skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Successful bootstrapping strategies would render something like YCombinator useless so. Expect some resistance.
Build an Autonomous Car with RPi, NAVIO2 and Tensorflow Keras
I have since stopped comparing Apples to Googles since the following realization hit me: Apple is a tech company. Microsoft is a tech company. They sell technology. Google and Facebook are not. They're advertising companies. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It's just that we can't expect the two types of companies to behave the same way.
Analysis of 10,000 studies on marijuana supports only 3 medical benefits (2017)
Ask HN: Remote workers – What are the issues you are facing?
Would love to hear about issues/experiences related to work and also outside works such as logistics, travel, etc.
Signal has reproducible builds, which means you can build it from source yourself and confirm that the result is exactly the same as what you got from the app store. Obviously not many people actually do that, but it means google can't start pushing bad versions without a significant risk of getting caught.
zfs used to have a better compression algorithm (lz4) before btrfs landed zstd with kernel version 4.15. Btrfs still doesn't have stable support for RAID 5+6 https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID56
On that note, are there any fancy file systems that have acceptable Windows/Mac support? Or are we all doomed to using NTFS or exfat for USB drives that need to work on Linux/Mac/Windows?
I think limited liability is flat out necessary for a lot of good things. Just like, say, diplomatic immunity is. But it's still something that is given, and IMO not something for companies (or diplomats) to take for granted and get drunk on.
Ask HN: What articles would you like to see?
Hi,

I was wondering if you got any ideas of what articles to write and submit?
- fsync on btrfs is extremly slow. The situation has improved in last 3 years, but it is still much slower than ZFS. I just did a simple test and BTFS is 12x slower than ZFS (on my customer SSD, for small writes).

- RAID5/6 mode is only experimental in btrfs, while it is really stable in ZFS.

- I don't have concrete data for that, but in my experience, BTRFS has high latency (>1 second) even for small file operations when under load.

- While that should not be a problem for production systems, I have some crappy hardware where BTRFS oopses or corrupts data, while other filesystems (Ext4, ZFS) work fine.
I've always understood timing, origin, and destination of a message to be metadata. I'm on the fence about the size of the message. Only the contents themselves are definitely data.

Of course, metadata sometimes contains even more information than the data itself, so framing it as "unimportant" is already incredibly dishonest.
Data Manipulation with Pandas Python
Resilience of a given species may be related to the diversity inside it, and in such a case (and all else unchanged) complexity may add to it (more characteristics).

On a related(?) path see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exaptation
For the median project, you could just rebuild everything from scratch every time and avoid the problem.

It's the huge projects with millions of files and tens of gigabytes of source and assets that need these optimizations the most, and that's also where checksumming is the most painful.

It's not as unrealistic or monstrous as it sounds. It happens in monorepos when you include all of a project's thousand dependencies (down to things like openssl and libpng).
Input plugins? It has lots of identical plugins. Give it a try. deadbeef.sourceforge.net/plugins.html
It would be great if there was an "expert" mode on this, with a bit more detail on the coat protein structures. Modern molecular biology is so abstracted, you often lose sense of the actual scales of things. Being able to look at things as a whole like this really enable intuition to kick in.

It looks like they've tried to get surface density of proteins right, but I'd love to know if those densities are about right. This is all important for understanding viral receptor binding, and the importance of multi-valent interactions.
I'm not sure I agree with the idea that having a single open source project to rule them all is an inherently bad thing. In proprietary software, if Banana corp says that the next version of their Cavendish OS drops x86 support, you might find yourself doomed. But if Debian decides to drop x86 tomorrow, you go "Cool, good luck, I'll just fork." The project itself is never a single point of failure.
> battery level, signal strength,

This reminds me Windows 10 collecting color of the device, in that it is unnecessary for operation but enough to pinpoint a person in combination.
Social Media Bots Draw Public's Attention and Concern
Interesting to see hard-learned lessons in software development generalized into the rest of life so neatly.

