skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After watching the GIF on the README.md I was like "WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL MY LIFE" (actually just the past 10'ish years)!!!

Then I was like, I bet quite a few ancient wizards out there have some pretty amazing techniques they have picked up over the year. And that it would be great to be a "fly on the wall" watching some of these wizards do simple tasks. And that a YouTube channel watching them do simple tasks could be quite revealing and therefore very educational.

Paul Irish did something like this a few years ago and I still use a bunch of the tools he introduced into my purview. Really, really improved productivity!
Great idea on aligning to ROI
Isn’t Citus AWS only right now though?
There are few simple rules to count on. The stability of grasslands depends on circumstances, usually including a range of herbivores to prevent forestation. Mega-fauna, like mammoths used to contribute to grove and prairie creation by eating trees, before humans dominated.

I wrote this to dereke in another comment, I think it is relevant to understanding the present situation:
>
Two hundred years ago about 60% of the earth surface was covered in mature and native forest. The figure is less than 30% today. Most of the worlds fertile crops are grown on deforested land, on the soil which native forests developed through ecological diversity and lack of erosion. Most of the grasslands which are used for grazing, don't have the soil quality to support demanding crops.

https://www.britannica.com/science/deforestation
Without getting into the conspiracy-ish side of this, I'd like to point out that this is changing. Until recently, I worked at Planet Labs where our goal was to image the entire landmass of the Earth, at 3m resolution (not quite as good as Google's most zoomed-in imagery), every day and make it available to everyone. The monitoring system design means, amongst other wins, we don't need to know "something is about to change" to get the before/after pictures, and it also prevents the "checkbook shutter control" the article talks about.

You can sign up for an account[0] with just an email address and start digging through imagery right now (unfortunately, purchasing it at full quality is a different story). Make sure to select an Area Of Interest to get down to daily imagery, I'll start you off with one for the Tonopah Test Range[1] which has coverage on 21 different days so far in October.

[0] https://www.planet.com/explorer/
[1] https://www.planet.com/explorer/#/area-coverage/0.32,1/mosai...
Yeah I would much rather see something about 10M. I'm not looking to win the lottery, I want to live a successful, comfortable life.
Ask HN: Why doesn't Gmail/Instagram/etc webpages directly go to log-in page?
As a user, every time I want to log in to my Gmail or Instagram account, I have to wait till the page is fully loaded, then "click" on a button that directs to the log-in page. Why don't they let us log-in in the first page?
Yes.

When "politically correct" is used as an attack on someone else's words, it nearly always means "being polite to a person or group the attacker dislikes".

When "politically correct" is used by a small number of academic theorists to describe the conscious substitution of vocabulary in order to conform to a particular subculture, it means... what I just said.

There are a reasonably large number of people who think that the second definition describes every situation actually covered by the first.
`fc` helps. Setting `FCEDIT=ed` helps a lot.
News app for users of users https://youtu.be/LJI-_XXQwHM
Show HN: Enhance PromQL with WITH templates
I was thinking this the other day - the best way to finagle the lottery now as a programmer is not to fiddle with the numbers chosen, but with the random number generator at the ticket machine (since so many people use it), so that some numbers or patterns are rare; then buy those and wait 'till they hit. I'll bet it's being done.
The odds of winning a lottery (lets say the Mega Millions or the Diversity Visa) are, to an extent, evenly distributed. The odds of succeeding in a social endeavour (lets say a business or a Green Card obtained via application) are not.

While on average the odds of the latter (the business) may be better, for a given person (which is always me and never an average person) the odds of the former (the lottery) may actually be much higher.

On a side note, while it may seem "un-meritocratic" to the HN crowd, having lotteries as gateways to social mobility and resource allocation is a decent idea.
Turing himself proved them equivalent in his 1937 paper "Computability and λ-definability" which I've so far only found in image form:

http://www.turingarchive.org/browse.php/b/11
This is relevant to the rabbit hole I have been going down this afternoon. Time to see if these two can be combined.

Like many other scripting languages, Web Prolog lacks some of the capabilities of general purpose programming languages, such as file I/O, access to the OS and a foreign language interface, but since a Prolog Web node is implemented on top of a general purpose programming language it should be straightforward to delegate the need for such operations to this language. A programmer wishing to implement an application that needs to perform e.g. file I/O needs to be knowledgeable in the host language. For some nodes, it probably makes sense to offer an interface between Web Prolog and the host language. In the case of SWI-Prolog, such an interface is obviously already there.

Torbj¨orn Lager (2018, June 18). Web Prolog and the Programmable Web. Retrieved from: https://github.com/Web-Prolog/swi-web-prolog/raw/master/book...
Compiling Julia to TPUs [pdf]
It doesn’t do the runtime dispatch this person wants, but it eliminates the worry of running into an illegal instruction error.

