skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was going to say the same thing. We really need a HN hall of fame for many of these types of comments. Pure gold. Made my Sunday.
> My point is a system with less need for that because it can handle more common divisions easily would be good.

My point was, that from a practicle standpoint this doesn't really matter. If you need to tick of a third of a meter somewhere just a few times, everybody would just happily make a mark at 333.33mm – if you need to do this 50 times, building a temporary ruler is a good idea in any measurment system, because it reduces both cognitive load and the likelyhood of mismeasurement. This is especially true if you are building something that involves many steps that are repetitive, similar, but different enough to ruin your day if you fuck up.

For me one of the best things about the metric system is, that it in fact is base10 because it eases the conversion and calculation between units and has cool effects that imo outwheigh the cool things you would get from going base12.

Going base12 in a good way would mean going base12 fully, including temperatures, currencies, voltages, weight, etc. and this would mean turning a whole culture of knowledge upside down and inside out. If we would have a world dictator they might try something like this. From a distribution perspective it is desirable to have one standardized unit system that makes sense.

So my pain point isn't exactly metric vs imperial, but that in 2018 we still need to deal with these two systems and the conversion between them. Metric is far more wide spread than imperial and this has reasons, some historical, some political, some practical. If you are one who thinks national unilateralisms are a waste of energy and potential, you are certainly in favour of the metric system, just because it would be easier for the world to agree on going fully metric, than it would be for the world to go fully imperial.

And I am not talking about everybody having to use it in their day to day life – just look at the UK. I am talking about certain space agencies, industry, electrical engineering etc, where these things can have real graspable consequences, maybe even deaths.
Administering Linux on Azure
Well, that is interesting.

I'm curious that they're talking about implementing encryption at the filesystem layer. This has typically been done elsewhere. And anyway, key management is an issue. Seems like it would be beyond the scope for a filesystem. But I had similar thoughts right before I started learning about the write anywhere layout used by NetApp all those years ago, where mixing layers had enormous benefits (ZFS too).

The idea of incorporating a flash translation layer (FTL) is interesting, but there is the hardware support issue. Meaning that yes, you can still buy raw NAND flash memory, but what are you going to connect it to? NAND flash controllers which can present a useful interface to the host processor (like USB) already incorporate a FTL.

Similarly, eMMC memory has a FTL layer baked in, and presents itself as a block-addressable device.

Raw NAND flash controllers are increasingly rare on modern microcontrollers.
None, really. I have been working remote for the past 5 years. By that I mean I live in Thailand but work remotely for company in northern Europe. The only issue in if hardware VPN dongles needs replacement. The tasks I do has only few dependencies to other people and that is a requirement to succeed in what I do. What makes it hard, at times, is if you need assistance from a colleague, because they are often sleeping when I am at work. If you all are in the same time zone that is a non issue. All in all. Working remotely is amazing. You will never have to get into the office, you can sit with your feet on the table, go shopping during business hours and no commute.
But now other people who are interested in Go can learn from it. Seems pretty much the point of HN - finding interesting things to learn.
Ouch, yes I did
There are ext2/3/4 drivers for Windows and macOS, but you need to install them. If you want seamless support, your best choice is FAT32. NTFS or ExFAT are good, though not all Linuxes support them of out the box.
Ooops :-(
Planet youhaventseenit in the Horse Nebula is material. Can you destroy it? No! Could it be destroyed by an unfortunate event? Perhaps. But if the number 1 is just an abstract thought, then that thought can seize to exist.

> Even if the entire universe were destroyed, mathematics would still exist.

You presuppose that maths is immaterial to proof that it's immaterial. That stance cannot be argued with, because you cannot show it to be true. If thought seized to exist, there would be nothing left to argue with, so this is reductio ad absurdum either way leading to a false dychotomy. What remains is: "maths" does exist. So my stance holds as much explanatory power as yours, no more, no less, but yours is metaphysical. You idealize things you don't understand, unless you have a concrete plan of action to "Recreate the universe again".
Show HN: SnackLog – Keep track of what you eat
Windows has ReFS. From the looks of it, it has some modern features. But I doubt that’ll ever be readable on a Mac.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS
Ethics is not something that gets decided by the Dean and laid down in a code of academic ethics. The University is just a part of society and it has it's own perverse and quite unethical practices; for example, the tendency to grab one's money and time and not provide any substantial education in return. Furthermore, the university might be perfectly aware that it provides crap services and that fraud is rampant, yet enforce it's own rules selectively just to the point where fraud is hidden away and not damaging to it's reputation.

