skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are more hams in the US, and more active hams, than ever before. That's a funny sort of dying!

Joe Taylor's work on below-the-noise signal extraction has revitalized shortwave: https://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/k1jt/wsjtx.html , particularly at the nadir of the sunspot cycle. That's a funny sort of dying!

Amateur satellites are accessible for $100 in parts: https://www.n2yo.com/satellites/?c=18 ; with the same parts and some practice and luck you can talk to the space station. That's cool for anyone but especially cool for students; NASA will do more amateur radio work in 2018 than in any previous year. That's a funny sort of dying!

If encryption were permitted on amateur bands, I'd expect to see commercialization right quick—along the same lines as the PACTOR modems embraced by the long-duration recreational sailing community: https://www.cruisingworld.com/staying-connected-at-sea
I experience issues with poor requirements everyday. The single biggest problem I see is that the people writing the requirements have no idea how to write them. We do not need a tool as much as we need better training.
Actually, I am surprised to find it here. I've jumped into Data Science with one of the earliest iterations of this course, and can't recommend it enough.

It's just enough to start doing, but compared to other MOOCs it also requires to up your math skills (I've skipped every piece of theory that required a math proof to go further).

But the real gem for me were the homework assignments.
1. Totally doable with just a laptop (no GPUs / tons of memory required).
2. Interesting enough to not quit.
3. Much better than just a questionnaire that you get from other courses.
This library has some very minor syntax sugar. Async/await is currently the most ergonomic abstraction for handling single-thread concurrency.
This is pretty much a return to the mid nineties AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, etc. era.
I see that often in smaller hotels: they sell rooms in several online systems, then reconcile it all in a copybook.

Personally, I had interesting booking.com situations too. Like, I arrive to a booked apartment, dial the password, the door opens, I see lots of Chinese people who arrived just before me. 2am.
> would you be fired on the spot from your workplace if these comments were discovered

That is not a simple rule at all: there are all kinds of workplaces out there in the world, some of which allow drunk naked people cursing while puking at the same time.
Apple, Samsung Hunt Elusive MicroLED – EE Times
I don't remember why I dismissed liquibase when I was looking at the options. Maybe it was seeing that 'Role-Based Authentication' is only supported in the paid version? I ended up getting most of what I needed out of pgquarrel although I think I ended up manually maintaining the auth parts anyway. If/when it comes up again, maybe I'll take another look at liquibase.

Ultimately, yeah, I just got better at keeping track of the changes myself as in the article you link in your GitHub README: http://www.liquibase.org/2007/06/the-problem-with-database-d...
Feeling this acutely today. I switched my home desktop from Arch to Ubuntu since there is some software in the AUR that I want to use, but the package builds are broken. Arch is a community project so, not blaming anyone except the guy that randomly decided to rebase his package on the git without telling anyone and didn't bother to find out what the dependencies are.

Anyway, got everything set up. Everything working fine. Rebooted a few times: no problem. Popped in an extra hard drive which is just for file storage for Steam games. Reboot and... nothing. Pulled the hard drive. Nothing. The operating system is now in a completely broken state. No start up messages, nothing. Not even NumLock on the keyboard works.

I have no idea what happened.
With Google Inbox getting shut down, a lot of people jumped ship to astro.

Just kind of funny.

I'm sure a fair amount of people are pulling their hair out
> What point are you trying to illustrate? Are you saying I shouldn't have been called out on it? Because I disagree. The fact was, I found the post I replied to annoying, and I replied in a tone that was stronger than it needed to be. It's a good thing that was called out. Next time I'll take a breather before replying and we'll have a more constructive exchange.

See, that's what I disagree with. To me that reads like almost pathological conflict-avoidance, or maybe it's the urge to not be a hypocrite. Either way, it's unnecessarily submissive and it's making you weak.
I'd totally rely on my Desktop for any serious work, and use such a mythical iPad as the mobile machine I can use to SSH into servers, VNC into desktop, run simple editors, email etc.

But, I don't think we're going to see that...
This was a great comment.

The fact that new notations/representations (be that tests, simulations, formal methods, etc.) must justify their additional cognitive overhead is a great point.

Aside from unit and integration tests, I think that substantial new notation/infrastructure is most justifiable when the second notation/setting allows you to model parts of the problem that can't be modeled in the original notation.

Embedded software is a good example. Although there are some tools that allow you to model the physical system alongside the control software, typically the code is written in C and so there's no way of expressing very important aspects of the problem in the implementation language. So a second notation can help. For example, simulators and HiL setups for testing or things like https://github.com/LS-Lab/KeYmaeraX-release for formal methods.

