skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The mostly-silent majority. KDE has some nice features but under the shiny screenshot it's still a disorganised and inconsistent jumble.

GNOME gets out of your way and lets you get on with your work. Customising every last detail isn't necessary to be productive, and if it is a DE isn't for you anyway.
So everyone with an eye for design doesn't do work?

Anyways anyone that has trained their eyes (which allows extremely technical visual skills to be developed, not just "art") to actually see what their eye is transmitting to them and not just interpreting it will immediately notice these kinds of things. It's like saying to them stop looking at letters if you're trying to read.

If this sounds like gibberish try this exercise.
https://www.allaboutdrawings.com/upside-down-drawing.html
The typical woodworker knows by hard all “crazy fucked” denominators like 333.333 mm for a third, 200 mm for a fifth etc.

The idea that not having straight fractional values somehow makes it harder is just plainly false. When you tell anybody to cut a third of a meter they will just happily cut 333.33 mm down to their usual tolerance
When you are measuring to fail
SF doesn't even have the worst air quality in the Bay Area. The Livermore Valley does.
DBMS as an application server (2016)
Do most of your friends live in cities?

How do your french friends in the rural countryside manage without cars?
Such is Brown's legacy.

California doesn't even have an oil extraction tax (most red states do).
We're on OVH for most things that aren't latency sensitive. For things where every millisecond counts for quality, we either find a 2nd tier cloud provider with decent peering to most of our end users in that area, or less common colo or rent a server (some areas just don't have 2nd tier cloud providers).
Not necessarily. Some cities still have fairly bad public transport. Using the car just happens to be worse.
I suspect the number would be quite a bit larger. You have to consider how many with diabetes would be willing to wear contact lenses, and if you consider what the tradeoffs involved are, I think you'd find it's a rather large proportion.

Managing blood sugar how we do it now is a far larger bother than wearing contact lenses. I would guess that most diabetics who could afford them and did not have some physical aversion would use the lens monitors.

The alternative is primarily: draw blood from your finger every time you want to know where your blood sugar is. (There are other 'continuous' glucose monitors, but you have to keep a needle in you all day, and my understanding is they are inaccurate enough that you still often need to check sugar by drawing blood.)
Oil has been a curse for much of the Arab world, they are going to go through a painful transition but it will be better for them in the long term.
Vala is to me the Dutch of programming languages. A fine language. When I hear it I first "know" it's English, then I know it's Danish, then I "know" it's German.

Which is when I realise is has to be Dutch.

But should I learn Dutch? Even though it's a fine language? Maybe I'm better off learning English and German first. And French. Dutch, and Vala, are too niche.

I wish ElementaryOS, would, in probably this order, would have:

a) used ObjectiveC instead of Vala. Elementary is attractive to to Mac users or admirers. Why not leverage what they know?

b) Exposed their API through some language agnostic mechanism. Heck, spits .NET even?

c) Supported interpreted languages such as Ruby, Python, Perl even.

IIRC I brought this up on some mailing list or other a LONG time ago, but (of course) was met - "Get with the program. Vala is fine."

It is fine, but come on. Everything about Linux (desktop) is niche to begin with. Why jump into a super-niche of a niche?
That and introduction of road tolls and paid entrance to city centers across Europe.
Here’s Why Tires Are Black
Mark Broumand 4.11ct Cushion Cut Diamond Engagement Ring – ViralTrendsLab
Linux in the form of Chrome OS seems to be capturing a lot of market share lately. Likewise Linux is also by no small margin what runs of most people's mobile phones or tablets. And the remaining ones run a fruity flavor of BSD. So most of what users is using is already unix and most of that is in fact Linux. MS is of course still pushing their own kernel but they seem to be insisting on that less when it comes to servers and all but gave up on mobile.

