skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh dear, we seem to have unearthed a pythonista.

Perl is still one of the best glue/high level systems languages around, partisan missives not withstanding. Debian's apt system is based upon it, as is git (though it uses C for parts that are intensive), and many other tools.

Python is fine as a systems language if you don't mind the insane indentation issues, and the extra boilerplate you need to do for "simple" things.

Honestly, I see Julia as the up and comer here. Julia has IMO the best syntax, is JIT compiled, is a real programming language, and is IMO python done right.

If you are stuck believing python is a good language to develop new projects in, great. Knock yourself out. I personally find myself most productive in Julia, Perl, C, Octave/Matlab, and yes, even Fortran.
Can you narrow the set of search engines from which the results are pulled?
I wonder if I can construct a Cantor-like diagonal proof that creates a definitively non-countable plot.
Because we've looked into it many times, and it's not a big deal. Trump just silently disbanded the task force looking for undocumented immigrants voting for instance.

"I'm undocumented, what am I going to do on a Tuesday? How about skipping work where I already don't get paid a living wage to go to a government building with sone police standing around, and big voter rolls of all citizens in the area. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea."
as a european who visited the US a while ago, the "fake happiness" as i called it was very offputting to me.

Like, people working dead-end service jobs act way to happy even when they have no reason to be happy. it seems so forced and fake that it actually gives me an unpleasant feeling.

I see little need why a cashier who makes minimum wage should always smile, they are people too and can have a shitty day too?
If you don’t want to read partisan sniping, don’t come into the comments about election systems. It’s not like this is a story about the attacks where people hijacked the conversation. Don’t seek out a topic and then complain that people are discussing it, that’s just silly.
GP is responding to the ridiculous assertion that the average RUNNING speed for humans is 11-15 mph.

Even taking into account only young adults, I'm sure most of them can't sprint 11 mph
It should be easy enough to upload the final rasterized texture to the GPU and apply filters there.
Almost agree, but email should also be treated as lossy.

It drives me crazy when people send mass company emails with, for example, new policy or forms attached, and don't post them elsewhere. New hires only see them if someone remembers they exist and forwards them, plus it's impossible to figure out current state without spending a bunch of time playing email archeologist.
Ask HN: Would you use an API for personal access tokens?
In an ideal world, getting an API key for access to your own data should be as simple as typing your username and password, and instead of clicking "Login", you click "Get API key".

"Login" means "I, a human, want to access this service"
"Get API key" means "A bot will be accessing this service on my behalf"

The world is not ideal though.

Some services offer personal access tokens but not all do. What if we had a command line tool such as:

$ get-access-token <service-name>
username:
password:

<personal-access-token-here>
$

Where service-name would be any service out there with an API: gmail, github, airtable, twitter, etc.

Question is, would you be interested in such a tool? Any thought or comment would be appreciated.
Yeah, this is design practice in other industries as well.

If you're assembling a process gas delivery system, you'll find that pressure bottles containing fuels (H2, CH4, etc.) have left-hand threads in the delivery valves. Oxidizer bottles (O2,, etc.) have right-hand threads. Associated hardware (regulators, flow limiters, etc.) is also threaded for their intended use.

Makes it much harder to accidentally connect an acetylene tank to a cryogenic oxygen delivery line, with resultant catastrophic exothermic disassembly.
There’s nothing curious about concentrating on the problems that actually happen.
Do you work in Support? They absolutely do, because twitter is basically the cheat code to "jump the line" in any support process because it's PR. CEOs and Execs don't jump into the support queue to read customer tickets (rightfully so), but they absolutely read twitter.
> So many of the "productivity killing" problems I hear people griping about with Slack aren't really issues with slack,

They're not specific to Slack, but they are specific to the existence of an official real time chat app. The boss expects you to read the chat, and if you just ignore it, you'll get in trouble and be deemed "irresponsible" if you aren't acting on it and participating in it.
I've only ever seen Slack in 1 of 2 modes:

- Dozens of people in every room having multiple conversations, and any comment you make is quickly lost in the flow of other discussions.

- Ghost town.
People like to increase the internal resolution to render at 4K or more, which I believe is much faster when using hardware to do it.
> All self driving cars and driver assistance tools will be imperfect. The question is whether or not they are statistically safer than the average human

I disagree. If you're arguiung for driverless cars, the comparison should be with the average driver aided by a driver assistance system.
This is definitely a major challenge for driver assistance features. Poorly maintained roads are less of a burden to humans who can more easily account for flaws in road design or maintenance.