Security is another good example. Typically code does not include an explicit threat model or explicit security properties, and these aspects of the problem are often scattered across the code and difficult to reason about. So being able to capture those things directly in a second notation can add a lot. For example, automatic vulnerbaility scaners for testing or https://tamarin-prover.github.io/ for formal methods.

Distributed/fault-tolerant systems are yet another example where it's very hard to state the thing you want to state in the implementation language. Netflix's chaos monkey comes to mind.
I have no problem with a mouse solution that's only active in textareas. But, as others note, if the external display is a real option then a mouse becomes necessary. Personally, I still doubt the iPad will drive external displays.
Nice article, but it's from 2013.
> As much as I might like Chrome (and Google)

Why would you? Brokering data in a borderline illegal or immoral way is their business model.
California hardly has a Republican party at all anymore but produces more greenhouse gas than any other state.

And before you try to rationalize this with "per capita" arguments....you don't lose your home or get cancer "per capita"...the absolute numbers matter and California has higher absolute numbers than any other state.
> if their parents didn’t think it was beneficial

Who are the "parents" in this case?
Thanks for your insight. I think the work itself was really interesting and super useful. My point is just that often great work is a tiny component of successfully convincing a semi-rational and biased populace of agreeing to something. It's just plain hard.

I hope you'll keep on doing great stuff like this even if sometimes the surrounding political situation outside of your control is messy and sometimes feels discouraging.
My point was that in some cases, it's easier for the NSA to snoop when the target is outside of the USA.
Yeah, I was thinking it could add some "walking" moves to get away from the edge. Rotate two sides together like two wheels.
Are You Discount Your Prospects for the Right Reasons?
It works in iOS Chrome but only on Google properties. I agree Safari is a problem, I’m not sure it’s the only pinch point. They managed to glue it all together with app links and URL schemes.

(Chrome on iOS works fine with Krypton on the same phone, effectively giving me the SEP U2F I want, just with gross UX.)
That's a great question, that I asked myself a lot.

I think this project was useful because it started this debate and brought more information to the table. For example, I found that a lot of people did not know how much the start times affected the district costs (tens of millions of dollars every year), or how the schools times seemed to be unequitable.

And this Boston Globe article allows even more people to read about this issue and make their own opinion. Ultimately, a lot of people in the US want later start times for high schoolers. This work can provide some information about the ways to implement such a change, as well as the consequences.
And to be fair, since then FPGAs have exploded in non ASIC prototyping use cases.

They're even starting to be used for some consumer electronics.
and I still haven't bought an fpga :p lies (jk)
It was clearly an analogy, not a literal interpretation of the facts.
I came here to say almost the exact same thing. From age ~10 onwards, I would walk to school with my younger sibling in order to get to school for 0850. When I moved schools in year 7, I left slightly earlier to accommodate the change in distance as the school started at the same time, and my sibling walked alone (they were then ~10). My parents went to work whenever they needed to.

I could alternatively have taken a (public transport) bus, but the fare would have come out of my pocket (i.e. out of the small monthly allowance I was given to spend on whatever I chose).
Does that mean that you need a Facebook account to work at Walmart now? People should have the right to not use Facebook.
> Sorting through 1 novemtrigintillion options — that’s 1 followed by 120 zeroes —

"Trying 10^120 options..."

We can stop padding our writing to make page length and column inches now. Digital media has a page area that is exactly as large as you need it to be.

If you're a journalist, even in long form stories, your working vocabulary is essentially the 3000 most-used words, and anything outside that should be easily understood from context alone. If you have to follow a word with its definition, you need to write something else. I don't know who edited this, but their iron palm of author-correction should have started the smack after "novem" and finished it before reading to the end of the "illion". A large number doesn't need a large word to describe it.

The essence of the problem is this. Balance the following factors:

(1) Supervise the children of working adults, without interfering with their work day.

(2) Transport those children between their homes and their schools, at minimum cost.

(3) Teach the kids how to be working adults after they graduate. (3a) Prepare a fraction of the kids for further education, to associates or bachelors.

In light of research into school start times as a factor of academic performance, they asked some MIT grad students to improve on goal (3) by giving high-school students later start times, with minimal impact to (2) from the new bus schedules. The algorithm devised to do so failed to sufficiently account for goal (1)--with all of its obfuscated hidden requirements--which made the whole plan fail.

They simply forgot, or never knew, that the primary purpose of public education in the US is to allow both parents to work outside the home, and to subsidize companies that have extended business hours with state-provided supervision for the children of their employees--a benefit usually paid for by the employees themselves via the property taxes on their homes.