The problem with 'traditional' linux distributions is not Linux the kernel but the notion of window managers and other stuff that just isn't very good or user friendly. With Chrome OS, basically Google decided to cherry pick Linux for stuff that they could use/savage and scrap/replace the rest. Given how successful they are with that approach, I'm very confident in predicting that KDE vs. Gnome is never going to end in a victory for either. At least not in the form of world dominance. If anything, I see a lot of techies using alternative, lighter weight window managers. Even the target audience is opting out of using either.

Elementary OS looks like straightforward rip off of OS/X before they dropped the whole aqua look. That is to say a bit dated, not very original, and not that impressive or tempting to me.
If you are a medium-advanced user with Excel it's not gonna be good with calc.

Linux is only going to be smooth for very basic stuff or if you have de knowledge to troubleshoot it.
I think overhead rates at most big state schools are around 50%, and I believe they are higher at a lot of elite private universities. This is the link I got when I googled "Yale overhead rate":

https://your.yale.edu/sites/default/files/rate-agreement.pdf

If I am reading it right, it says that on-campus research has an overhead rate of 67.50 or 69.0 percent depending on the funding source. Ouch! I imagine that the federal government knows that it is subsidizing universities as a whole through this system and intends to do so.
It doesn’t matter. Just write 333.333 mm and if you make it evident in your construction drawing that three of these third meter-things need to fit one meter somebody might even calculate the width of the blade into it.

Measurements are just a number and you will always have tolerances and chains of measurements to go with them to clarify what you expext as a end result.
"Cross platform" is in the eye of the beholder.

How easy is it to use for someone that thinks their browser IS the internet to install and use?
How can the apartment work for 5 or 6 people? Are apartments simply larger, or is it a sort of make do with less space Tokyo wise thing?
Goofy hoax:

"The alleged hacker has been busy posting to various image boards and stating that they would send $20 in bitcoin to anyone who spread the word about this hack using the #Protonmail hashtag on Twitter".
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hacker-say-th...

"A closer reading of some of the claims, e.g. "circumventing the Geneva convention, underwater drone activities in the Pacific Ocean, and possible international treaty violations in Antarctica", etc, should also cause a reasonable observer to draw the same conclusion".
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/9xjrch/protonma...
Strictly speaking, IMSI identifies the SIM. A subscriber may have multiple SIMs and many SIMs throughout their lifetime. The IMSI is never ever transferable. The IMSI/SIM represents a unique network identity and links to items such as individualised cryptographic keys; session state, etc. the counterparts to which are baked into the SIM itself.
My mother has been eating large amounts of of hot fresh chillies with every meal for the last decade and has noted a huge improvement in her arthritis pain, to the point where if she travels and forgets to take chillies with her, the pain seems to return swiftly.

It may be psychosomatic, but the benefits to her seem to have been huge, for an incredibly low cost and risk.
Purchase price is down payment on first repair.

This has always been a problem for Jaguar, I wonder why they have never been able to get a grip on it.
People in the industry were calling out Theranos' nonsense for many years

People in the industry enabled Theranos. You don’t make deals with Walgreens and Safeway without people in the industry backing you.

Of course, there were fair number of doubters. But when the likes of Mayo Clinic lend their name to anything from Theranos, it’s safe to say an important part of the industry
backed it.
What I've been calling "time travel" is a technique for personal growth. I imagine an idealized future world I'd like to live in (ie. using the time travel mechanisms in the article) and imagine how people and/or myself might respond to events differently based on how the world works. I imagine what I would do with my time, how I'd go about it, and what kind of person I'd be. Then I choose to be that person now.

It's like my present self is reaching out and pulling a future self backwards in time to their past.
Isn’t urbanization a thing?
General Anesthesia Cuts Down Child's Intelligence
10 Best Black Friday Tips for Amazon Sellers 2018
Unity still works perfectly fine on 18.04 for me. There is still some maintenance going on, so it can be an ok choice for the near future.
Wow...

if you can read in any flattering from me on either red or blue, I don't know what to say.

And I'm poking fun of the whole "calling for bipartisanship" for ignoring that there might be more than two parts to any one issue, and then you compare me to (red team) Mitch McConnell!