> We can’t really justify all our decisions, many them are hunches, many of them are wrong.

https://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2014/06/heisenberg-developer...
Connecting Cycle Plots in Tableau with the New Set Actions Feature
For what it's worth, it reminded me of a passage in a novel (I can't remember which one) by an Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan.

In the story he contained an observation on how in blockhouses people on the first floor secure their balconies with bars to protect their flats against burglars.

These bars, however, make for a perfect ladder right onto the balcony on the second floor :) So then people on the second floor are forced towards doing the same thing, and so on all the way up.
I think this is a fantastic idea -- I hope the footage is getting archived for future viewers who can watch it at their pace -- 2/3x.
I've been writing code for 15 years (in Java, C++ and more recently JavaScript and Go). I have finally given up on exceptions and settled on return values (I particularly like Go's system). Exceptions, while theoretically superior, simply tempts even good programmers to just kick errors down the callstack. I prefer guard clauses [1].

[1] http://wiki.c2.com/?GuardClause
Is Btrfs worth considering? ZFS is one of the most advanced, stable and feature-complete filesystems there is, and is cross-platform. Btrfs is best known for being flakey and in mainline.

Had there not been uncertainties about licensing which prevented ZFS from being in mainline there wouldn't be any Btrfs. How can you ever really trust a filesystem developed by adding features first, trying to add stability and usability later anyway?
Introducing new concept for compressing links (trackable)
So tv stations, radio stations and some newspapers are advertising companies too?

And if Microsoft makes Windows free and displays Ads to makr revenue they are suddenly an ad instead of tech company?

And what about Google (actually Alphabet?) having multiple products out of which only a few make money by advertisement. Think of Android and Maps.
Developer, Webops and Technical Architect Vacancies – Ministry of Justice UK
> it would take a good iOS developer just a few days to put in place code in both the Facebook and WhatsApp apps that could discretely copy this database from one app to the other, via their shared container.

Weird article. If modifying the WhatsApp app is on the table, there are trivial ways to send decrypted messages elsewhere.
If you're busy and can't be arsed to research past "this has been rock-stable for a decade, so should be safe to use", ZFS is the best choice out there.
Come chat whit us on irc
It was used at my old job on a 1TB backup drive, containing lots of hourly snapshots from around 100 other machines that also had btrfs on it (btrfs send). The snapshots were also frequently thinned (i.e. only a few of the older ones kept) to make room for new ones. The filesystem broke at least two times in two years when it was nearly full. None of the fixes we found with web searches worked. We went with formatting and copying the backups from another location, losing only a little bit of data that was not too important. That was around 2015-2017, and the version of Btrfs was about what's in Debian jessie.
It was undoubtedly unethical behavior. But it's like... well it's like the story of Toshihide Iguchi, who accumulated over a billion dollars of trading losses and hid them successfully for 12 years. Sure you throw the guy in prison, but you have to hand it to him that what he managed to do is pretty damn impressive. After his release, finance CCOs might even want to hire him to audit their traders.

You can get off your high horse about not being able to acquire your degree without cheating, too. I never once cheated at any point in college, but if I had spent more time working on sick electronics projects and less time memorizing the years of significant 15th century battles, I'd be more qualified technically, not less. The ethics of it are problematic as I've said, but you seem to be going farther and implying something about his ability as well.
If you want to make a case for blockchains, maybe you shouldn't lead with the proven pyramid schemes that are ICOs?

