skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a complete 180 from about 18 years ago, when I contacted someone re. the Jobcentre website requiring Internet Explorer:

"I only have a Linux system, how can I get access?"

"We only support Microsoft Explorer."

"So if I use Linux I can't find a job?"

"We only support Microsoft Explorer."

That kind of blinkered approach went on for far too long, so it's a real pleasure to use the various websites on gov.uk at the moment. Even traditionally unpleasant things like filing a VAT return are relatively low friction, and taxing a car is absurdly easy.

Now, how can we get the same sort of thing to happen across Whitehall and Westminster more generally? ;)
There were these two British gentlemen coaching our doctoral programme summer meetup. I think their task was to make us better communicate our research. Probably quite hard because we were all from a STEM background and at least half of us Finns.

During a break, we were seated in a table of five and this British guy sits with us for a while and asks some generic questions, but soon leaves our table because he wants to meet the other students, too. Then one of the Finnish students next to me asks ironically: "So... was that supposed to be that famous small talk?", making many of us smirk.
The biggest problem I can see with that is bankruptcy - both natrual and liability dropping shenanigans. Perhaps some sort of deposit for a low overhead system? Granted buying trash only to repair it enough for the deposit and dump it leaves us at square one via a circutious even less efficient path.
We don’t lack for wonderful writers in the Apple ecosystem. Along with objc.io I’d heartily suggest:

https://oleb.net (Ole Begemann)
https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/ (Mike Ash)
I'd be definitely more interested in an article on "How US/UK survive with small talk".
As contrarian anecdata, a non-trivial app (with 3-d graphics) we developed for iOS 2 still runs fine on iOS 12. (Long retired from the app store, but my retained binary still runs.)
Human labour, especially in the presence of liveable wages, is extremely expensive…

FTFY.
I've had a BSCS for years, an MS in a related field and working on an MSCS and I've never heard of "max heap" or "min heap".

Your explanation makes it quite clear and I guess now I know -- but it's not been common in anything I've ever seen.
Non-paywall article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/19/facebook-...
Gitea is a nice option for self hosted git servers, too.

https://gitea.io/en-us/
If you find optimism in the thing you were pessimistic about before that’s ideal. But if you can’t, how do you switch to not caring about it and switch to something else that you can be optimistic about ? It’s hard to know when to quit.
My grandparents hung clothes up often but honestly it took longer and was more work than a dryer. It takes like 30 seconds to load clothes into a dryer and it gets them dry in about an hour regardless of weather.
Don't forget, that's only the number of stores on Shopify, not the number of people accessing those stores.
The constant chit-chat is at the surface of this phenomenon, it's the general hyperactivity of Americans that strikes me as an eastern European. Always moving around restlessly while holding a drink, overacting and commenting after any kind of trivial situation around them, something that most people would not care about at all.
In Finland we sometimes ask how are you, especially if we know the person. However, it is usually meant to be a real question and not just empty phrase where "fine" is regarded as the only correct answer.
A lot of pharmacies I see in Europe and UK sell homeopathy, and by according to a schoolmate who graduated in Pharmacy and inherited the license to run one from his dad (Italy is weird like that), homeopathic products are among the biggest cash cows for them, together with supplements.
The "love of socialism" in the Nordic countries is not particularly old. Germany got a welfare system long before Norway for example, then motivated by mix of fear of the Marxists and Christian morality (Bismarck pushed it through with the support of Zentrum; one of the forerunners of todays CDU).

What happened in Scandinavia was not that Scandinavians were all that much more socialist than the rest of Europe, but that the workers movements happened to be more successful to the point of obtaining a political hegemony in the post-war years that allowed them to shape the system to a much greater degree, and the conflict level was much lower.

A large part of this was in response to religion. In particularly the role of strong Lutheran state churches that looked down on ostentantious displays of wealth and promoted community and sharing, which made it easier for the Christian parts of the right to find together with the labour movement on welfare issues. As a result the first comprehensive welfare bill in Norway, as in many European countries, was pushed through with the votes of the Christian Democrats.

In Norway at least a lot of this "love of socialism" is much less a "love of socialism" than it is a mix of that tradition of community and a strong but relatively moderate labour movement.

But it is also pretty recent - up until the 60's for example, Norwegian prisons were very harsh and following very much an idea of dealing with "tough love" for sinners that needed to be purged. Social and criminal reforms didn't really start happening at pace until the 60's and 70's, and were a constant issue of tension with religious values.

I think it's more that you've touched on a similar foundation: In Norway at least I think you'll find that quiet nature very much matches what used to be seen as how a good Christian would behave. Too much excitement would not do.