The technical solution is easy. The political solution, which includes an admission that this is one of the goals baked into the public schools system, is nigh impossible.
It makes no sense that money police collects goes directly towards funding any government department. It should go into a tax refund pool.
Lamport is famous in part for his work on LaTeX, the document typesetting language. It is Turing complete. Should no one write papers in LaTeX?
Certainly there are an awful lot of startups that fail over issues like this. They either invest massive effort into seeking technical fixes that don't exist for human problems, or they find genuinely superior technical answers that are impossible to achieve - because they upset key parties, or because the cost of change is too high, or because they just sound too damn silly to sell people on.

But in this case, I'm not sure there was anything to be done. (As you acknowledge - I'm not disagreeing, just looking at the point.) Two grad students whose background was overwhelmingly technical were brought in to provide a technical solution. They had enormous amounts of logistical information, but it's not clear they had social/political information about their task, and certainly they had no control over messaging and notification.

The outrage appears to have been less about the use of an algorithm than about massive disruptions to schedules. It's a predictable outcome - school start times are largely set around common parent work schedules - but it's also an irreducible one. The desired outcome was the source of the anger, however much the computer derivation added insult to injury. Doctors have been calling for these changes for years and been utterly ignored. The school district I grew up in tried something a lot like this a decade ago, with no fancy algorithm, and was slapped down with similar fury.

At a certain point I think the error was not the superintendent seeking a technical solution to changing start times, but seeking a solution at all on a topic where parents didn't want change.

(If I were to really get inflammatory, I might mention that school is a classic principal-agent problem, and the proposal failed because it tried to trade the agents' convenience for the principals' health. But that's another, uglier debate.)
Uber, Lyft drivers earning less than 1/2 of what they did 4 years ago: study
MacOS Mojave Privacy Bypass Flaw Allows Access to Protected Files
Ask HN: How to support and groom polyopoly to destroy monopoly?
To destroy monopoly the first step is to achieve polyopoly where multiple small companies are being used and supported, they may be doing some unpleasant stuff like the monopoly but since they are all separated they wont be as efficient as a one big monopoly. They will be broken down into pieces and then we can promote and use polyopoly.

For some mild inconvenience we can all stay sane.
Can you explain this more? I'm not arguing with you, I just don't fully understand the context of the joke.
You call this "quaint" if not "prehistoric". Yet you neither demonstrate that this view is old, nor explain why an old view is necessarily a wrong one.

The fact that, in 2018, much commercially-produced entertainment runs counter to Rogers' views says nothing about whether he was correct.
>Supermarket perishables are the classic example of things that have to be delivered within a very short time.

Yeah, but we've managed that in the 60s and 80s without so much as the web. Trucks are still needed of course.
Tricky DoS Attack Crashes Mozilla Firefox
Having the word "gun" in the title explains why the "gun control" page is listed first. Positing Google does it because they have an agenda besides showing relevant results fails the law of parsimony here.

Please explain how Google implements its agenda into the search results people see before mocking other people's statements.
As a developer, I would feel shifting the blame with this) I am writing a follow-up on how to do better, though!
The survey answers in this report, from people who say they enjoy this work, refute this notion. Many of the workers say they are learning interesting things. (Also, a surprising number have significant educational backgrounds, implying they have other work choices.)

Also, the systems themselves certify high-performing workers over time, who then become eligible for higher-paying microtasks.
Around the 30 minute-mark, I noticed some weird syntax that I've never seen before. I dabble in C++ at my job, so I'm not a total newbie. But what do those braces mean on 'weekday'? Is that some kind of class constructor or something?

Code in question was:

cout << weekday{October/19/2017} << '\n';
Paper Trails: Living and Dying with Fragmented Medical Records
Well, kinda. Now the choice is made at what browser you use.
zoho.com domain is blocked
Python has a famous adage `explicit better than implicit`.

You want to be explicit but still concise while writing python.

I do not have any experience with Java, but I guess when writing Java you can feel that you use too many words than needed (i.e. definition of verbose [0]), wikipedia has a hello world example[1] and it feels just heavy.

IMHO if you write pythonic code, very often it feels like writing/reading prose, seems like talking to computer. You are not too implicit, neither too verbose.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/verbose

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language)#"H...
this is not how they do it
>Surely HCI/UI/UX prinicples have come a long way since 1998.

There's been lots of progress, e.g. dark patterns have become much more harmful. 1998 was full dot-com boom time, and it's about then that people realized serving users wasn't as profitable as exploiting them.
I believe it is healthy to take at least some aspect of their mind-set on this.

Unless you have a contract with a golden parachute, anything could happen in a moments notice. Very few people outside of senior management have such parachutes, and even then not all of them negotiated for a good one.

If nothing else, keep your resume and linkedin up to date.
I haven't watched the full talk, so let me know if this gets explored by Lamport, but...