"They ripped off over 5 billion dollars in cash, that means it's not a bubble." Well, doesn't that actually tell you the opposite? That people threw money at obvious scams just because the scams used fancy technology and a buzzword?
The digital divide is being flipped
The Climate in England in the Middle Ages
Open source geospatial coordinate sytem libraries are being revised
The internet is our prime hope for peace, democracy and freedom
Moderation, Authorisation and Background Task Improvements for OpenStreetMap
Has Facebook ever made it completely clear what they use btrfs for? I believe it was in one of the episodes of bsdnow where they talked about it "only" being used for administrative systems.
The ‘Geno-Economists’ Say DNA Can Predict Our Chances of Success
It looks like we had some harsh winters. "Thames frozen for seven weeks" in 1061.
If you think about it for a bit, the whole Western perspective has been moulded by merchants' advertising for a few centuries now - say since the Gutenberg press was used for non-sacred texts ...
This reminds me of the food situation. In distant past, food with high energy content was not very common, and only the rich people had plenty enough of it to get fat; today, junk food is both very cheap and full of carbohydrates, and obesity is rampant mainly in low-income groups.
I agree with you and to add. I think of FTP used in describing s3 is kinda like Coke being used to describe all cola based soft drinks. FTP here is a generic descriptor for transferring files, The protocols part is unimportant as is the difference between Coke and Pepsi when you said I’d like a coke.

All of the descriptors used for the Aws stack had a similar ring to them with an intended audience of someone a little older and with a little, or more, legacy knowledge about tech. Oddly I could see this useful for two use cases.

1- explaining something to my mom, now over 60 and no longer in the know with regard to tech. Might remember what ftp is or collocation is
2- explaining to an older very siloed technical person, I’m thinking enterprise/gov networking in a place where they don’t get exposure to newer cloud stack stuff. (Banking, healthcare, FEMA)
> And do not pass too quickly over the fact that a car company hires car thieves for consultation. If you are a businessperson, do you regularly engage those who wish to do you harm?

It hardly shocks people when it's about cybersecurity.

I'd also nitpick about car thieves wishing to harm the car companies. They're actually harming car owners, or possibly insurance companies. They do not "wish" to harm car companies. It's arguably not even an unintended side effect of what they do.

Car companies might actually benefit from you having to buy another car once yours is suddenly gone. Sure, the stolen one will be sold to someone else, but on average the victim of the theft is wealthier than the person who'll buy their stolen car - which essentially means more rather than less extra money is likely to get pumped into the pockets of car companies at the end. (You presumably had a good car, you can afford buying a new one - the person who bought yours would have been unlikely to buy a new one anyway).
I first heard of Franzen through a book review by the Welsh professor Robert Adams. Adams is a tour de force, who brings an incredible depth and character to every book he reviews. He retired years ago, but TVO has thankfully archived some of his best.

https://tvo.org/video/archive/big-ideas/robert-adams-on-jona...
This company in Australia makes copper and steel adaptations of the aeropress:

https://www.artisansmith.com.au/collections/press

Steel press is $149AUD, which is about $110USD.
> So tv stations, radio stations and some newspapers are advertising companies too?

Yes, they are.

> And what about Google (actually Alphabet?) having multiple products out of which only a few make money by advertisement. Think of Android and Maps.

It's still adtech. If some product doesn't make money by itself (citation needed however) it still feeds the data and lures the users. And fleeces them for the data. You get the picture.
Programmers are too myopic about programming. It always looks the same - long strings of text. And that's the only domain in which we can think. Any (developer) usability problem is always seen as a language problem.

Well, creativity is constraint. What we're actually doing with all of this language is exploring a space of constraints on the Turing machine. But I would argue it's actually a small sub-space of the full thing. For example, you could fix (modern) browser JavaScript and explore what you can do with that. And this is, in fact, what "frameworks" actually do! And a framework does this by providing a higher-order data-structure that the programmer "fills in" with tiny bits of programming language.

Meanwhile, this higher-order data-structure is informed by the lower-level constraints of the language, both in form (syntax) and function (paradigm). So basically this is a huge space, but it feels like parts of it are falling into place. Emphasising pure functions, immutable, serializable data-structures, certainly makes filling in those lines of code much more pleasant! So, Elm and Redux in particular have staked out an excellent spot in this space, in my humble opinion.