So while I agree with you in the abstract, I believe it's hard for people in the western system to relate and make moral judgements about the experiences of a student in post-communist Eastern Europe, where the rules were often gray. Fellow students were cheating on a grand scale, and up to that point, I had the same principled attitude towards cheating as yourself. Part of the reasons for creating "the system" was my revolt towards what I saw around me - the tacit acceptance that those with good cheating skills, which I lacked and did not develop early in my academic career, should be allowed to cheat their way to a degree, while I was supposed to memorize garbage.

Sure, my "rebellion" was unethical and compounded the social problem around me. But what could I realistically do, could I have changed anything? At least I saved me from myself, because otherwise I would have dropped-out. In the grand scheme of things, impeccable ethics is often a luxury and could have the exact opposite effect, letting only those with no ethics whatsoever to graduate.
> Yes, they are.

By this reasoning, Netflix isn't a media or tech company, it's a subscription company. Similarly, Comcast isn't a telecom company, it is also a subscription company, just like Netflix!

This type of definition is so absurd as to be useless. The monetization system doesn't entirely define the company or industry.
Came across some reddit posts saying there's good money to be made -- found a niche that seemed underserved and started banging out the stories. It's hard work but if you get a following and have a style your readers like it becomes easier.
This is a very weak argument, eyeballs do find backdoors

Eventually, maybe. How many eyeballs and how long to find Heartbleed?
Ask HN: What are some good CS Courses for self-taught learning?
I've been a self-taught developer for a little over 5 years now, and I sometimes feel I'm lacking the proper CS knowledge a BS/MS would give me - mainly when it comes to algorithms, and architecture, are there any CS courses you would recommend?
The Ultimate 5G Explainer: The untold story
Sorry, I should point out the $200K includes my day job. From this gig it's about $50K
I'd suggest getting an app like Sensors Multitool for Android which gives you the raw output of your phone's sensors. I tried one of the altimeter apps a few years ago to see how tall a big hill was, and the value that the app reported turned out to be far off the actual value. There are various techniques for mixing and cleaning data from the GPS and barometric pressure sensors and a premade altimeter app (if it's not open source) obfuscates what's really going on with the values you'll actually end up seeing if you create an app for your microfarming project.

Also be aware that different phones have different levels of support for non-GPS location services. I was surprised to learn recently that my Pixel 3 can use data from the US, EU, and Russian satellite geolocation systems for better coverage/precision.
Thanks! There’s a reason large enterprises spend a ton of resources on security while SMBs are vulnerable on just about every public attack surface: priorities.

Well that and expectations. Most small business owners see security as part of the developer’s job. However don’t realise it’s something that needs non-stop attention as websites and technologies in general are affected by erosion. What’s safe today might not be tomorrow. The developer isn’t at fault for that, and yet the website owner refuses to foot the patch bill, or pay for continuous monitoring.

I could write all day about this and we’ve only been in the trenches for a few weeks now :p
It's a bit sad that many of the ETSI EN 300 706 V1.2.1 graphics characters (1, section 15.7.2) are not available in Unicode.

I am maintaining a small program that renders images directly in the terminal using unicode block graphics characters (2), and these would come really handy to enhance the conversion...

1) https://www.etsi.org/deliver/etsi_en/300700_300799/300706/01...

2) https://github.com/stefanhaustein/TerminalImageViewer
Even if you insist on calling them cattle, you may still want cattle support to keep the herd happy and productive.

So this isn't really a relevant point here.

Though if we talk about customer lifetime value of one customer vs the cost of support, we might get close to an answer why they don't offer support.
I've just written a little parser I OCaml, and the file goes like this:

Module declarations ( 3 lines)
Parser type declaration ( 1 line )
Implementation details you don't care about (47 lines)
Actual grammar (20 lines)

In that order. In Haskell, I would probably have put the grammar at the top of the file, so you can get the big picture right away. But the language reads stuff from top to bottom, so I have to put the big picture at the bottom.

An alternative would be separate the details from the grammar, but then I would expose those implementation details in an interface, while in fact the rest of the program is only interested in one function that parses everything.

Or, you could write from bottom to top. It's OCaml, so you know the big picture cannot be at the top. Now a case could be made for a language that reads toplevel statements from bottom to top…
‘Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat’ Is a Love Letter to Amateur Cooks
Rust and SPARK: Software Reliability for Everyone (2017)
SVPT – Next Generation devices for biofeedback in PT(Article 3 in series)
It's really hard to get an appointment at the apple store though, I recently had to stay awake until after midnight to catch one of the online reservations.
Hello HN!

