skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Giving precise estimates is almost always impossible for any project of significance and really doesn't matter much. What value does a very precise estimate give? None, because 1) it's impossible, and 2) even if it wasn't, how do you know if it is accurate?

My process looks like this:

1) Decide how big of a project it is. Is it a small script or app that does some simple data manipulation? If so that's a week project. Is it larger? Maybe it is a 3 month project. Complete software solution? 1+ years (usually).

2) Go back to the client with this information, but don't spend days on getting something precise. Have the discussion with them: "from what I understand, this is going to take some time to get together for you. Are you prepared to work on the project scope with me some more?" for a larger project, the 1+ year project, they have to be prepared to spend days, even weeks, working with the team to get them a product. The time is roughly proportionate: they (the business) have to spend 1/4 to 1/2 of a work day for each week of development. 2 to 4 1-hour "talks" or reviews (on their time).

3) OK they are prepared. Talk to them some more, have the first 1 or 2 hour meeting and work on the scope, using your notes from #1 and #2. You bill them for this time. Might take 4 hours or might take even close to a week (with a demo to prove you can solve the core problem) to get them a scope of work.

Again, very important: you bill them for #3.

I always stress to the client that if they don't like the work done of course I have a satisfaction guarantee, but if the SOW is solid (and I do stand by my work, so I will make sure it is so) then they have to pay for it. If they like the SOW it is theirs once they pay: it is reasonable for me to expect them to outsource this scope to another team. I make that very clear.

Also, after #3 you'll have an idea of how big the project is. I give them an estimate for the way-high end, then add a bit to it. So if I completed a recent project like this one in 1 month, I say to myself "this took me about a month of work, focusing on just this project. This is worth some $N to me. But, you know, it might take longer - I'm going to estimate to the client it takes 2.5 months, to be safe, and tell them ($N * 2.5)."

I always do this, because often you'll end up under-billing the client and then they're super happy and will probably end up spending that extra $$$ with you anyway.

And if you don't under-bill (I almost always do using this system, unless massive pieces are left out) then well, the client is none the wiser (I hate putting it like this, but it is true) and you are being responsible to them and your own business.

The alternative is either telling them you have to charge them more $$ or you're going out of business, or eating thousands of dollars in cost b/c you're underbidding on projects. Neither on sustainable, unless you're like Uber I guess? I don't know - my business is small and I don't have any outside investors :)
I'm not really certain of how to react to this since [a] I can configure Wireguard on my phone to use any DNS server (usually my remote Pi-Hole+DoH but can be 1.1.1.1) and [b] wonder if non-tech folks will install this app and grasp the difference between encrypted DNS queries vs. encrypted traffic + DNS queries -- the latter being a better option requiring an actual VPN tunnel.

I understand that using a loopback VPN is the only way to do this kind of DNS enforcement on non-rooted phones, which happen to be the majority.

But I think Cloudflare would be better off promoting privacy by either offering a complete VPN service or partnering with the likes of Mullvad/Azire/ProtonVPN etc. to ensure DoH by default (which most end users of those services tweak anyway if they can).
Somewhat heretical, but I generally don't.

I usually explain that development is an iterative process, and that I generally deliver work as soon as it's done.

We talk about the knobs that are available to tune the work to the goal, and how to measure goals. We talk about containing costs, and working together to deliver good value.

I find that in general, estimates are rarely, if ever, accurate to any significant degree, and thus are usually dishonest when presented as a way to assuage client anxiety over "when will it get done" or "how much will it cost".
I think this medium post by the author is the same text as the PDF.

https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-complete-javascript-hand...

I find myself on flavio's site pretty often coming from google when looking up node topics. He puts out a lot of content, publishing every day. You also might be reading his node content as the official getting started guide on the nodejs website, pending this PR's review.

https://github.com/nodejs/website-redesign/pull/105
Not sure I understand you correctly, but Bitwarden can do this (it's the 'passphrase' option).
>Like all powerful technology, I don't think trying to ban it is the answer. Rather, stronger regulation over how it's allowed to be used.