But the problem of developer usability is much bigger than language!
There's a piece in Andy Grove's book ("Only the paranoids survive") where tells about realizing that sales of memory are slowly going down - it's still comfortable for everyone, but at this right he will be fired by the board in a couple of years. So, he thinks "my replacement will get a carte blanche; what will they do?" and realizes that it would be "concentrate on microprocessors", a small but slowly growing Intel business -- a completely heretic, "hail mary" at a point that still doesn't seem so bad. So that's what he does.

On the other hand, Intel sold their ARM business about 20 years ago because it had lower margins than they liked (and in fact, axed a lot of relatively low margin business). But, as they are slowly discovering - someone WILL eat your margins, if it isn't yourself, it is someone else.
> When I was a CS prof, many, many years ago,

Curious what you do now.
Some tv stations had become advertising company for sure.

And same lake of concern is present for customer satisfaction. The metric used is "do they watch enough so my ads bring in enough cash?" And not "are my customers satisfied with my shows?".

And it’s also why you can’t compare Netflix to regular tv stations. They sell contents to customers, they make no money with ads.
Yes the 12x slower seems about right. I remember Debian installations taking >1h while ext4 took < 10min. (Installations and package operations are particularly bad since dpkg does many fsync()s when unpacking). I think that was on a spinning drive, though. Anyway at my old job (where we had mainly spinning drives) we used apt and dpkg only with eatmydata. eatmydata is a command which uses LD_PRELOAD hackery to remove fsync() systemcalls.
Many EU startups won't be interested in your academic records but such a project would make them hire you on the spot.
I somehow have more trust in tools written in languages like C, Go or Python. If it's written in JavaScript, I tend to look for an alternative first, and I use JavaScript for 95% of what I do.
> The lack of syntax makes python a great language for prototyping

And I thought Lisp had a lack of syntax.
I sell erotic stories online through Amazon Kindle. Made more than $200K last year but it's hard on the imagination
For me, how vuex works was very very easy to visualize. State, mutations and actions are very intuitive.

On the other hand, redux's reducers are harder to visualize at the beginning. Until you learn how the reducer works, every reference to "reducer" leaves you slightly confused.

I visualized redux's better with a simple example. It helps you to see how state and reducers interact.
What bubble? That the various codes of ethics state what they state, even though they were "far from" being universally respected (which means it was often broken)? You're just confirming that they weren't universally respected. But that doesn't change the various codes of ethics themselves, e.g. from https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp

Journalists should:

– Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived. Disclose unavoidable conflicts.

– Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and avoid political and other outside activities that may compromise integrity or impartiality, or may damage credibility.

– Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money; do not pay for access to news. Identify content provided by outside sources, whether paid or not.

– Deny favored treatment to advertisers, donors or any other special interests, and resist internal and external pressure to influence coverage.

– Distinguish news from advertising and shun hybrids that blur the lines between the two. Prominently label sponsored content.

Meanwhile, "new media" don't even have that ethos in paper, with or without "teeth", you might say there are no principles being broken because there are no principles.
> So tv stations, radio stations and some newspapers are advertising companies too?

If you have been keeping track of the quality of news and articles (now indiscriminately called "content") for the past twenty years, you will realize that it is in fact the case for many (though not all) such media companies.
Because you're Microsoft's customer and Google's product?
I think the open question is how does Facebook make money and justify their expensive purchase of WhatsApp? It still seems to be an open question years after the acquisition.. i think it is fair to bring up that if Facebook wanted to maybe “parse and target” WhatsApp messages they could and also make the statement that they are encrypted end to end. It does make me chuckle a bit though that there is some debate about if zuck can be assumed to be forthright or not.. the frontline episode about Facebook definitely sort of makes you realize that Facebook and mark zuckerberg at least for a long time thought the world needed to catch up to their super smarter than everybody thinking and hey if there are consequences eh that’s the natural course of things..
Open Source Design Summit 2018
It's a bit subjective, of course, but if a company makes most of its profit by selling ads why shouldn't we label it as an advertising company? Profit maximation is what ultimately drives a company and thinking of Google and most TV/radio stations or newspapers as ad companies helps a lot to understand the decisions they make.
how did you start?
Brexit – the people must have a chance to give their verdict
Oh cool! I'm a Mudlet dev (https://github.com/Mudlet/Mudlet) - the font looks pretty nice. Not that many MUDs out there that make use of unicode graphics though.
Which of these forms you use does not matter all that much. They both have the same semantics where a file is opened, and it is up to the programmer to remember to close it. What actually is a an improvement is Common Lisp's with-open-file or similarly, python's with:

