and close down later, when the student presence is still permitted. The bus schedules revolve around that 90% of kids that show up just for class and then leave for home afterward, but if there is a local need, it is usually technically possible to fill it. It just takes money. The problem is that the need and the money only rarely intersect.

Some school cafeterias even serve breakfast--mostly for kids with subsidized meals, who may not be able to eat regularly otherwise. That is state or federal money available to open earlier. Youth diversion program money can keep a school open later. It is entirely possible for a kid to be at school continuously for 12 hour intervals, every weekday, with no additional burden on the local taxes. Meanwhile, in the suburban schools, the clubs and extracurricular activities are powered by fees paid by the parents directly, and some kids get picked up and dropped off by private cars, as part of their parents' commutes, never even seeing the inside of a school bus.
uses 100% CPU even when idle

That sucks.

Anecdotally, I've never seen this, even when I had 1 external 4K and 1 external 2K connected. The whole OS was kind of sluggish at that point, but that was definitely asking a lot out of a puny integrated 3-year old laptop GPU so eh.

Just did a quick informal test with my current setup:

- MacOS High Sierra.

- 2015" MBP with no discrete GPU.

- Single 4K external monitor, 3008x1692 scaled resolution.

- uBlock is off.

With only a single blank tab open FF uses 0% CPU as expected. I opened three tabs: Facebook, Espn.com, and MSNBC.com. There was a brief flurry of CPU activity as the sites loaded, and FF's processes are now idling comfortably at 0-1%.

I repeated the process with Chrome and results were similar. One difference is that Chrome spawns 10x as many processes, but they seem to consume less memory each.

In both FF and Chrome, there's a palpable (500 or 750ms?) delay when switching tabs. In my experience a lot of Mac apps behave that way at scaled 4K resolutions.

I repeated this informal test in Safari and it "feels faster"; less CPU spike on initial site load and switching browser tabs feels close to instant.
>the attitude that rigor and formal technique is worth the additional effort

Commercially speaking - it's usually not.
Ah I understand, half the battle is terminology (I was introduced to the 'weights' as hard and soft constraints, with corresponding penalties against the fitness function score).

Even though I did research on it, I found that the field is subject to a lot of colloquialisms (for lack of a better term) when it comes to different research cliques, and therefore the terminology I use isn't any more of less correct as a result.

It seems like you've got as good a handle on it as anyone.

My research was mainly involving investigating parallelism of the above algorithm (not very friendly to parallelism without work).

Nowadays, there's so many academic open source optimizers, as well as commerical, that I would usually tell people if you're solving for a business case, it's often more cost effective to frame your problem in a format digestible by the solvers and let them at it than writing the solvers yourself.

Of course, where's the fun in that? I'm jealous that you got to use this for a problem that you had, rather than in my approach which was for a problem I didn't need solved myself. I bet that was satisfying.
In addition to the resources others have posted, I recommend picking up a copy of the AMSAT Getting Started book: https://www.amsat.org/product/2018-edition-of-getting-starte...
Stripe is testing cash advances
Thank you very much! This is what I will do!
I see plenty of usage in automation. Most domestic (US) manufacturing is highly automated, there's simply no way around it. However, for some parts of the factory, tracks/wheels just don't cut it -- think iron works, rougher terrain, variable terrain etc. A bipedal or quadrupedal robot could make lots of sense.

There's also military usage -- if you can build an autonomous robot, it's not not much of a stretch to use those same design chops to augment a human.

Granted, the last one is fairly speculative, but their market is composed entirely of B2B/G and those customers are likely going to get their own highly customized versions of the robots Boston Dynamics produces for a princely sum.
The creator of that site, Coraline Ada Ehmke, is also the creator of the new Linux kernel CoC.
Do you have any source of people spending hours planning garbage pick-up routes and how that has changed with software?
The iPhone XS Max is outselling the iPhone XS, according to analyst report
i really dislike speed traps. i'd even support a proposition to convert all speed limits to suggested speeds (thereby abolishing fines for speeding). you could and should still punish dangerous driving, but speed by itself wouldn't serve as the threshold for unsafe driving.
Microsoft upgrades Azure and Office 365 security at Ignite conference – Axios
Meta-comment: if you're producing a video of a presentation with lots of equations on the slides, PLEASE make the slides larger than a postage-stamp. I wanted to be able to follow this in detail, but was unable to do so because the slides were illegible, and following them verbally was something that even tripped up the presenter.
I have to say: I like to be charged as much as FastMail charges. It gives me some sense that they will not be out of business or quit in a year or two. I like FastMail to still exist in 50 years.
Also known as binary frequency shift keying (BFSK).
Sounds exactly like a proper use case for a blockchain.
Show HN: Mastering Modular JavaScript
A crazy amount of new Azure infrastructure announcements
> Whatever beef you have with Toyota, Japanese, or buzzwords just seems inappropriate here and lowers the quality of discussion.

