skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not OP, and not sure this is what OP's talking about, but I have examples.

First, anything piracy related. Previously you could search something like "albumname zip rar torrent" and get vast lists of downloads. It's unclear whether the presence of scam links or the illegality of filesharing prompted the removal of valid results for this class of searches, but it's nonetheless true that this type of search returned useful results in the past and is now fully, intentionally, and obviously nerfed.

Second, the filtering GUI for searches has degraded over time. Timeboxing and verbatim searches will negate one another when trying to build some queries. I brought this to the team's attention [1] and received a response last June, and it's still broken as of last week. Attempting to bypass the GUI by combining the desired URL params from two searches also yielded broken results, IIRC.

Google's search is in many ways improved since 2008, but it's also worse in some ways. Subjectively, it feels that in the last decade, search has transitioned from "show me what is on the internet, limited by the power of our algorithms" into something more like "show me what is on the internet, limited by the overton window[2] of our legal, PR, and advertiser-relations departments".

I liken google's transition, in search and elsewhere, to apple's. As they've grown, their customer base has changed from "small number of hackers" to "large number of laymen" and the preferences and tolerances of those groups shifts in a way that causes these products to be less useful for the HN crowd. One of the core shifts is away from "build abstractions to wrangle reality in custom ways" to "build abstractions that obscure reality in convenient ways".

I don't have the answers here. It seems that if you want your reality to be unbounded by such filters, you're doomed to be some kind of hacker/pirate/outlaw/non-normie.

[1] https://twitter.com/riiiiiiiikk/status/1012859335095959552

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
All the pie charts except for the very first would be better presented as bar-charts, I think.
Google employee here through a throwaway.

To me the optics of refusing to work for the US government on maven but complying with censorship in China seem very bad in the US’s politics climate. There is nonzero risk that the brand will be, for lack of a better word, fucked.
You need a Mac for that.
Rewriting a system call fuzzer I wrote in C several years ago in Rust. I ran into many problems with the C version with memory management across multiple child processes. I figure rust would make the memory management much easier and it would be a great way to learn Rust. So far Rust is making the project much simpler and more robust, with similar performance to the C version.
Progressives have to do that because employers continue to be racist and sexist and discriminate on age, purely based on a resume. So removing that first filter is a good thing.
The myth of Shaolin temple just reminds me of how my values have changed.

As a kid, my dream come true would have been to have been locked away doing nothing but martial arts training for years till I emerged a fighting machine who could win any fight.

As I grew up, I realize what a total waste of time and life that would have been. Far better to learn to read and write, or even dance (college I guess). Those skills make me far happier. Yet, as a kid, it felt awful to have to go to school rather than spend my time in Shao Lin.
Just in case, xe, xem, xyr:

https://jdebp.eu/FGA/sex-neutral-pronouns.html

as possible betterings to "Spivak" pronouns (of which you are proposing the "Tintajl" version):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spivak_pronoun
> Story points are supposed be a tool to help management with realistic scheduling, not a way to push developers to work as fast as possible.

There is no empirical evidence that story points are more effective than other forms of estimation. (There's also no evidence that any form of work estimate is related to business value, which is the original criticism of measuring inputs).

Secondly, the perverse incentive around sprint boundaries exists and can create bad management practices. If management is actually looking at those estimates retroactively, it means that the team is being evaluated on the performance of their estimates, not on the timely delivery of value. If management is not looking at them--either in the long term or the short term at a sprint boundary--why bother in the first place?

Additionally, if it was routine for a team you were on to finish ahead of schedule, my guess is your teammates and/or manager was padding the estimates. In which case, we're back to what I consider a situation where both the company and employees lose because of disengagement.
This is very discouraging to hear, especially since I'm currently choosing a motherboard for a new PC build. Is there any good way to determine the quality of motherboard firmware? Are there any recommended vendors?
Nitpick: Some of those pie charts are not very nice to read. Some of the busy ones have me scanning for labels left and right. A table would be simpler to read (especially as the labels are small and light grey for some reason).

I think pie charts are perhaps better when you've got, say two to four items and labels are short enough to be in place instead of off to the side.
> Unfortunately, "subjective" is often used as a dirty word especially around here where some folks even claim to prefer html stripped of all styling.

Because so many other things designers come up with are less readable and less usable in general, even as they protest that their designs have manifold improvements over the previous status quo and that we're just too philistine to see them.

I appreciate good styling, I merely disagree that gray text on a gray background with 80% of the screen eaten up by margins qualifies as such.
We go to the gym together and spend a lot of time in hour 4 together. The first hour is just exclusively for us. Often she will visit me while I am coding and I (typically) don't mind :)

Per weekend day, I normally find four~five hours of development time and the rest I typically spend with her.

It's also worth noting that this schedule isn't law, there are days were I don't develop or go to the gym to hang out with my wife more
It's one thing to work at a company with questionable business practices, even if they could hypothetically lead to a Black Mirror future.

It's another thing to work at a company which has decided to aid a government on the other side of the world that's forcibly relocating a million religious minorities to re-education camps.

(Cue the China apologists!)
Nimbus Sans was designed to be a complete lookalike for Helvetica. I'm not sure how they got away with it, except that the IP laws protecting fonts are rather weak.

Besides, I don't think it's open source.
He gives this example:

real, dimension(5) :: a = [ 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 ]
integer, dimension(2) :: i = [ 2, 4 ]

print *, a(i) ! prints 4. 8.