What is also a major issue is lack of design patterns on roads. Rather than using a standard set of merging lanes, circles, right and left turn lanes, etc, there are hundreds of variations across municipalities. What makes it worse is that even the patterns in a single municipality aren’t often followed. We notice this when driving on 290 from Austin to Houston where the turn lanes are sometimes marked with a white line on the left and other times marked with a yellow line.

It’s going to take a concerted effort by legislature to help driver assistance and self driving cars by adjusting roads to make them safer rather than the free-for-all we have now.
I think you're an outlier. I accommodate with my bike every day and I never bike faster than 25. Not because I can't, but because I'm just trying to go work safely, why go that fast? I have flexible hours anyway, if I'm late 5 mins no one's gonna notice. If scooters started riding on bike lines I'd sell my bike and start using the train. I don't wanna bike next to an object that is significantly faster than me. If I would be ok with that I'd just use a car.
You’re probably getting downvoted for making up what people are talking about and then arguing against it, which is a straw man.

Advocating for more people to use car-less transit more often is not the same as banning cars.
That’s not even remotely true. Election results in the US are almost always accepted by both sides. When Trump indicated that he would reject the result of the 2016 election if he lost, that was unprecedented.
I work in the public sector of Scandinavia, where we’ve digitised voter registration to make queues more efficient but kept the actual voting part on paper.

Overall there isn’t a reason to have voting machines, and if you do, they should really just print a piece of paper with your vote so that you can make sure it’s what you picked.

You’ll sometimes hear finance and efficiency as a reason, but unless American licensing for government software/hardware is significantly different from every where else, it’ll always be cheaper to manually count the votes than to buy voting software/hardware.

I mean, we digitised part of the process like I said, but we did it to make citizens wait less not because it was cheaper. It’s actually really expensive compared to doing manual voter registration, but we pay the money because no one likes queues.

Blockchain isn’t really a suitable option. It could be, but in the real world it would never be truly decentralised because no government is ever going to trust that, and if it isn’t, it’s just as easy to change and manipulate as any other database structure. And you still wouldn’t know if the voting machine actually did what you told it to do.

You can never vote from home in a democracy, because people might force you to vote a way you didn’t want to. I don’t really think groups would show up at your house to force you to do anything, but we frequently get husbands ask if they can vote for their wives, and if they could do that from home, no one would be there to stop them.

I know we live in a time where we want to digitise everything, but the paper vote is probably the safest and most efficient way to run voting in a democracy.
This is based on the observation that the valuation "...doesn’t accurately reflect the preferred treatment some investors might get, the researchers say."

Which is irrelevant if the unicorn does well enough anyway.
And then people argue that Tesla does not do deceptive advertisement and everybody knows the legal and technical limitations of autopilot.
It absolutely can. Even without the categories the author tracked, a decrease in overall financial anxiety leads to an increase in happiness, which perhaps culminates with the point where one no longer needs to work in order to live.
Brett has a thing with actually holding what we are interacting with.
He believes that the sense of touch and how our fingers evolved isn't being used by any computing medium yet..
Further like the article mentions, immersing into total virtual worlds shall leave our bodies immobile
Same. I use Firefox for Android which is helpful if you have searches you know for a fact DDG won't be able to figure because Firefox let's you select a different search engine instead from the bottom. I do this for sports and location specific searches.
>To explain how much of a driving principle that is for him, he recalled an anecdote from the early days of JetBlue, when an experienced pilot with an enormous amount of flight time under his belt showed up for an interview. “He had 15,000 hours,” Neeleman said, “but when we asked him to tell us about one instance where he’d gone above and beyond, he couldn’t name it. So we didn’t hire him. Why? Because he was a jerk.”

I will never fly this airline, and will strongly reconsider flying JetBlue again, now that I've read this seriously damning admission (in the form of a brag).
Not the original poster, but I have decimal time as part of my (free) Android French Revolutionary Calendar app.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ttaxus.the...

or the source
https://github.com/jhbadger/Thermidor-Android
> ...remember that you never have to reply immediately.

Yeah, but you have to check immediately, unless you have immense willpower. And so the distraction is already made, the focus is lost, and the time spent switching contexts can't be recovered.
I want to! I have a few articles I've written in the pipeline, but it's always a struggle to find a topic to write about. I did write this article about a very specific effect though: http://blog.mecheye.net/2018/03/deconstructing-the-water-eff...
You can use the g! prefix and it will go to Google. I found DDG plenty good enough for my use case, and in the rare case I can't find it there I just use g! and bam.
I'm starting to have this odd thought that its time for a softer harm reduction approach regarding undesirable forms of financial activity: dodgy investment schemes, gambling, even money laundering.

Like drugs prohibition doesn't seem to work. It pushes these activities further into the shadows and generates deeper and less obvious forms of corruption. It also seems to drive socially harmful manifestations like the use of residential property as a money dump.