This is the 3rd article in series discussing our companion device platform for physical therapists. Please take a look and let us know what you think!
This is the industry standard.
I wish I had a choice to either pay with my data ("free" content), or pay with money in a subscription model. Just like Zuckerberg was asked, whether he would consider a subscription model. The formula is quite simple: monthly income divided by the number of users, that came out around $11 a month, if I recall correctly.
This, of course, isn't in the interest of content providers at all. With a growing user base, the unit price of an ad is growing each month. Users wouldn't agree to an increased monthly fee based on the number of users. Greed wins.
I wouldn't mind ads in principle. I hate intrusive ads. Does anyone know, why the Acceptable Ads movement isn't globally spread yet? I think this could be a middle ground for advertisers and users. https://acceptableads.com
I love this. The piece does a great job of showing that the languages you use won’t solve the problems inherently due to the programmers. Also does a nice job of showing how few people actually read the content before deciding that “they know better”.
I made a PRNG with a 13-bit linear feedback shift register out of redstone with no mods. :D
It's a simple task to check that you really are experienced developer and not someone who stuffed his CV.
I like the functional approach with Try, basically the exception becomes part of the return type, and the code chooses to either return an exception or the actual value.

fun doSomething(arg: X): Try<Y>

Since the return signature needs adjusting, this leads to developers very consciously making the choice to either handle the error in the function, therefore avoiding adjusting the return type, or let the caller deal with it if it isn't logical to handle the error there.
I think I need a video of you making aeropress! It's super clean for me. Some suggestions:

> I always manage to spill grounds getting them into the Aeropress,

Use the scoop but don't pour or tap them in - instead put the scoop into the cylinder and then spin the handle to dump out the grounds. Makes it impossible to spill.

> Plus there's the risk of your cup flying away with the amount of pressure you're putting on the top of the press

That sounds like way too much pressure - some new aeropresses can be tight (which can be remedied) but maybe you have too fine a grind. It should definitely not be espresso level which requires that type of muscle. It's not brewing by the pressure you are applying but time + agitation. The press is just removing the grounds.

I have however frequently knocked over a pourover while pouring... my own fault... tend to use a heavy ass kettle which turns it into some weird strength endurance exercise.
Maybe this helps you giving you some insight: https://medium.freecodecamp.org/looking-back-to-what-started...

also fun to listen. This is his screenreader: https://soundcloud.com/freecodecamp/zersiaxs-screen-reader
I would think the dishonesty is in the assumption that data and metadata are disjoint. Metadata is simply a kind of data--but it's still data. It's just a kind of data that is particularly difficult to hide--but that obviously has no bearing whatsoever on whether it contains important information.
> And if Microsoft makes Windows free and displays Ads to makr revenue they are suddenly an ad instead of tech company?

Insofar as they shift from making the best OS they know how, from how to get the most eyeballs in front of ads, I'd say yes.

It's interesting to compare the reaction to tech companies peddling ads, and this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18479383 If the ads don't take away from the technology, why in that case do the surrounding ads take away from the words?

Who would you consider more of a cook, someone who makes the best meal they can, or someone who makes an acceptable meal that still makes people thirsty enough so they buy a lot of drinks? At what point does craftsmanship turn into selling out the craft for something else? Who do you think is more of an "actor's actor", or a "comedian's comedian": someone who sometimes compromises on maximizing gain for the love of their craft, or someone who just takes the highest paying gigs, regardless of quality?

So on that sense, sure, they're all tech companies, but so are IBM and Oracle. Just like Adam Sandler is an actor and a comedian. As most fields it's a wide field, it has a high end, a bottom end, and a lot in between.
z!OMG it supports Amiga ASCII and C= PETSCII!1!11!!, instead of being yet another PC-tin-bucket-MS-DOS-only font.

Now we can enjoy all that wonderful Amiga Type ASCII art in front of Skid Row cracked games!

Well done! Well done! (Loading Star Control.)
Because we label a company by the thing that gives it it's competitive edge. Google's edge is search - so it's mostly a search company.

Of course the monetisation scheme of a company matters in understanding it's actions - but it doesn't define what "kind" of company it is.
The headphone was a very small analogue receiver that had it's own micro-battery, an inductor and amplifier - all about 4mm wide and 8mm long. You would place it deep inside the ear channel and it was invisible even to a person standing right next to you. The signal was induced by a coil you would wear around you neck and you would pipe raw audio into it.

Similar systems are even now on sale: https://www.olx.ro/oferta/sistem-de-copiat-casca-invizibila-...
Facebook shared opposition political party details with rouge government
The art form of typography comparing English and Korean
Detecting fingerspelling with artificial intelligence
There's a difference between a potential backdoor and a bug. While a lot of eyeballs might oversee a bug, you have to make an effort to design your backdoor to go unnoticed.
I thought it sounded like quite the opposite: he's not saying they aren't buying it because they're cheap (he points out that if it worked, and they were trying to be cheap, they would buy it). He's saying they're not buying it because it might not work very well.
Oh, so it's the soy scare, plastics edition. I guess that explains the desire for a dangerous to handle impractical steel version, you get to prove how non-estrogenous you are every morning by burning yourself.