So you don't think weapons of mass destruction should be banned?
I can’t see how it would be in your interest to post this. Are you not concerned that this comment could be tied back to your working identity and used against you?

Another possibility is that you are a lying fed stirring the pot. For instance, a fed could point to your comment as evidence that antipolygraph.org is inciting people to break the law, which is a gambit they have used before.
Show HN: Record your Android screen with “scrcpy --record file.mp4”
Thanks to the initial work submitted by igorinov via a pull request (https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy/pull/292), scrcpy now provides an option to record the device screen to a video file:

scrcpy --record file.mp4

The device is mirrored on the computer and can be controlled via keyboard and mouse, as usual.

If the device is rotated during recording, the recorded video is also rotated (its dimensions change). It seems to work correctly in video players (vlc, mpv and even firefox).
Are you UnHappy? Know the science behind it
It'd be cathartic if Audi sent a questionnaire to my wife to ask her about the dashboard GUI. ("Only a German engineer could design such a thing.", which is a bit harsh: there are plenty of thermostat designers who could do worse.)

The fact that iOS 12 now supports 3rd party apps (==Google Maps) on CarPlay has been a life saver.
> There’s no one there I can’t get on Facebook, Instagram or signal.

I'm actually waiting for FB/Whatsapp to announce it's specific monetization strategy so that it becomes the trigger to tell my friends/family on WhatsApp off of it and onto Signal. Otherwise, you're correct, it's very difficult to convince people otherwise.
Lisp Machines and Xerox PARC workstations had network access.

In fact, parts of Ethernet protocol were researched at Xerox.
> They should add something

I disagree.

> to run code when leaving a scope, no matter how you leave

This, and various other features, were already added to C long ago. The resulting dialect was called C++.
>For starters, we need to place a much higher priority on understanding how the human mind works—particularly how our own wisdom and compassion can be cultivated.

Here, be dragons.

Our analysis of the human brain allows us to better hack the human brain. Someone will use it to improve their RoI.

There’s no such thing as learning “compassion” without also learning other adjacent things as well. Perhaps withholding compassion, or selective compassion. Perhaps alienation is a close neuronal cousin.

Opening up one set of pathways also opens up other pathways for manipulation, good or ill.
Citizens do matter, if the country has a social system, like the Europeans do.

You can have either social support system, or open borders, but not both. It is unfair to those who built the system to open borders and deplete it on people, who neither built it, nor have intention to continue building it.
As strong as I hate dealing with cash, it can't be dismissed in current society. In many places you don't want to use card as it's sketchy, in many places you don't want to have a log in your bank account (like going to a bar midday on a Tuesday).

Not to mention a classic meaning of cash, or just money: you get things for it. If you are getting robbed one thing is to give $40 because that's all you had in the wallet and completely other getting robbed for all money in your account. That's just one scenario.

I'm not sure I would want to live in a society without cash.
Bayer aquired Monsanto, not the other way round. But yeah, these two companies truely are a fit made... well not heaven but maybe the hotter counter part of it.
Glad someone pointed this out. I had to Google it, then urban dictionary, then back to Google with an “open source” appended to the query, only after happening upon these comments. So far, I think it means “decentralized”
I have been using Keepass2, then KeepassXC for 5 years, with Dropbox to sync the db between my devices.

Since Dropbox recently stopped to support ecryptfs, I started looking for alternatives (KeepassXC + Google Drive/SpiderOak, Lastpass were some candidates).

Looks like Bitwarden is worth testing too :-)
You can do it in Bjarne Stroustrup C, which is standard.

You can do it in the 20-year-old version of it, and draft versions many years before that.
C desperately needs to be left alone.
I walk through the requirements document line by line and capture it all using Event Storming. Once I get it granular enough I can give a reality-based guestimate on the hours.
Badly.