Maybe we could have regulated unregulated financial arenas with appropriate disclaimers and some degree of KYC to prevent the absolute worst use cases?
I'm not sure what the take away was, but I really enjoyed the article. That seems appropriate.

I've been doing unguided mediation by myself for short periods (sub 30m) for years. Never really took much instruction in terms of what type of mediation i should do.

I think this article is the first thing that really made want to seek out instruction.

Any personal recommendations for books/other material for someone that's familiar with the concept of sitting meditation and can get into daily habit of 10m sessions without a huge amount of trouble?
Wow, what a surprise with a privacy focused company like Google.
My coworkers go out of their way to tell each other, in person, about the free food.
Why peanut reactions have become 'almost epidemic' – and what to do about it
That couldn't have anything to do with HN but all with your browser. Most likely you do have clicked through to the URI another time before when the link was up and you just forgot because it is not anything you would or could remember, higher gauge theory I mean. That happened to me with a pdf as I will save too many pdfs to read and open too many pages in tabs to fit memory.
I don’t understand what you disagree with. I’m not arguing for or against driverless cars.

I’m saying that our basis right now is whether or not driver assistance systems are making driving safer or less safe.

Driverless cars are currently only used in specific areas under tight regulation. They are not generally available and this article is about Teslas which are not self-driving, they have driver assistance features.

The original commenter above was making a remark about how the driver assistance features in a Tesla are “unsafe” due to a highway barrier accident.

I was making the counter argument that the driver was acting in an unsafe fashion by using driver assistance features as “self-driving”

I agree that if driver assistance features with a human driving are safer than driverless cars, driverless cars are not ready.

The point I was trying to make is that rather than talking about a single traffic accident, we have to look at the data. This is a law or large numbers thing, not penny press headlines.

I don’t think this a choice between driverless cars or not. We should be looking for the solutions which reduce traffic fatalities and injuries and also those which reduce the amount of hours wasted in traffic. Driver assistance features or self driving is only one angle for that. Improving road design patterns, building roads that actually follow the principles of psychology and fluid dynamics related to driving, properly maintaining roads, and other non technology related solutions are also potential factors for improvement.
Younger generations are actually better at telling news from opinion
Backwards installation of G-switches crashed the Genesis probe on its return to earth [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_(spacecraft)#Mishap_In...
would anyone be able to recommend the current best resources for acquiring useful AI / machine learning skills, for the average software engineer?

EdX has a good one, I wrote about my experience of it here https://gaius.tech/2018/08/08/microsoft-professional-program...

The tooling and libraries are very good now; assuming you already had the data in a good shape, you could do something commercially useful with Keras in a day or two from first picking it up. There is still quite a lot of low hanging fruit around but these skills are well on their way to becoming commoditized so I don’t know how much longer that will last.
Is it OK to be average?
Email is generally regarded as the most reliable in my experience.
A similar HN submission came up a few days ago about how MOOCs can be a replacement for a PhD: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18293418

Data-oriented MOOCs like Andrew Ng’s Coursera course on Machine Learning and fast.ai’s course on Deep Learning are good academic introductions to the theory and terminology behind data science and other related fields. Although MOOCs have many practice problems to solve, they don’t make you an expert in the field capable of handling messier real-world problems, nor claim to do so. (my longer blog post on the subject: https://minimaxir.com/2018/10/data-science-protips/)

More importantly, actually getting the job nowadays is near impossible without a Masters/PhD due to the competition. (the statistical trick with MOOC/boot camp job placement is that the candidate often has a Masters/PhD in a different field, not necessarily in AI)
How TurboTape Works
I suppose you ruled out Rust because of the lack of simplicity?
Javascript and numerics. That is my takedown of javascript. If you don't know why its bad for numerics[1] or just generally weird [2][3] ...

No, JS shouldn't be used as a systems language IMO. It gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot (multiple mixed metaphors for a reason).

[1] https://charlieharvey.org.uk/page/javascript_the_weird_parts

[2] https://hackernoon.com/js-wtf-with-math-79da9a941ec1

[3] https://github.com/denysdovhan/wtfjs
I don’t think people mean difference in development, as in one is shriveled and weak, but often differences in flexibility and minor changes in power can affect thing. Consistent poor usage of your body can and does cause certain muscles to compensate for others, an imbalance if you will, because that’s just how the human body moves.

A lot of pain I’ve experienced over the years has been caused by an imbalance in flexibility between muscle pairs. Lately I’ve been having issue with the pectoral minor vs. one of the rotator muscles that’s been making overhead pressing a very pinchy experience. Releasing the pec minor with a lacrosse ball has done wonders for improving the comfort (and power) of my overhead press.