[you probably got flagged because HN is very sensitive to dragging politics into subjects that aren't inherently political]
Polish: Mowa jest srebrem, a milczenie złotem.
Blurbs: Life could be transported between planets, Is Hadoop Dead? and more [pdf]
North Korean hacker crew steals $571M in cryptocurrency across 5 attacks
Most parts of possible problems have political, social, legal, economic and technical parts. A big technical issue is around battery capabilities, but other issues are stuck with a lack of funding, political will, gaps in the legal system.

For example, installing places for people renting or living in flats to charge cars, or reducing car demand by increasing walking/cycling.
Need a reliable VPN for Croatia?
Open Access Is the Law in California
It sounds like it has some basis in what happens, but how does that give them better postage rates? Surely they still need to go to their local post office, in China, or is it a scam the local post office is involved in too?
They're subject to a clear limit, though. The more micro you make your services, the less they resemble operational units and the more they resemble primitives from which your actual system is built, sort of like an inner-platform effect. And then you have to debug interactions between microservices, with all the overhead that entails.
What is different about breaking an application into services is that because services run as different processes:
* you have an immediate natural failure domain (the process) as well as resource isolation between services,
* services can be updated independently (something that is done many thousands of times every day at companies like Amazon or Google),
* a corollary of independent updates is that services can be tested independently and new code can be "canaried" by initially deploying only a single instance of a service.

The statement that service orientation "... just replaces internal calls between services of your monolith with flaky and slower network calls" is correct in that network calls are flaky and slower but incorrect in its assessment that you gain nothing from using services.
Everyone without outdoor space that I know in UK hangs out washing. Except in winter when it's too wet.
Well it's not thousands of manufacturers participating in a global conspiracy, but it's not quite the same as commodity items like disposable razor blades either.

Whether it's prevailing economic school, or what they're teaching MBAs the last few decades but there is clear intent to a) remove maintenance and repair options, and b) ensure products are not built to last, but built to last "just long enough".

Now, profits are not so knife edge that adding 50p on a connector to permit a part to be changed in a fridge or kettle would cause them to go under. The market for kettles spans £10 to well over £100 for stupid gimmicks. Plenty of space for more ethical options alongside internet connectivity, LCD displays and LEDs that light up the water. Even the ethical extra water saving environmentally gimmicked options don't permit repair. In single blade razors the smallest change could make or break profitability. Even that is a different proposition now thanks to the ever rising blade count and added gimmicks.

Many of the companies that made traditionally repairable items are still around. It's just they all started phasing out at roughly the same time.

Were lighting a 21st century invention there would be no lightbulbs or bayonet and Edison screw fittings. We'd all be replacing the light fitting every time, and people would be explaining why it was unavoidable.

So I suspect it's something more than simple economics, though I don't think there's been a repetition of the 1,000 hour lightbulb cartel. :)
I'm so glad that recently on an interview with a foreign company, when I got asked "how are you?" at the beginning, it felt strange enough to remind me "just say 'fine' and be done with it" :D
Mississippi police took property without legal authority
Ask HN: What parallels can you make between the law and a codebase?
Thinking about the future of the relation between laws and Humans, an idea grew up in my head: laws are a giant codebase with it's own technical debt, badly written parts and so on.

What do you think about it ?
[pdf] 1984 – George Orwell
I’d say what we do is closer to engineering than science. I was fine with programmer and then developer, but fashion in language as well as clothes change, and so here I am an engineer.
As I understand it, Denmark and Sweden (and perhaps the other Nordic countries?) used to have more elaborate social rituals until relatively recently.

Eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Du-reformen .

I seem to recall that people could also referred by their job title, eg, "Mr. Programmer", and even listed in the phone book that way. But I can't verify that.
I am I understanding this correctly... it sound like this was successfully exploited by businesses and poor cannot take advantage of the benefits?

if accurate I think this is a problem with many of the incentives that are provided, maybe providing the tax incentive would be better directed towards saying to take advantage of this opportunity you must provide something that the public can use?
NOPE. First and foremost, you work for yourself. Employers come and go. If you are sacrificing your resume to meet your employer's "business objectives", you could end up with a dead worthless skillset.

A balance has to be achieved. Obviously we can't sit around all day rewriting simple things in our pet language of the week...but employers need to understand that a good developer will not let their resume atrophy.

The days of the twenty-five year stint followed by a gold watch and a pension are over...you simply cannot put your employer's needs ahead of your own anymore.
Tesla launches new $45,000 Model 3
Just in case anyone is wondering what a Dualit Toaster is:-

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/interiors/11064079/Toa...
Death of the World is just so convenient.
https://gizmodo.com/5995220/this-ultraviolet-lamp-keeps-your...
It's a strong feature of Attention Deficit Disorder as I understand it. Hyperfocus often comes hand in hand with extreme fatigue and brain fog in the presence of tasks that don't motivate enough, to the point that you can feel it physically.