It is not a joke comment. I could go into a lot of detail about methods that I've used, but it's the most important and valuable piece of knowledge that I've gotten out of this experience: we're bad at this. No matter how we do it, that's the thing that we should never forget.
I used LastPass for roughly a year before making the switch. I also switched from Chrome to Firefox at the same time, on Windows and Android. Desktop - no issues!

Android is evolving, and their changes seem to have put Firefox in a slightly behind position, which I think they're almost caught up on. Basically, there's legacy and modern autofill capabilities in Android, and Firefox is working on closing the gap. In the production release, I am unable to use the BitWarden android app, but there's an add-on that mostly does the job.

I have two issues with the add-on. First, it tends to disappear from the menu. There have been some bugs on BugZilla for this, including one I recently submitted. Of course, quite fortunately, I haven't been able to reproduce the issue since I submitted the bug and installed Nightly. And it's interesting - Nightly seems to work with the app, so the need for the add-on should go away. Second, the add-on is a little clunky. It opens a temporary tab, and then closes that tab when you select your login. However, there's an issue there, too, where sometimes it just does not work. It throws up an error message that it's unable to autofill, and there's little you can do about it except close the temporary tab and the original tab, and start again.

The Android app also has an issue that I've seen with Chrome, where it isn't actually detecting the site you're browsing, but just the app you're using (Chrome) and thus is unable to select your login. This is easy to get around - usually going back to Chrome and then tapping the BitWarden toast will find you your login.

Overall little nuisances that are mostly Android related issues more than anything, and each of them seems to be getting worked out, so I expect the user experience to only get better.
Thanks, saved me from giving me email and getting spam :)
Who cares, that is the least of the problems with Java ;)
Have you come across any blog or podcast which offered useful advice that didn't finally start feeling this way? Even something as well researched as Brain pickings seems to degenerate into repetitive fluff after a while.
> What I find strange is that a man who would make such a noble gesture as taking care of a wounded enemy, would not simply refuse to take part in such a senseless, destructive war as WWII, in the first place.

Because he lived by a code. He fought bravely for his nation, but he wouldn't cheat — and for him, shooting a wounded plane was a form of cheating.

I don't really think WWII was senseless (although it was certainly destructive). WWI, yes: it was a completely stupid loss of life. But I think for everyone involved the Second World War was vitally important.
how do you SMS your friends abroad?
HAL did have a baritone voice as he was “dying” - the visual implication of pulling out various modules was causing damage to his ability to talk and then think. The drop in register was designed to add to the unsettling nature of the scene.
I would dare say that "basic needs" with a $70k price sticker aren't all that basic. I mean, for starters, that's more than twice the median personal income in US. So we're talking about people who live roughly twice as well as the majority of US citizens. This includes stuff like a cozy home, good food, plenty of entertainment, Internet etc - are those really basic? Or do we perceive them as such today, because of how much the bar has been raised? Could that $70k just be "egalitarian enough" with the present income distribution, say?

But supposing that theory is right - then all we need to do to secure social stability is to ensure that $70k income for the majority of people in the country. Are there any ways to do so without massive wealth redistribution - which would, coincidentally, also reduce wealth inequality? It feels to me that regardless of which of these two theories are really correct, they prescribe essentially the same treatment, at least short-term.
Farmers can’t use glyphosate and be certified organic.

Certification can certainly miss things (hence the lawsuit). But I don’t think you can get much closer to glyphosate-free than organic, except by growing your inputs and the final product yourself.
I think this is of iMessage? It's probably not working if one of the user doesn't have an iPhone.
Stone Age Immersion Project
no this isn't it. i'm saying i want to be able to "run" a promise while stopped at breakpoint
> the aim was to integrate apps/companies into Whatsapp, but for me "No!".

When Facebook opened themselves up to everyone instead of College students, I felt the same way. When FB opened up to companies, I cancelled my account.