My only beef with this process is that figuring out which pair is imbalanced is really hard, and I could never do this on my own. It is not intuitive or logical that a pain I'm feeling in my shoulder can be fixed by focusing on my chest.
Loneliness costs the US almost $7B extra each year
Sounds risky. Not that uber drivers are riskless - but food can be spoiled in less obvious ways than driving.
The 8 Best Security Software for Windows 10 Malware Protection
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Rather than just any old divisions, politics is increasingly steered toward divisions over things that elites don't actually care about: gun rights, abortion rights, LGBTQ rights, manufactured "religious freedom" debates, "tough on crime" policies, etc.

These things actually are important, because regular people do have strong feelings about them, but they matter to elites only to the extent that they can be used to gin up votes without having to dissent on any of the things that they all agree on: killing lots of foreigners with expensive weapons systems, preventing anything resembling a realistic safety net, pro-capital/anti-labor tax and immigration policies, unlimited dark money in politics, etc.

First-past-the-post systems like the US make this particularly easy, since third parties have no chance. If policies like universal healthcare and non-interventionist foreign policy are simply never adopted by either party, voters are forced to make their voting choice based on things that at least are different between the two parties, and elites have arranged for these to be things that barely matter to them at all. They don't have to interact with our barely-there social safety net, worry about health insurance, send their sons to die in foreign wars, or tolerate any of the daily parade of indignities that constitute life for working people.

In short, it's good strategy to manipulate the poors with cheap rhetoric about the 2nd amendment, so that you don't have to have messy debates about expensive things the elites oppose, like universal healthcare.
I've taken the course. It's the best out there. Jeremy and Rachel do a phenomenal job and they're taking a contrarian stance to a lot of others in how they encourage anyone with even a little bit of programming experience to go for it. It's also a free course so it's not like they'd make tons of cash on covert advertising operations...
I must admit I laughed out loud when I read:

"Part of the reason why Ann Arbor is tech hub in Michigan is because of U of M, which is ranked very high on any university ranking sites. There is no doubt that the school spends a lot of money on their buildings exteriors and interiors to attract students. However, just like most other universities, you do not really learn many practical skills from there even if you are a computer science student. Here is my personal experience. One day, I went to one of the biggest computer labs in the CS building and asked more than 30 students there if they know how to program in Swift ( the programming language used to make native iOS apps), everyone said no. When I got back home and search their curriculum, only one course is related to mobile development. However, stats show more than 75% of people are using mobile phones for personal use compared to 40% using a desktop. So just as most other universities in the US, students are not well trained to stay up to date."

Note that the University of Michigan is one of the top ten engineering schools in the United States; it's graduates go on to _design_ the next generation programming languages and microprocessors[1], if not go into research. Apparently, this fellow imagines UM to be some sort of community college.

Given this, one has to suspect the rest of the article is equally faulty.

[1] To give you an idea of its size, the UM EECS department has the capability to do chip fabrication on-site and it's available to undergraduates as part of a course (EECS 423)
I wouldn't even try emulating this properly with the standard GPU rasterizer, except as a fallback mode for underpowered systems. It would be fun to try using Image Load/Store and Shader Storage Buffer Objects, though, in OpenGL 4.6. Just bind a framebuffer object with no color buffer and do all your writes using atomic operations to image objects and SSBOs in the fragment shader. The fragment shader interlock extension might be helpful if it's available (note: it's unavailable in Vulkan!) This is similar to how order-independent transparency or voxel rasterization works.

One possibility might be to do two passes: one to build up linked lists of per-fragment data (polygon ID, color, depth, etc.) and a second pass to sort all the linked lists into the proper order and determine a final color. This is the standard order-independent transparency trick.

You could build up tables as well--for instance, you could emulate the "one span per scanline/polygon" behavior by allocating a table of scanlines for each polygon that you fill with the lowest X coordinate for that scanline and discard fragments that don't belong to the triangle contributing the lowest such X coordinate.

I have no idea if this will actually work--if I had to guess I'd put a 50% probability on it not working out at all. The fallback would be a SIMD scanline renderer. The Image Load/Store GPU implementation would be really fun though :)
You’re in an unusually rich area.

Down here in LA, which I believe is slightly less rich than SV, I still see more scooters than Teslas, and this is a car friendly area.
Check out Twist. https://twist.com

I have no affiliation with the company/team, but love the product so much that I want to share it here!

The whole idea behind Twist is to be a team communication that doesn't have the productivity issues Slack does. I think it's a very well positioned and timed product.

We've been using it for months at our startup, Canny. Threads are a useful level of organization, such that it's always easy to find what I'm looking for. However, I don't feel like I need to check it constantly.