Handing over the microphone to you, my comedy act can't match this. How's that knee?
Trump must be seething with envy, he'd have the entire CNN staff assassinated like that.
Well you can use https://github.com/argoproj/argo for workflow needs without need to version everything. For data versioning if you need, you can use https://dvc.org/ As this gives me freedom to choose as if I want data versioning and/or workflow rather than one bug bundle.
Thinkpads and Dell Latitude series (5xxx something). Currently Thinkpad X220 and L440. Wifi non-free drivers but in most distros, trackpad on L440 seems to recognise multiple finger use for scrolling &c. I admit that I tend to use at most one external display - projector - and that seems to work, I know that the newer hires external displays pose issues around scaling &c
No, but I have a very good friend in Vegas who says it's similar there.
Learn to Make Python Data Structures with John Bura for Free
The Raspbian distribution has recently been improved to the point where it has a decent (if less polished) experience. I have a Pi desktop for developing in Arduino, and it’s great with the newest 3B+.
What a time to be alive, eh?
"On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules" (1972) - because the core principles of modularity haven't changed
[https://www.win.tue.nl/~wstomv/edu/2ip30/references/criteria...]

"The Mythical Man Month" (1975) - because human nature hasn't changed
[https://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month-Software-Engineeri...]

"The History of Fortran I, II, and III" (1979) - because this historical piece by the author of the first high level language brings home the core principles of language design [https://archive.org/details/history-of-fortran]

"The Unix Programming Environment" (1984) - because the core basics of the command line haven't changed
[https://www.amazon.com/Unix-Programming-Environment-Prentice...]

"Reflections on Trusting Trust" (1984) - because the basic concepts of software security haven't changed
[https://www.archive.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p7...]

"The Rise of Worse is Better" (1991) - because many of the tradeoffs to be made when designing systems haven't changed
[https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html]

"The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to learn" (1996) - because the core principles that drive innovation haven't changed
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2FF649D0C4407B30]
[https://www.amazon.com/Art-Doing-Science-Engineering-Learnin...]

"xv6" (an x86 version of Lion's Commentary, 1996) - because core OS concepts haven't changed
[https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2011/xv6/xv6-rev6.pdf]
[https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2014/xv6/book-rev8.pdf]
Why you should know about Non Functional Requirements?
Its always someone else's fault. I suppose that makes it easier to accept one's country is a shithole.
Working together is the only way to take back tech from the corporate overlords. We need to support Mozilla's efforts to liberate critical technologies like Voice to text via Mozilla DeepSpeech.

Building the Common Voice corpus is critical to generating highly accurate transcriptions, check it out at https://voice.mozilla.org

If we do nothing, there will be no large organization standing up to build foundational technology outside of corporate siloes.
It might help if every new software developer was at least forced to grok the five monkeys in a cage parable:

https://hipmonkey.wordpress.com/2016/02/08/5-monkeys-a-banan...

Afterwards gently point them towards the familiar examples of passwords (“Passwords can't contain spaces/be longer than 20 characters/must …”), email address validation (“I found this really complete regex that …”), names (“No, surnames are always at least 3 characters long, and …”), and sex/gender (“Haha, yeah I know gender isn't a binary option, but this is the sex field, it just records what's in the user's passport, and THAT is either male or female!”¹).

1: Nope: https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2018/10/gender-x-first-gender-...
CIA has a long history of misleading the public, and even the Congress. Examples:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/michael-morell-apologizes-colin...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_co...

https://www.cnn.com/2013/08/19/politics/cia-iran-1953-coup/

Why do people still take their statements, and even their leaks, as truth?
18.04 prompts you very clearly and the first report they let you see looks innocent. Is there something concretely wrong with 18.94 telemetry beyond objecting to even optional telemetry on principle?