I think there are use cases for a fat binary, but I’m less certain as to its necessity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor

Many synapses behave very much like memristors, though caveats apply.
I find myself taking a lot more one-offs than I did before. Previously, when I would bank PTO, I would avoid taking a day off to do something around the house or play a new video game that came out. Now, I don't worry about it as much and take the time, which I think is the point of having PTO anyway.

I have probably taken 4 weeks off total in the past year.
This is such a neat idea. I can see building a Little, Free Library being an interesting project. Add a solar embedded stack [1] to it and you could add some fun features such as: shelf time tracking (maybe to replace never read books), number of checkouts/returns, etc. I'm not sure if adding connectivity would be keeping with the spirit of the project, but it opens up even more interesting social possibilities.

In general, I love the idea of projects/technology that encourage interaction in the physical world. (See the first week or so of Pokémon Go).

[1]: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/09/how-to-build-a-low... is an example of a website run on such a stack
Note that I never revealed the secrets about HN that you trusted me with. Remember?

That makes it rather hard to prove that you do in fact determine the front page ranking, except perhaps for stories that the community initially upvotes.

The comment ranking is determined by you to the extent that you specifically micro manage comments that you feel don’t deserve the top slot, even if the community disagrees. I have several examples of this.

I don’t understand why you have a problem with someone simply stating what they know to be true.
Odds in a lottery are uniform and do not account for personal attributes. Assuming 1 ticket per person, anyone that buys a ticket has an equal chance of winning. A 98 year old grandmother has the same chance of winning as a 21 year old man.

Odds of starting a successful startup do not follow the same rules. There are a small number of people with the skillset/connections/etc to start a successful startup and thus have a very high chance of success, and a large number of people without those attributes, and thus a very low, if not zero percentage chance of success.
Out of curiosity, what language was it?
"Of course I'm properly switched on. Having depressed the activator button what else would you expect?"

I may need to tone down the dialogue a little from the inspiration's level of snark ;)
These are some serious allegations. If this is true then DogitalOcean needs to explain themselves.

I guess, one should also have backups off site. Relying on just one provider constitutes a single point of failure.
it's also already packaged in most distributions if you want to install it easily.
Thanks. I’m still learning, but I think I would use your style like this: instead of o carro é do eles. I could use o carro é do grupo. Please correct me.
MemSQL is a great product but it's a niche offering and requires proprietary licensing by capacity so it'll probably never be provided as a managed offering by anyone, especially by a smaller player like DO.
That seems obvious and makes intuitive sense - but it turns out its wrong.

"GIVING THE 3.5 million workers picking produce on American farms a raise to match the $15 an hour many fast food workers are fighting for sounds unaffordable, right?

Not really. According to University of California-Davis agricultural labor economist Philip Martin, the likely additional cost to American shoppers of that wage hike would be about $20 a year."

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/t...
Hmm, interesting thought! The tool needs to do some ugly buffering however; would there be place for it in a shell? Also, I suppose some kind of "Ctrl-Enter" or something would be a better idea instead? So that it could also be hit at any point in the line... But how about scrolling through the preview?
The lottery is still a single asset (even if it is backed by a diversified portfolio). When we are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, I would be willing to pay a premium to hold that money in a more diverse way. This is the same reason I prefer 401ks to pensions (and our government has not demonstrated an ability to start with a fixed fund and not raid it for unrelated purposes)

For your threat model question, I would be much more concerned about the state raiding the lotto fund to pay for, say, their pension obligationd than I am about them retroactivly banning lotto winnings on moral grounds. It is much harder for the state to steal from investments it doesnt control.
This was originally posted elsewhere. Reddit sucks.
The concern was mainly over terrorists, who don't have their own satellites and have to rely on commercial imagery.
Realistically though, a neurosurgeon would probably be able to immigrate on another type of visa. Same goes for most executives, lawyers, partners at VCs or hedge funds...

An auction based allocation would favor ad selling companies that can pay juniors 200k to do A/B testing.

Then sure, it would partially solve the abuse from cheap IT consultancies, and that's better than nothing. But there would definitely be adverse effects.
One thing I imagine that's coming at some point is their own implementation of "cloud functions".
tramp is built into emacs now. Between tramp and helm the problem is solved :-P
Not only that, but a smartphone provides a spectrum of functionality and any "smart agent" function is just one of many. Many of us turn those features off, meaning that—unless the phone has been rooted or is not doing what its manufacturer claims—it is not even listening for wake words. But a smartphone with this feature disabled still provides its remaining suite of functions.

These in-home "smart speakers" exist only to be agents listening for wake words.