with open("somefile.dat", "wb") as f:
f.write(somevar)

which automatically closes the file when it leaves the scope.
My humble opinion. University is about learning (not, for example, status). Learning is something strictly personal. There is nothing fundamentally universally wrong to cheat at an exam beside the fact you may be harming yourself.

Now since we need a little order for various secondary reasons, we promoted exam cheating to illegal and that's ok. We need order. But there is nothing someone should feel guilt for imho, assuming the person knows she may be harming herself.
You have no idea how publishers are hurting financially because of the monopolized (google and facebook) market of internet advertisement is tanking. It's a bit like farmers cursing larger distributors and retailers for taxing at 200% for a gateway to consumers.
ZFS on windows: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OpenZFS-...

https://github.com/openzfsonwindows/ZFSin
I'm not sure the tone of this is likely to be productive. Obviously "proving wrong" is a non-starter in such a debate. Nonetheless...

It's a reasonable position for a person to take that the state should stay out of decisions made for oneself and family as far as it's practicable. I know what's good for my family and can get that far better and more effectively than giving my resources to a bureaucrat to waste, returning a small fraction of it to me with a decision made on what they consider good for my family. (Maybe I'm wrong there, that's my right, and yours, to be wrong about such matters as pertain to yourself and your family).

Caring about such rights for others does necessarily mean one is incredibly selfish. Just as espousing socialism does not necessarily mean one is selfless. Incredibly selfish people will exist in both camps.

Those who disagree with me (of whom some are socialist) are capable of having merit as people and could be warm, lovely caring, empathetic people, even if that's clearly not all of them. Noam has no empathy for me, I lack merit for disagreeing with his brand of socialism in his eyes. I can live with it. I think he's arrogant. He can probably live with that too fwiw...
I think that's a couple of years old. If you want more modern info, I think https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME4RhxwPO5A (skip to about 8m30) is pretty good, as is https://code.fb.com/open-source/linux/. We also talk a lot about the benefits of having cgroup2 work well with BTRFS, which (imo) isn't something that particularly matters with administrative systems, but more for data processing/serving systems. I don't think we've released numbers or percentages, but it's safe to say every request you make to Facebook.com is processed by 1 or more machines with a btrfs filesystem. We've got a ton of value out of it, I hope we talk more about its successes publicly soon :)

(I work at fb)
People don't realize that solar is not a "fair trade" energy, that celestial body is being ruined to supply our egotistical needs ...
Indian PM Modi government Scam – 59-minute loan or 59-minute Billion INR Scam?
Oh that’s golden, I’m going to remember that one and pop it out as an example some time. Thanks for that!
Metal is a heat thief and will significantly affect the brew. You can go through a rigmarole of pre-heating but it will still drop in temperature much faster than plastic.

Handling metal at boiling temperatures is miserable. Burning yourself in your pre-coffee haze makes the ritual less enjoyable. Plastic is pretty damn good brewing material thanks to it's insulation. Metal and ceramics look great but you end up needing to add cladding and they are still inferior.

Fortunately aeropress is forgiving compared to espresso so you might get away with the temperature changes but I would not be suprised by mixed results.
A Meal of 50 Courses Over 6 Hours. Is This the Future of Dining?