Hey, I'm sorry it came across that way, because I don't have a beef with anyone. But I've explained and expanded on what I've said in this thread a lot before you came along with that comment, and I think it's uncalled for (and "lowers the quality of discussion") to assume bad faith the way that you're doing right now.
Outright selling a vocation isn't what four year colleges do. If that's all you want, do a certificate program at a community college. Nothing wrong with them. If you want to retool from doing oil changes to being a CNC Operator or writing Javascript it's a very good option.

Vocational training in a four year program is a side-effect, not a feature.
I am told SiriusXm pays car manufacturers around $150 for thi s bundle. For many low end cars even this matters to the car companies. SiriusXM is equivalent of toolbars that laptop companies bundled with the preinstalled browsers.

If you buy a high end car though things are different. I have got 5 years of SirusXM subscription for free.
You should be able to talk to anyone in the USA with 100W and a wire antenna.

I think the bigger issue is noise in urban areas. The FCC does a shit job of regulating noisy equipment. I had to go through my house and dispose of certain Ethernet switches, an audio device, notebook power supply, etc.
I wish they'd fix the 7 days transfers in the EU. I don't get how the service can be so bad here and yet stacking layers of iteration and evolving elsewhere.
Release 1.2.71
> and one I didn’t realize had adopted it.

You can see how you not noticing it is incompatible with your comments about CoCs being the end of the fucking world, right?
Oh my god, thank you for telling me about this. I just upgrade from a 6s to a SE and I've dearly missed being able to move the cursor around with force touch (the only useful force touch feature.) Just checked and holding the spacebar works great. Thanks!
One person’s notion of “ahead” may not match another’s. You could also say that China’s lack of data protection laws and norms puts them way behind the West in terms of user privacy. Sure, “the West” is inconsistent in its protection of people’s data. There is no Gold Standard country or regulation to point to. But we are still unarguably way ahead of China in this regard.
Google's new activity cards will save your previous searches
I just googled it and they seem to be MCUs with no programmable logic?

What feature gives them a taste of an FPGA?
It may not be "on purpose," but it is happening. Creators of algorithms inherently assign their own biases.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/1...

http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512

Also note that the top "organic" result on Google's search for "Gun Rights" is just a tag page from NPR. There is no way that's a relevant result. So even if it's not on purpose, it's a very poor result...and given it stands out more so than other keyword searches it seems a bit odd.

Edit: down voted for citing study from the National Academy of Sciences, bubbles certainly are thick.
I made decent progress solving the puzzles in Myst until I got to that rocket ship and discovered that my tin ear was a showstopper.

It didn't help that my machine (A Mac LC with 4 MB of RAM) was only barely powerful enough to run the game, and when it ran out of resources the first thing to go was the sound.
WeWork Does Bodegas
Are they? Do you have any evidence that lost/overbooked bookings are decreased on software-based booking systems?
Fair point, I bet there is extensive testing going on at this point though. There could be considerable competitive advantage to surprising an enemy with a new technology, even though the tech appears very immature today
Yeah, consent doesn't really exist in the context of wage slavery.

While it's certainly true that if these jobs were forced to pay a reasonable minimum wage there would be some less work to do, most of the world has already conceded the point that pure supply-and-demand is not an acceptable way to negotiate wages - we agree that some minimum wage is useful to protect those without other options.

If I weren't already off-topic, this is where I would veer into advocating for basic income.
Also released in 1993 was the first of the X-wing series from LucasArts. I ended up only playing Myst a couple years later, after hearing so much hype... but the pace was so different that it wasn't living up to that hype for my personal tastes. Still, even not being a big fan, I do recall that everyone talked about it, even in those days where gaming was nowhere near the popularity it is today.
Build a Desktop App with Electron and Authentication – Okta Developer
My reasons are very pragmatic: I found that OO doesn't bring me any benefits, while imposing a significant cost.