I am not sure why use of a smartphone is painted as hypocrisy when countering the argument that consumers should be cautious about installing smart speakers in their homes. Clearly most people who are cautioning against the use of smart speakers turn off the listening agent features on their smartphones and recommend that others do that as well.
Ask HN: Need some extra dev help on an open source project?
I'm looking for open-source JS projects with good first-time contributor communities.

I run a startup where we teach software engineers in India how to be effective remote employees and then help them break into international tech careers via full-time remote jobs.

For the last 4 weeks of training, students complete an open source apprenticeship where they work full-time contributing to select open source projects for free.

The time commitment from project maintainers in return is pretty minimal.

- A 30-minute on-boarding video call during the first week to get to know each other and clear up any questions

- A list of "good first-time contributor" issues to get started

- Timely pull-request review so that the engineer doesn't get blocked since they will be devoting around 6 hours per day Mon-Fri to the project

- Complete a short survey at the end that will serve as a performance review

Does anyone have a project that could use some extra help or know a good project that I should reach out to?

The full details of the program are here: https://www.pesto.tech/open-source-apprenticeship/

I would also be happy to answer any questions.

Thanks! :)
If anyone is interested in experiencing this (sans psych ward melt down) lavender sachets to put in your pillow are really very nice.
I am not seeing it, either.
A sustainable new advertising model for digital media
Migration is limited because almost every EU country has its own language.
Actually, Gmail starts with the login page, if you load it first time.
Instagram starts with registration, which also makes sense to me considering you are not likely to log in too often.
They'd definitely need to account for region, rather than just looking at the dollar amount.
The '8 Fallacies of Distributed Computing' Aren't Fallacies Anymore
Oh sure -- the right has weaponized the term pretty effectively, no arguments there.
I don't know why you picked Stalin. He wasn't exactly tolerant of religion, and would never agree to auch a CoC.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USSR_anti-religious_campaign...

David Duke on the other hand would happily contribute to this project. He would never contribute to a project that had a muslim CoC though.

...You demonstrated yet again that religious CoC are not inclusive, which is my point. I feel like you're just trolling at this point.
>The more interesting question to me is whether that truly improves security, once you start working on networks, and whether it could be made usable for the general population, rather than so inconvenient that nobody can adopt it. Is it only something the most extreme high security secret lab air-gapped environment will ever tolerate?

Networking a machine that cannot get security updates sounds like a bad idea. It's pristine boot state is bound to get infected seconds after going online.
Remember this was the height of MOOC madness.

Then we learned students never completed moocs and instructors hated creating content and getting paid almost nothing (compared to their full time jobs) to be a sharecropper on their platform, without tenure, status, or all the other perks teachers enjoy (because they don't get paid much). Contrary to techies opinions, teachers do not want to give up their hard won political power ( that's all they have left ) for the sake of tech.

They saw what tech did to the publishing industry
Everyone loves them mother.
Agreed. This is what I meant by convergence. If things do reduce to a single wearable, Apple is well positioned.

I'm not fully convinced, though. Most wearable things from Apple, seem as fashion focused as anything else.

That said, my understanding is that folks that like them, love them. So not sure how the others are standing out. And will it continue.

I am also very new to this. Started using Strava and so far liking it. Bought a dedicated heart monitor. Curious if that will prove to bea complete waste someday.
Welcome to Jurassic Art
The in-between shouldn't be health enthusiasts or exclude the scientific method. Upthread is someone linking research that lavender includes compounds which significantly impact endocrine function in a way that is just starting to be studied.

It is hard to tell which is worse, if these non-pharmaceuticals are completely ineffective or potent medicines.
18 years is a long time ago, and memories fade and get corrupted even after a short period of time, much less that long (its on reason we have statutes of limitations on most crimes).
I will leave this here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ. It's comical and frightening when reality imitates art.
Right now I am worried about the path to $10k
Berlin is the worst place if you want to have a good paying job. If you only want to work for startups, then Berlin is the place to go. But if you are open to work in Big Enterprise IT, then there are many places where you can work and earn very good salaries (especially Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg where Enterprise IT usually pays between 80k$-140k$ depending on your role). While taxes and contributions for singles are quite high, it also includes health insurance, retirement money and unemployment insurance. For food, Germany is one of the cheapest places in the world. Property taxes are REALLY low compared to the US (I mean, in the US or in Germany, you as a renter pay them, so rent is also cheaper here, even in the hubs). In big cities, many people do not need a car as public transportation is very affordable and available everywhere (so that money gets saved for some).

The biggest challenge: to stay here for longer, try to learn German well. It is not that difficult if you take your time.
Amazon has gotten into the advertising business [1] and I believe are growing quickly. I find it a disturbing move on their part; I have to trust that they're not mining my purchase history for ad targeting. If they do do so, it may be susceptible to targeted discovery. (Run ads with unique URLs for each selection keyword; everyone who sees the ad is apparently someone who bought that kind of product.) I hope Amazon is smart about the risks they take.