In the end it didn't matter. Companies were creating FB accounts anyway. Curbing them to a more explicit form of corporateship was the right thing to do than let them masquerade as users.

Internationally, WhatsApp is a very large force in both friendly communications and corporate/public/commercial avenues to communicate. Creating a WhatsApp business account (payable) to communicate with customers is the right thing to do. And I would not mind it as long as it is behind a portal and filter.
Coming from an enterprise background and having used Eclipse and IntelliJ for many years, I am honestly puzzled by the current trend in IDEs such as VS Code, Atom, etc. given their lack of fully features refactoring support, code search which goes beyond just simple text search, native understanding of classes, interfaces, method signatures etc.

I have tried all of the above 'modern' editors and almost immediately find tooling i'd assume is part of every IDE (i.e. code formatting, import organization/cleanup) but wasn't

Amongst the current crop of engineers, there seems to be a stigma against even trying Eclipse or IntelliJ. I kind of feel like junior engineers are missing out on discovering some much more powerful tooling and forming their own opinions.
Local farms where you can actually talk to the guy that owns and works the fields. At least for me, it's not that much more expensive than organic food at the grocery store, tastes significantly better (since it's not picked when super green), and I'm pretty sure it's more nutritious too.
Fun bit of off-topic trivia: The author of this post is Robert Quattlebaum, the creator of the SynFig animation software.
It would be fair to say this is tied pretty tightly to lack of business skills.

I think most of us expect that on the "Most Admired/Least Admired Scale" marketers clump towards the bottom, not the top.

There are plenty of failed KickStarters/GoFundMe's to peruse, but this is endemic among non-profits. While many do NOT offer services that could be self-supporting, many others could be, but there is insufficient business or advertising understanding to pursue being successfully self-supporting.

Among inventors, many pursue licensing or finding large partners (a reasonable idea, as far as it goes), but I've seen some pretty ridiculous advertising attempts.

But the real gold mine is from the files of marketing consultants working with teachers/service providers. Only some clients are in the "trying to make the world a better place" category, but many overlap that. Here's where you really find the greatest numbers of admirable folks very out of their depth at marketing.
From the Oil Field to Silicon Valley: How Coding Changed My Life
I'm still not exactly sure, which is definitely a red flag to me since I'm already a nerdy type that should at least understand the value proposition.
How is the form fill for information besides username and password (e.g. credit cards, personal contact info) compared to LastPass?
A couple of observations:

- Something like Light Table would probably seem like a step up for repl.it users, instead of a step down.

- It can take a long time to reach the point where it feels like there's a big payoff from using IDEs and similar tool.

Now, I definitely see the value of being able to do something like set a breakpoint in Visual Studio, step through a bit of code and observer local values changing, and then step backward, change the value of some variables or even edit my code a bit, and then step forward again to observe how my changes impacted the execution of the code. But when you're just learning, it's hard to even know that this kind of time travel debugging and live editing is even possible, and even when you know it's possible, it can be difficult to envision how you'd want to use it until you have more experience.
I don't know if this counts as the same thing, but I've recently started a Rails-based project on Google Cloud, using the cloud shell and its built-in editor. This is great because I don't have to futz around with a Vagrant environment or (worse) a straight Rails dev environment on my Mac, and I can do full-strength software development from the little Chromebook I like to carry around.