This realization came as I switched to Clojure: it found that I'd rather use the generic data structures with the excellent functions that come with the standard library. This gave me much better reusability than inheritance. Enforcing contracts can be done in a multitude of ways, and I no longer liked the idea that the only way to enforce data integrity is by keeping the data private and accessible only using "accessors".

Debugging OO code can be a major nightmare. Reading and understanding it is also difficult. How do you know which method implementation will get called at a certain point in your program? You really have no idea until you run it and dynamic dispatch happens. This is also a problem with Clojure multimethods, although it is somewhat mitigated by Clojure's explicit dispatch fn.

As for data modeling, I found that inheritance isn't such a useful tool in practice. It looks great in theoretical problems, but in practice the perfect "is a kind-of" relationship is rare.

The final nail in the coffin was Clojure's STM. Immutable data structures bring so many benefits that after using them for a while it is unthinkable to me right now to go back to mutating data in-place.
If you do a lot of debugging or reverse-engineering, FF’s dev tools lacks a lot of essential tooling compared to Chrome.

Things like getting all event listeners for a DOM element (with inspectable closure variable values), local workspaces, blackboxing files and folders, async-spanning stack traces, saving CSS/JS edits to source files, document event breakpoints...
So you're saying Python devs are all libertarians? :D

<braindump>

I agree that coding/development is an art, but I also am hard pressed
to find anything that, when done well, isn't an art.

The difference is that music doesn't have any really notion of correctness
or efficiency; sure, there are ideas such as "no parallel fifths" and "tritones must resolve to M3 or m6", but this isn't an issue of
correctness, but rather stylistic guidelines. Schoenberg's compositions
weren't incorrect in any universal sense.

Programs, on the other hand, can be incorrect or inefficient. This is because most
programs have a concrete function that they produce.

Dynamic types are great for exploring your solution space. I can quickly
whip together a prototype, try out different solutions, etc. I don't need
to design my entire program ahead of time, and this is nice. However this
does not prevent me from reasoning formally about my program. Once I've
muddled around a bit and built up some scaffolding, it very well may behoove
me to try to shore up my design, spend some time reasoning and designing a
formal algorithm/specification/etc, etc.

And for the record, as a musician I definitely think formally about my
compositions/pieces I'm playing. Granted, being a guitarist this usually
doesn't involve me writing out my pieces with sheet music, but there is
still a blend of intuition/exploration and brute computation.

As an example, I often times have two disparate parts that I need to
connect together, maybe by modulating, maybe by changing registers, or
maybe by altering my time signature. At that point I put the guitar aside
for a moment and think about my formal requirements, and then try to find
some 'convincing' way to get from point A to point B. Maybe I have some
constraints (I have two measures, I need to start in this position and end
in that position, this finger needs to pedal this note, etc). This quickly
becomes a math problem where only a small set of viable solutions exist.
After 'doing the math' I am left to evaluate my solutions aesthetic quality
which, I suppose, is where most people think of the 'artistic' bit comes
into play. But really, I'd say artistry abounds throughout the process.

And to be clear, I'm not thinking about this stuff as doing math as I'm
doing it--I have my own system for thinking about this stuff that doesn't
look like math.

Anyway, all of this is to say that formalism can be used even in music with
very real benefits.

</brain-dump>
All the competition shows substantially more storage. Plus they offer other services.

So no, their pricing is not on par.
On that note, I am surprised that they added Fusion-awareness to APFS, rather than just putting APFS on top of CoreStorage.

It certainly is better to have the filesystem aware of the Fusion situation, but...measurably, significantly better? Would the experience have been significantly worse without it? 10.13 betas allowed APFS use on Fusion drives, presumably without any Fusion-awareness in the FS.

I'm surprised, but happy to see they did it.
Best way of disabling Google Chrome sign in and sync: Uninstall Chrome.
> ...disasters unlikely to strike...

Meanwhile, I'm preparing for the M9.0 earthquake that is overdue near the Portland metro area. Portland will burn like a roll of toilet paper when that quake strikes.
An AX.25 packet radio chat protocol with support for digital signatures and binary compression. Like IRC over radio waves

I just wanted to say thank you for such a concise, clear summary. So many projects get posted with cryptic descriptions full of insider terms.
You explained perfectly the reason why I used the term "survive" :P Thank you! :)
Execute Java from SQL Server 2019 ML Services
I program as you say 'similar to writing music'.