(I agree that the Amazon search thing was bad.)
On the Wikipedia page for Scunthorpe (not the problem) the etymology of the name is given. Seems that we wouldn't be having the Scunthorpe Problem if the people of Scunthorpe could be bothered to spell their town's name correctly:

The town appears in the Domesday Book (1086) as Escumesthorpe, which is Old Norse for "Skuma's homestead", a site which is believed to be in the town centre close to where the present-day Market Hill is located.

If they changed the 'c' for 'k' then they wouldn't get modded down in the AOLs of this world and nobody outside of Lincolnshire, England would have any reason to even know of the place.
Yeah, how you cripple an economy is by not letting people take low budget holidays in Mexico and stopping them from buying imported crap off of amazon for a week. National security risk my ass - this is fearmongering.
You might be thinking along the lines of natural units [1] or even Planck units [2], where you set some fundamental constants to 1 and take it from there.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_units
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units
Ask HN: How do you reduce cognitive load?
Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (1994), an amazing book on the history, science and philosophy of comics, is itself a comic...then checking out most of the cartoonists he mentions that I hadn't heard of[0], too many to mention. I discovered a load of great stuff from that, e.g. the graphic novels of Will Eisner and wordless novels of Lynd Ward.

[0] Library Genesis's comics section helped with that http://libgen.io/comics/index.php
Arch is brilliant for packaging things up, it's my daily driver and while it drives me mental sometimes I still use it on the laptop for work.

However my main desktop these days is a bog standard Win10... probably showing my age that I can't be bothered to tinker round with it anymore.
My father lays tiles for a living and he always did the same in metric, if he didn’t had something to measure things with him (which any professional should!)

A meter is basically a slightly longer step. I think most tradesmen over here got a pretty good sense how to walk a meter.

0.1m or 1dm or 10cm or 100mm is basically the width of your hand.

1cm or 10mm is roundabout the width of the pinky finger
The technology is definately more than cool, hopefully some of that tech can be repurposed into something that can make it clinically.

Worth noting, tear glucose wouldn't need to be correlated in a linear fashion with BGL, as long as there was a way to derive BGL from tear glucose data.
The noteworthy thing here is not that the Saudi's are doing stuff like this but that the CIA is calling them out on it instead of helping their former ally to bury the bodies and get away with it.

It's a big change. The Saudi's have been instrumental for decades in the foreign policy of the US in the middle east. And that's despite al queeda, IS, etc being founded by Saudi's and openly funded by them. For decades it was very convenient for the US to provide active military support to the Saudi's in various ugly wars by proxy in the region and look the other way when it came to such things like genocide, occasional bombing of schools, hospitals, etc., Muslim extremists, and public beheadings.

However, recent focus on energy independence and a string of embarrassing incidents around e.g. Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc. seems to be souring the relationship. Times are changing.
This.

There are 1,000 of these little things that just aren't right with linux as a desktop that make me drop it in less than a week every time I try it out.

* How to I switch keyboards from English to Japanese easily?

* How do I run excel or Lightroom or blah software that I'm already familiar with?

* How do I upgrade my OS if I don't know the difference between Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 x86_64 and Linux 3.16.0-4-generic or some such? Or even the difference between Intel and AMD? Why am I picking "amd64"? I have an intel processor! (That was hypothetical don't answer that)

* How do I buy a new laptop that all of the hardware just works like it's supposed to?

* How can I upgrade a piece of hardware and be sure it'll work?

Only macOS and Windows answer all of those questions.
> I really don’t know how this is going to work out for personal vehicles just given a lack of personal parking spaces.

It probably won't work. Or, come to think of it, it will sort of work as it will force the "poorer" people (those who can't afford a dedicated parking space with access to a charger) to sell their ICE cars and revert to using public transport, so you'd only have "richer" people driving their EV cars. A similar thing is now happening in cities like Paris, where recent rules forbid the use of older diesel cars, which has in fact meant that people who had moved out in the banlieues for cheaper rent while still working in downtown Paris have had to go back to using public transport, which out in the banlieues is not that reliable compared to the downtown area. That means that those "poorer" people now have issues arriving at time to work or picking up their kids from school. Regressive taxes and bans are bad.
is there any specific reason for using python 2 instead of 3 or it is just how you guys do it
You’re assuming demand is tied to supply. That’s a logical error. If demand is increasing faster than supply there is still scarcity and prices will increase. Is the ratio of supply and demand and the change over time that determines price. Further there is a lot of evidence that wages are unique and resist going down and are slow to rise (because employers are aware of the stickiness of wage levels)

In the case of H1B, we are talking about Highly Skilled individuals that are scarce by global standards. Basically the supply of highly skilled employees is less than the demand, even with current levels of immigration.