A Chromebook plus a 100% cloud-based dev environment is a great way to work without having to radically rethink How Software Works.
The Zombification of Intellectual Property and the Tool That Could Reform It
WebRTC is a standard...

https://www.w3.org/TR/webrtc/
My only problem was ampersands. LastPass encoded them as &amp; and I wasn't aware of this at first. After receiving errors for some passwords, I found out that was the problem. I had to find and replace all. Bitwarden was aware of this though, they have a warning for this on their migration guide.
It helps in delivering a superior experience to customers which ultimately is one of the only things that really matters in business.
Why are Distributed Systems so hard? A network partition survival guide
GraphQL Schema Design @ Scale
How to drive a robot on Mars
A lot depends on whether you're billing "time and materials" or whether there is going to be an agreed fixed price for the contract. For the second one, you have to have a pretty rigid specification in order to start - a list of all the screens and menus in an application as "wireframes", for example, with a brief description of what they do. Once you have that you can then assign some sort of average time cost to the features to produce a headline price.
Show HN: Plan your 28 hour day sleep schedule
This doesn't necessarily translate to production-level programming, but I used to teach computer science to middle and high school students. I originally used Cloud9, and had to walk students through the process of setting up a Github account, going through and setting up a proper dev environment, ensuring that their file space was showing and walk them through the run server commands. Very heavy stuff and ate into valuable time every class.

With repl.it, it was simply a matter of typing out a bitly link and hitting enter and everything was set up and ready to go.
Your assumption that the species isn't afraid of space travel is invalid.
The comments I made about Redshift vs BigQuery and about disk/network/etc reflect current opinions of colleagues who use AWS currently (or recently in some cases) and extensively, not 5-6 year old opinions. Even my own last use of AWS was maybe 2-3 years ago, when Redshift was AWS's closest competitor to BigQuery and when I saw disk/network issues directly.

You're right that Athena seems like the current competitor to BigQuery. This is one of those things that are easy to overlook when people made the comparison as recently as a couple of years ago (before Athena was introduced) and Redshift vs BigQuery is still often the comparison people make. This is where Amazon's branding is confusing to the customer: so many similar but slightly different product niches, filled at different times by entirely different products with entirely unrelated names.

When adding features, GCP would usually fill adjacent niches like "serverless Redshift" by adding a serverless mode to Redshift, or something like that, and behavior would be mostly similar. Harder to overlook and less risky to try.

Meanwhile, when Athena was introduced, people who had compared Redshift and BigQuery and ruled out the former as too much hassle said "ah, GCP made Amazon introduce a serverless Redshift. But it's built on totally different technology. I wonder if it will be one of the good AWS products instead of the bad ones." (Yes, bad ones exist. Amazon WorkMail is under the AWS umbrella but basically ignored, to give one example.)

And then they go back to the rest of their day, since moving products (whether from Redshift or BigQuery) to Athena would not be worth the transition cost, and forget about Athena entirely.

On the disk/network question, no I didn't see performance problems with provisioned IOPS volume types, but that doesn't matter: for GCE's equivalent of EBS magnetic storage, they do indeed give what they promise, at way less cost than their premium disk types. There's no reason it isn't a fair comparison.

And for the "instance" part of my EC2 performance comment, I was referring to a noisy neighbor problem where sometimes a newly created instance would have much worse CPU performance than promised and so sometimes delete and recreate was the solution. GCE does a much better job at ensuring the promised CPUs.

I'm glad AWS and GCP have lots of features, improve all the time, and copy each other when warranted. But I don't think the general thrust of my comparison has gone invalid, even if my recent data is more skewed toward GCP and my AWS data is skewed toward 2-3 years old. Only the specifics have changed (and the feature gap narrowed with respect to important features).
Thanks for the tip... I checked & believe that it does.
Why the heck would "four hand written parsers" be a selling point?
I don't know, deep space terrifies me as well. I remember trying a VR game that had my flying through deep space and to me it was terrifying.
> We hope that in the future, workers in Foxconn and elsewhere manage to find ways around such companies' military-style discipline and surveillance, come together, and forge collective paths out of this capitalist world of death, into a world worth living in.

Are they aware that China is a communist country?
> Whenever all those "where are the other silicon valleys?" articles come up, they never seem to bring up the Wasatch Front

Huh, interesting. This is exactly the opposite of my experience. I would have said those articles always bloviate about Silicon Slopes.