I often get it myself, feeling like I can't physically write another line of code until I move onto one of my own projects, then I'm good to concentrate for another 6 hours. I have to work extremely hard to complete tasks that on the surface look very simple and involve solving no new problems. This also extends into my normal life, like cleaning a messy room.

Note: I haven't been diagnosed with ADD and am not suggesting anyone has it if they experience this, I've just looked into it a lot.
How do Finns flirt without smalltalk? Just jump straight to 'do you find me attractive?' and 'do you want to date?'

Though admittedly I used to work with an Irish guy whose sole chat-up line was 'are ye ridin?' and who had considerable success.
"Software engineer" is a common title - I'm UK based, not even US - and that perhaps helps to differentiate practical development work from more academic computer science work: the two activities truly are quite different. "Engineers" is probably just an evolved shortening of that "Software Engineer" title.

I know what you mean though: Chartered Engineer is a proper thing for example, with exams and governing bodies involved, and anyone in construction who just decided to call themselves a Civil Engineer would likely get into some bother for doing so.
Validation – learning, not memorizing
The average reading age in the UK is 9 years old. Are you proposing that the Gov.uk website be inaccessible to the population it serves?

Don't forget, unlike other websites and apps, people do not use Gov.uk of their free will. They are forced to use it, in the sense that it is the official source of information and services from the government.
His reason for why he’s a vi guy was funny! (He only had 60M free for his Linux partition and emacs wouldn’t fit). It did sound mildly apocryphal but so did most of it.

My reason for vi is equally random. I learned Unix at college, but I wasn’t allowed on the systems because I wasn’t an engineering student. I had to resort to nefarious means to get online, so I needed to keep a really low profile. The easiest way to do that was to remote into unused boxes in the lab. (This was back when it was easy to get onto an intranet and hard to get on the Internet — it’s exactly the opposite now!) The systems that were usually available were these crappy diskless Sun workstations that booted over the network. They didn’t have enough memory to run emacs without paging and paging over the network is a recipe for frustration. Plus if someone logged in and the system was slow the first thing they’d do is try and find out why, which might lead to them wondering why I was on that system, just who I was, etc and that was a bad direction for me. I also couldn’t talk to people in the labs since I wasn’t supposed to be there, so I was entirely self taught, and emacs seems like the sort of thing someone has to evangelize to get you over the initial hump.

Anyway, that’s my story — what’s yours? :)
Enough of this talking!
'Married but Gay' GLBT Uhuru Siege
Here's a good summary of the history of the term and discussion on "programmer" vs "engineer".

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/progr...
If it isn't solving any problem then why does it have 8k monthly users?
There are several other articles about this dating from 2016 [0][1]. Still, the articles back in 2016 also come as a big surprise for me, since I remember having a kids encyclopaedia back in 1994 [2] that had a small snippet mentioning a certain migratory bird that travelled an insane distance and used warm currents that generated lift to basically take a nap mid-flight. So unless this is ruled out and not considered "flying", I really don't understand how many "first times" there have been.

[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-just-seen-birds...

[1] https://gizmodo.com/we-finally-know-how-birds-sleep-during-f...

[2] Sorry, I can't provide a source at the moment, will try to find it later.

Edit: to be fair, this article is citing the ones in 2016. I found other articles from as early as 2014 [3] but maybe this is just about how for the first time the theory is actually based upon measured, empirical data. Like an article that was recently in HN about semi-automatic weapons being more deadly than non-automatic ones.

[3] http://sabersabor.es/una-vida-de-record-los-10-hechos-porten...
Drupal-to-Drupal Migration Tutorial
Passing a full controller isn't always an option, some controllers don't like being passed and/or suffer from reset bugs and not all machines even have enough controllers.
And of course, if you pass a full controller, you can't use your keyboard/mouse on the host until you shut down the VM.
>There's so much wrong with the execution of this, I don't know where to start.

This looks like every other mechanical engineering undergraduate capstone project. Relying on paint for waterproofing is the real kicker.
That's interesting. I developed an ulcer at my first job out of college in 2004 and didn't know what was wrong until I spoke with a doctor. It was a brain factory with white noise and cube walls so high you had to stand to see your neighbor. I used to work 11-14 hours per day because I was young and foolish, and had a blasé manager. My how times have changed.
If it seems like a troll, best to just flag and move on.
IBM just proved quantum computers can do things impossible for classical ones
A 30% markup on parts may not even be enough to make it make sense to the vendor. It costs a fair amount of non-billable time to order and manage parts and you end up paying for that time in the markup. I’m semi-notoriously frugal, but don’t have a problem paying parts markup of even 50% on the rare occasion that I have someone perform work for me. Their office staff has to eat, too.
These are the reasons for me. I'm fairly charismatic and well spoken. I just don't like it for this kind of thing because it doesn't give me little extra time to formulate the best response I can.
> But microservices are also about coupling: just have a self-contained service that does one thing.