A similar thought experiment: if you build more apartments in NYC, the price won’t necessarily go down because the demand is massive and increasing; it would take a lot of apartments to lower prices in NYC.
The other thing here is, of course, that these "companies we all know" are not the be all and end all for software development. There are hundreds of thousands of smaller companies the world over doing development in every field you could imagine. I know nothing about them, but some of them are very likely to be doing things I would find fascinating. There's very little to connect me with them except by chance. Even if I'm aware of the main companies in the specific field I work in, there are still far more that I'm unaware of. That's a lot of missed opportunities.

The current process is inefficient and suboptimal for all concerned. Recruiters have trouble identifying good candidates. And on the other side we have trouble identifying good companies/projects. On both sides we dumb down the skills provided/needed to bullet points of technologies and tools, often completely ignoring the actual problem domains. While I don't think the suggestion here about gleaning insights from git repositories is a solution by any means, it might make a small improvement by providing some deeper insight into real demonstrated skills and experience. As someone else mentioned, of course this could lead to gaming the system, but I suspect most fraudulent stuff could be filtered out--there would be clear differences between real projects contributed to over the course of years and "resumé fodder".
To the people who say it was about ”states’ rights” and not slavery I ask: A state’s right to what?

And it’s interesting that we focus on states’ rights and not human rights.
Slightly off-topic:

This is an ATC recording where pilots lost control over the aircraft. Figuring out what to do when the aircraft goes to random directions, they ask for the direction of the ocean to ditch in. Because of low visibility they have no idea where they are going.

The description suggests that during maintenance, some steering control was attached in the wrong way.

https://youtu.be/kIc8Rr-cKd8

In this case, the pilots have like an hour to figure out how to control the aircraft.
> Maybe start by not making it an issue that only geeks or tech savvy types are outraged about.

I also think that in order to unite the wide public for a cause, we should have a clear message about the dangers of no neutrality being explainable to a kid.

But I wonder what is the biggest danger we try to warn about?

Some people think its just about not having bandwidth to watch 4k videos. Some people think its about lack of privacy.
Others mostly disturbed by the possibility of losing our very access to information itself. That is, public knowledge being manipulated. What does that mean for society?
Virus Explorer – visualize and compare viruses in 3D models
For sure get the second edition. The first edition is way, way out of date.
I don’t get the hate, really. It’s the only distro I’ve used in the past few years with a “nice enough” desktop where my Mac instincts translate across and where I can use anything packaged for Ubuntu with zero hassles.

I’ve been running it on a low-end Chromebook for a long while now, and upgraded from 0.4.1 to 5.0 via the CLI (not recommended, but feasible if you know what you’re doing), and other than the ultra-niche app ecosystem (which I don’t need, since I mostly run Firefox, Docker and VS Code on it, besides dev packages) it has zero weirdness.

Well, except for the mail client. It has improved, but every single time I try to use it to send out some notes while away from my regular machines it breaks somehow, and there is zero addressbook/calendar integration (I have Thunderbird installed, but keep trying the built-in mail client after each update because I like the UI).
Story of the infamous Windows bug: filename too large for destination filesystem
Cryptocurrencies are wasteful and “smart contracts” are neither smart nor contracts. I’m all for decentralisation, but IMO git helps more than all of crypto.
used ObjectiveC instead of Vala

Or Swift?
On Rigorous Error Handling
"it makes a difference" or "it matters"