This is because given all of the levels of various languages, frameworks, and libraries- I'm just trying to get things to work.

However, I would very much like the methodical engineering approach at my day job applied to programming.

It really blows my mind we don't have full stack + auth that works cross platform out-of-the-box. It blows my mind my recent framework didnt show the post request exchange to get tokens and authenticate.

There are NOT that many people that program at this level. It seems most of my programming questions are answered by asking experts rather than reading a wikipedia article. Electrical and Mechanical Engineering are better solved reading rather than asking engineers. IMO.
Audible has a similar ridiculous thing going on. At any point you can cancel your $15 a month subscription and they will ask if you want to pay $7 instead. Anyone with this knowledge can easily get the service for $7 forever. Or you can start infinite trials and get infinite free books.
Not if I wanted to use a bicycle on it. Some states even allow usage of mopeds on roads without registration.
Just be careful before ripping out too much!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
Is that code for nausea inducing? ;)

The perl implementation is full of this sort of stuff. Some corners are hardly penetrable because of it. I'll be visiting the offices in MSN and KIR/SEA next week. Happy to rant over coffee or a drink some night if timing works out.
Bill Bur in "You people are all the same"
80 exabytes of heart ultrasounds? I don't believe that.
I wonder if current attempts at EHR interoperability are a case of "the perfect is the enemy of the good". Obviously the ideal solution would be one where well-structured interoperable datasets are produced and shared. This would enable very targeted analysis of patient data, and sophisticated clinical decision support functionality. However, it seems like this is still not happening, and the convoluted nature of many HL7 standards is certainly not helping.

So I've come to think that it would actually be preferable to put most of the health data into PDF-like documents, and focus on optimizing the accessibility of the data through good full-text document search that can assemble an overview by showing document snippets (i.e., allowing to get a broad cross-document overview through document previews, rather than requiring opening each document individually).

I guess some kind of especially important data, such as information on current medication or drug intolerance should really be kept in a fully structured format to enable clinical decision support, but for a lot of other information, a light-weight system based on unstructured data combined with good information retrieval tools would already improve on the status quo quite significantly.
This can happen and did happen before. Maybe being suspicious of an algorithm is not a bad things, we should have extremely high standards for them ! My hope is that some people will just have a better view of how complicated this problem is, and be able to construct their own opinion from there. And this would already be something I would be proud of!
Isn't it more likely that they had a class limit of 50 and not that the 750 didn't have the chops to become a software engineer?
This is the claim. In reality, if they can figure out that you are a member of the John Birch Society or otherwise rejecting things (even outside of the written assignment) you'll be lucky to get a D. For example, if they happen to spot you outside of class trying to raise support for the "wrong" political cause, then that might affect the grade.

If presenting to NIH and DARPA is what matters, surely there are far more efficient and effective ways to teach this. It doesn't have to suck up 2.5% of a human lifetime and the cost of a 3-bedroom house.
I wonder if that's why American manufacturers didn't listen to Deming in the first place, until after he taught Japanese manufacturers how to kick their asses.
yes. It's your email. If you're in the market for improving how you interface with one of your number one communication mechanisms, you'll probably look at investing a tiny amount of money into it.
> Consider, however, that you are a computer scientist in 2012 that has been working in the field of image recognition using hand written algorthms for 20 years. You are the best in your field, highly respected. Your code has been refactored so many times that you think it is near perfect.

> Then along comes a young PhD student named Alex, and presents a completely different way of doing image recognition. Instead of talking about "refactoring", the talks about "retraining" or "rewireing". Instead of talking about "software architecture" he talks about "network topology". While you are "unit testing", he is "regularizing". He is still refactoring and building software architecture, you say, but for him, those are less important.

Sounds like an intro to an unusually intellectual and a tad weird porn clip.
If anybody is still jonesing for that Myst hit, the pointlessly-online version is completely free to play:

https://mystonline.com/en/
A first look at what is new in SQL Server 2019 Machine Learning Services. Yes, we can now execute Java code from inside SQL Server.
per transported students. The transportation cost are more than 100 million per year.
Google adds activity cards and collections to search results
FYI stray period at the end of your link breaks it :)