What stops you from creating a module inside a monolith with an interface that provides a self-contained service that does one thing?
It does have some sort of meaning when it comes to pay grades as well. When I worked for local government I had the title "Programmer" and couldn't be called "Developer" without my pay being bumped significantly.

People outside of the software world also seem to take the title "Engineer" a little more seriously than "Programmer" or "Developer" from my observation.
I line dry and have tshirts that are over 20 years old. I've lost clothing to a washer that broke a paddle though.

Another benefit of line drying is you don't need to iron, we don't iron clothing. The only times I've ironed in the last couple of decades is job-interviews and attending Buck House.
You can install ubuntu-budgie-themes, they come with Pocillo, including a dark variant.
The Building Blocks of Reinforcement Learning: Deep Open Sources TRFL
Wow... White text on almost all-white background... :D
Sounds like an odd decision, but Nick Clegg is a very level-headed person with lots of experience handling tricky communications in party politics, elections and government policy, so potentially a good hire.
>then why not centralize it in government (to which it would ultimately be equivalent anyway)

Because most governments seem corrupt to some extent or other and we don't trust them. Free markets seem to solve this problem to some extent. The degrees to which people believe these two statements seem to be the basis for a lot of left right / politics IMHO.
Not mentioned yet: Souroush Khanlou http://khanlou.com is always at the top of my list. Thoughtful and very practical material. Also Dave DeLong: https://davedelong.com/blog/

> I’ve missed Swift 2 & 3

In some ways this is an advantage to you. There was a fair bit of churn in that time period. Things have settled reasonably well now.
Thanks for this Martin. Thought provoking as always.

A couple of observations wrt Order Cancellation.

I'm not sure I get your point regarding bundles and scopes. In both the 'with' case and the RAII case, you're explicitly using them for scoping. I appreciate there are syntactic pros and cons for different call patterns but, fundamentally, they're both explicit scoping mechanisms. No?

Also, wrt your point on one thread type per bundle. Wouldn't a standard producer/consumer be an example? Or did you mean something else by type of thread.
There are many, many ways for software to detect it's running in a VM, including ways much simpler than checking impossible hardware combinations.
If software wants to know it's in a VM it'll always be able to tell, no matter the measures taken against it.
Ignoring WebMD for a second because there are no citations in the article so all we have is the word of the person who wrote the article, it's usually not enough to cite a single contrary article to make a claim that someone hasn't done research properly.
I can't access the article you cite, however a single meta-analysis from 1995 from a journal dedicated to alternative medicine in nursery and midwifery doesn't sound like the ultimate source; a casual check on Cochrane Review (https://www.cochrane.org/CD009215/PREG_aromatherapy-for-pain...) suggests that there are simply too few scientific studies to be able to say anything about whether it works or not (which is a polite way to say that if it did work, we'd know by now).
Yeah, that's all part of the technique; breaking down the issue, understanding why you're having negative emotional reactions to it, and deciding whether the problem is your emotional reaction (in which case, change that), or the outer-world situation (in which case, figure out the steps needed to change the situation).

It's taken a while to learn it (indeed I'm still learning it), but it's powerful the more it starts to click.
I see a modify button in the upper right hand corner. Is this date supposed to be modifiable?
Make a Rain Detector with Raspberry Pi
Webinar: Creating an API with Apiary: How to boost collaboration in your team
Thing is it's still a £20 component being used often enough (or at electronic supplier rates possibly a 50p component), it's just been riveted or soldered to a few other things to ensure it can't be bought without £180 of pointless other things. Even with higher labour that should make a £50 (£20 + £30 labour) repair of your £500 appliance feasible. It gets pointless when it's approaching a sealed unit with a £300 repair of a £500 appliance (£200 combined unit + £100 labour).
AI Diary #3 – BERT, MELD, DepecheMood++, Future of AI and NLP, Anthropomorphism
> And yeah, the best tactic is usually "make my boss look good".

You say this like it's a bad thing. You should be making your boss, your team, and your teammates look good. If you are doing those things, you are probably also making the company look good.

It's thinking about the long vs. short term. Focusing only on your own optics may work okay in the short term, but they cap out fairly quickly.

Think about how it looks from the outside. Employee A is only focused on themselves. It is recognized that A is good, but any team A is on still struggles. Employee B makes the whole team look good. It becomes recognized that B not only does well, but any team B ends up on does well. Who do you think advances the farthest long term?