Don't worry, you'll be fine. If that worked, I'd be sucking on plastic spoons all day.
Weekly Newsletter Archives – Dataconomy
Even though I also find it very suspicious that WhatsApp keeps proactively badgering me about turning backup on, I don’t see how this could be exploited by Facebook as the messages are stored in iCloud and Google Drive which it can’t access.
I risked reading below the line on the article, and among the frothing rants is one very salient point - not that long ago, old-guard public utility companies (the example in the comment is AT&T prior to the 1980s, but other firms in other countries are also good examples) had everyone as a customer, and nothing seemed to stop them from providing at least a bit of personal support. It may have been second-rate a lot of the time, but one could contact them, and directly - in the case of the telephone network, one could speak to an operator more or less immediately and more or less any time of day.

Obviously it isn't the case that Google's support operation is in the exact same problem-space, but I was interested to realise that the pure statistical "there are too many users" argument doesn't immediately excuse them.
To expand on that: when we say that "Y is an X-company" then what we mean is that X is the thing that gives Y it's main competitive advantage.

The monetisation scheme of a company is of course relevant when trying to understand the actions of the company, but I the English language, it we usually don't call companies by their monetisation scheme.
The quick answer is that the price of airplane tickets has taken a nose dive in our lifetime. This is caused by a combination of airline deregulation (in the 80s iirc) and the slow march of fuel economy in aircraft engines. GE/P&W/RR pumped out a ~1% more efficient engine every year for 30 years and the gains have added up. Furthermore online booking cuts out the travel agent middle man.

Couple this with airbnb and now travel is far more within reach to an average person. Why not spend on it.
A hegemonial free software project isn't just good because it opposes radical changes but it is also bad because it opposes radical changes.
I don't have specific username recommendations, and I doubt if I'd follow anyone at all on HN since the threading format and the UI aren't good enough to follow long discussions. However, here are two points to start with for anyone interested in something like this, or creating an external service that notifies people of comments by the followed users (disclaimer: I'm not associated with these and do not endorse them, so try and decide for yourself):

1. The HN karma leaderboard at https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders . You can find the list of people ordered by karma points, from highest to lowest. Obviously, the ones at the top have contributed a lot of appreciated content here.

2. HN Profile at https://www.hnprofile.com/. Use this to find an expert on a specific topic by just entering it there and hitting Search. This site has been submitted here as a Show HN more than a few times. You can browse through the comments by the users in the search results and decide.
I wrote a raster graphics editor for my Casio programmable graphing calculator. I also wrote it exclusively on the calculator. Did it to one-up my class mate, who had done one previously--mine had better features (no dot in the center of circles, could also do ellipses, had a spray function), and it was half the LOC.

Casio BASIC had subroutines in IIRC 36 registers ([A-Z0-9], conditional jumps and labels.

I wish I had that source code. I can't see how I would ever do something like it again.
The question isn't whether there won't ever be backdoors, but how likely that is, how long they will stay in place undetected, and what the effects on the reputation of the product/project/committer are once they are discovered.

Bringing this up as an argument is a sensible as claiming that transparency and democracy isn't any better than a dictatorship because there is still corruption.
Screen readers should be made more context aware. The IDE knows what's a comment, the screen reader should know that as well: "comment <comment text> end comment" or something.

This may be even more important for the rest of the code. Who cares about the parentheses after the `if` keyword? No one, they're just there to delimit the condition. Likewise the curly braces, they just delimit a sub-block. Their absence should not stop the screen reader from spotting the end of the `if` block. They should say "end if" regardless. Same goes for Python.

Structural editors have mostly failed, but maybe some specialised version could be more useful to blind people?
I think this article (and most comments below) failed to grasp a component that is highly relevant to the discussion: Google doesn't have a billion customers.

Google is a company that collects data from over a billion human beings, then structures and organizes it in a profitable way for a very small group of large corporations that want to spend millions$/year to reach their targeted audience. To that matter specifically, and I speak from personal experience as part of a digital marketing department at a retail group, Google offers not very good, but quite "ok" support.

People complaining about Google offering them bad support for software (google apps) or hardware (google phones and/or android in general) forget they are not Google's customers. We are basically raw resources with purchasing power and Google is trying to help its customers influence our purchasing decisions in their interest. That's it.

To my opinion, a question worth much more of our attention is to discuss how and why we, as human beings, have accepted becoming reduced to a simpleton with a wallet by our own peers (other humans...).
That's the same I thought. I don't think I fully understand this article.
Google has ten-thousands of people working on tech support, see gTech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcjR6ZngQcw
The most telling evidence for me was that Signal was banned in Russia because the government couldn't read their messages, while whatsapp was just fine.