[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/09/23/amazon-is-now-the-...
For example, Donald Trump is often called non-PC by his supporters and racist by his opponents;

To be clear, even if he had used entirely politically correct terms, the "racist" charge would still be there over the clearly-racist-in-intent immigration ban, supporting literal white supremacists, and dog whistling on the national stage.

Reality is that you won't suffer much at all in repercussions if you get a word slightly or somewhat wrong. Most people know to avoid using the N-word, or "chinks", or "fags", etc. You see repercussions when it's clear you also carry actual racist beliefs, or when it's clear that you're intentionally calling someone by the wrong pronoun because you're trying to take a political stand.

I've used the wrong pronoun plenty of times, and people have subtly corrected me, but nobody has batted an eyelash because I wasn't making some sort of stand. "Oh, it's 'she' now, ok, sorry." Despite only living in extremely liberal areas, I've also never been asked to use any exotic pronouns. The more I see people complaining about it, the more I think that it's a straw man.

Sure, there are examples of people being oversensitive, but oversensitive people are a fact of life. You can choose not to be around them.
I work for Google but not on Search.

I think the issue is that besides the money they don't really have a competitive advantage so it'd be difficult to catch up given how long Google has been doing this for.

First of all Search is well outside their domain expertise; they aren't really well known for doing either search/MI or even web services well.

Secondly, it takes a long time just to get all the infrastructure set up. There is an unbelievable amount of build/test/deploy infrastructure that Google has been able to set up over the many years of doing search. I certainly think Apple has engineers smart enough to make it happen but in the end building the stuff takes a large amount of time.

And this is all assuming they use AWS/GCP/Azure instead of deploying their own data centers.

It's very much the same difficulty that Google has trying to make hardware to compete with Apple. They have so much experience and expertise in that area already. There's no way Google could make a phone faster than the iPhone: Apple makes their own chips! So instead Google has to compete in the areas where they have a competitive advantage, for example by using AI to make very good cameras.
I highly recommend this relatively recent article from the New York Times: The Man Who Cracked the Lottery. From the relevant Wikipedia page[1]:

In 2017, Eddie Raymond Tipton, former information security director of the American Multi-State Lottery Association (MUSL), confessed to rigging a random number generator that he and two others used in multiple cases of fraud against state lotteries. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/03/magazine/mone...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Lotto_fraud_scandal
The feature set and type of problems that they are good at are similar. The personality of the language is not. But the translation is easy.

What is weird about Perl is that it is intentionally designed to use the part of our brain that parses syntax to encode a bunch of information. So $ means "the", @ means "these", and so on. The linguistic analogies are carried surprisingly far, and There Is More Than One Way To Do It is considered a feature.

By contrast Python tries to have a very simple and regular syntax. It has well-organized libraries. And aims to have one simple and right way to do it. (Though why their one way to handle opening external processes should be so Byzantine..well I digress.)

But both of them live in the space of dynamic interpreted libraries with similar kinds of introspection, similar native data structures and so on. Both take heavy advantage of the fact that between decent scalars, arrays, and hashes you can write algorithms for almost any problem which will perform within a constant factor of a theoretically ideal data structure. Therefore given the same problem it is natural to write the same solution in about the same way with very similar characteristics.

If you know one, learning to write the other isn't hard and the mental translation remains easy.

Oh, there are differences. Some things are easier to express directly in Perl. Like backticks. Python can let objects be used as keys in dictionaries. Perl's optional variable declarations catch a lot of minor bugs. Python's iterators/generators take a lot of work to replicate in Perl. (Yes, there are CPAN modules that make it doable. Have we agreed on which one is right?)

But on the whole for most code, you tackle it in the same way, with equivalent data structures and naturally organize it similarly using the same strategies.

Compare and contrast with, say, Java.

The fact that they are so close puts them in a natural competition. And there, well, Perl is not popular for new projects while Python is one of the most popular languages out there. All the cool new integrations are made available in Python first and Perl is an afterthought. If they are too similar to co-exist without competition, it is clear which one is going to win. And it isn't Perl.
I am against digital implants for a variety of reasons, including privacy, but… The only valid case that I could agree to would be my complete health record, ESPECIALLY when my health record would no longer be stored in a data retrieval system. Can’t steal or spy on what’s not in the system.
Kotlin coroutines RC1
Two problems:

- The green card process doesn't completely transfer over.

- Filing a petition to transfer an H1B puts the employee at risk of getting a denial. Every petition sent to USCIS is risking an audit, denial, and at the very least, many headaches.