Here's a thought: PL researchers seem to generally agree that typed languages are superior to untyped languages, yet programmers tend to prefer untyped languages to typed languages, to the point where Java and C++ have the fanciest type systems in common use, with ML being the closest thing to an academic language that gets significant use.

It seems intuitive to me that typed languages are bad for exploring algorithmic design, so could this where the disconnect is? Most programmers do not know what algorithm their final product is going to have when they start and dynamic languages are much more ergonomic when you are exploring he design space.

Certainly if I knew exactly what program I was going to write when I started, I could probably write it in haskell; indeed once I have a working program, translating it to haskell is often fairly mechanical. However much of my time is spent trialing algorithms that may or may not be a good fit for the problem I'm solving and in those cases I feel like haskell gets in my way, while lisp gets out of my way.

I don't know if there is any practical takeaway from this, but it does seem to at least give an explanation for the divide between PL theory and practice.
I'm not the commenter you're replying to, but here's my interpretation:

Elsewhere in this thread, the entire concept of employment regulation is called into question. The history of employment law goes back to child labor regulations. So if you reject all employment regulation, you also reject child labor regulation. This is a very fringe argument that is a nonstarter with basically everyone. If, on the other hand, you don't reject child labor regulations, then you accept the premise that employment regulation is sometimes necessary, and now we're just haggling over the details.
I have mailboxes with over 70-100k messages in them in Mail.app, and they never take longer than about 0.5-2.5 seconds to load up when switching to them (the higher range being when the system is also under load).

I have a few small gripes with Mail.app (it occasionally claims that some messages are unread that aren't, for instance), but nothing I've seen of other mail clients has led me to think they'd ever be better for my workflow.
You can get a U2F device that lives in your phone’s SEP, right now, for free. U2F kegs are not $50.

https://krypt.co/
This seems like an extremely expensive move. Reading TFA, it isn't clear whether these are the costs of moves or of home buyouts. If these estimates are for buyouts, they should be multiplying by the number of households, not the number of people. Also many of these properties are vacation homes or rentals. It's fine to help people whose primary residences are threatened, but we shouldn't subsidize poor investments.
I was trying to think of a place to stick the money that wouldn't incentivize over-policing and couldn't think of one. But your option is perfect. There's obviously no incentive for government employees to return money to tax payers, so if anything, this would incentivize under-enforcement of fines and fees.
> Just because something isn't that hard, doesn't mean we don't slip up sometimes. So I'd stand by my assessment. It isn't that hard. I expect it of myself and my team. I still sometimes fail. Then a CoC, being called out on it, and given constructive criticism helps me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(psychology)#Disintegr...
Sometimes I wonder what in the world people are thinking. Does anybody actually find this a remotely reasonable estimate? Or even anything completely short of absolutely ridiculous? I moved, along with my wife, literally half way around the world for less than $5k. For $200k, you could spend a like 2% of that on moving costs and then practically retire in many parts of the world.

In the US the median personal income is around $35k. So you spend let's say $2000 moving and then you have $198k, or more than what most people will earn over the next 5 years for what?
But it's more difficult to redirect all/most messages to a class/instance to another class/instance. Especially if there is no message passing going on ...
Somehow on iOS 12 my iPhone 6s only works on Spacebar, not anywhere on the Keyboard.
Astro is joining Slack
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/865
Three Cybersecurity Hotspots to Watch – EE Times
The grammar must have been butchered when creating an HN-friendly title.

The current WaPo headline: "What happens to police departments that collect more fines? They solve fewer crimes."
OK, so what did I get wrong? Please explain exactly which facts are incorrect, and what the correct version would be. Or is "revisionist" just a content-free dismissal of something other than your personal preferred narrative? Put up your version, and we'll see who the revisionist is.
Now I've only got one problem remaining: how do I upgrade my old U2F-capable NEO on all the websites? Do I have to keep it with me ad infinitum? I cannot really destroy it either, as I cannot be 100 % sure I've remembered to enroll my new Yubikey 5.

This raises a more generic question: What's the proper upgrade path for hardware authentication tokens?
If the best option for these workers is earning sub-minimum wage via MTurk to pay for life's basics, then society, through its income distribution patterns, not Amazon, is threatening them harm.

Which makes it society's responsibility, through regulatory mechanisms, to improve the workers options.
Agreed. Anonymity and privacy come from lots of little actions, none of which provide much value on their own.

For example, our return mail address labels don't have our names on them... and I use them on the back of the envelope to seal the envelope.

Our trash and recycling is emptied into our bins loose, so all our trash is not isolated to its own bags, it mingles with the rest of the trash.

Neither of these provide a lot of value on their own, but they're easy to do and provide a little value.