In APL the same is:

a← 2 4 6 8 10
a[2 4]
4 8
Started programming PDP-11 Basic in freshman year of high school, kept going (Applesoft BASIC, 6502 ML, QBasic, a little C, MS-DOS batch) up as a hobby through college, first job out of college was an operations job, but then the programmer quit and I took up the slack (PL/1), went into computer sales (Amiga; learned ARexx, CanDo, more C), worked at a couple of business consulting jobs (more scripting stuff, MS-DOS/Win, Mac, AIX), started working with a friend doing desktop database (PAL) one-offs for various clients, started doing webdev (when the web showed up), transitioned to Delphi for the desktop stuff, then Delphi generating Perl, HTML, Javascript websites, sold the co. for 45M, out of work for a few years (kept doing more advanced web stuff, learning better javascript, html, css, related junk), now work in IT and do webdev on the side.

BTW, I have a BA Humanities :)
I have a similar sentiment, but it's hard for me to put a finger on it. There is so many things happening over years. I'm wonder how much of this shift in Google could be attributed to Sundar Pichai and how much to just normal process of becoming soulless corporation.

Maybe they just have worse PR?
Neat! That sounds like a great use-case. Thank you :)
The law obliges management of a publicly traded company to report fairly to its shareholders its assets, liabilities, revenues, costs, and certain other items such as the compensation of the five most highly compensated officers.

If a shareholder believes that management is not maximizing profits, the shareholder is at liberty to take his or her money and go elsewhere, by selling his or her shares.
Huh. I'm somewhat surprised Apple releases the source code at all, in that case. It's not required, and they don't accept outside contributions, so what is the benefit?
Hmmm... I'm curious, would provider-switching still work with those phones? or would those phones be stuck on a single provider?
Even if you get hired, you still have to show up for work and can be fired later due to the same bias.

If both the application and the work is completely remote and anonymous it might be possible to avoid most bias, but that's only feasible in IT and a couple other sectors and even there it's not common.
Values are not about profits. They are about Innovation. Which fuels market share and has the intended result of increased profits.

The assumption that profits rule the world is a projection. Imo, Innovation rules the world.
>The human genome is still not complete by any normal definition

Well considering that the human genome is a moving target, it can never be "complete". However, it can be 99.9% complete, which is all but complete for all scientific intents and purposes. The rest is just semantics.
So what are two essential differences from google?
Your social credit score will plummet too, probably.
Calder Hall -> Windscale -> Sellafield

Calder Hall fire 1957: I was in the womb 100 miles downwind at that time and have reasons to be grateful for 'Cockroft's folly' [1]

Windscale Enquiry 1978: I was 20 then and THORP was bitterly opposed by environmental organisations, the Manx government and quite a few engineers, the latter on the grounds that it would never be viable [2, 3]

Nuclear power, especially with reactors that require heavily enriched fuel, in a small densely populated country, is always going to be problematic.

[1] https://www.khl.com/news/final-cockcroft-folly-is-demolished...

[2] http://www.worldcat.orgwww.worldcat.org/title/windscale-inqu...

[3] https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1978/mar/...
Make sure to mention how you will revolutionize the industry with AI
>People who proselytize programming languages are missing the big picture. Its always about making computers do stuff and programming language of choice is just an implementation detail.

What if you're missing the big picture?

Many developers don't care about the stuff we make computers do, but are passionate of the tools and implementation details of doing them.

If I work on some accounting enterprise software I could not care less for accounting and the associated business goals. But I could very much like working with this over that tool and finding nice ways to solve various problems towards the (still boring to me) end goal.

Unlike we're working on our personal/hobby/passion projects, the "stuff we make computers do" are usually irrelevant to us -- business owners care about them. But, as programmers, we presumably do care about programming and programming tools and concepts.
Huh, that's an excellent point. When a company is so big and entrenched it doesn't need to seem like the nice guy anymore.

Perhaps similarly to anti-monopoly laws we should also have size caps on companies.
1) International precedent: if China, why not acquiesce to more censorship in Turkey? Why not England?

2) optics of doing this after saying no to project maven for US intelligence

3) the very real risk that if google is successful it will create leverage for the Chinese government over google services. The Chinese government can say give me that gmail account of a Chinese dissident and former citizen or lose 20% of your market.
wow, the fact you refer to yourself as "cis gendered" means that no, in fact you are not a real man. please remove your testicles as clearly you have no use for them.
Yeah, I have ignored recruiters hiring for companies I have moral qualms in regards to, despite the jobs being undoubtedly quite lucrative. Haven't ever let them know about my moral aversion though.
"Many of us accepted employment at Google with the company’s values in mind, including its previous position on Chinese censorship and surveillance, and an understanding that Google was a company willing to place its values above its profits."

When has it ever put values above profits? Google is selling our data to everyone. What values?
Hugged to sleep...

Anyone have a mirror?
> "does not seem all that healthy to just dismiss and ignore and totally negate compounding value of cross-generational achievements and accomplishments"

There is no compounding value of cross-generational achievements. You are not your ancestors. You are not responsible for anything they did, good or bad.

Yes, I want a world where your "humanity means nothing" in that I don't judge a prospective hire based on who their parents are.

That's not even the point though, personal information is disclosed in the job interview. I certainly hope I don't see anyone listing their ancestors' accomplishments on a resume.

What are you suggesting we judge a resume on if not merits? Should we be declining people for being the wrong race or having names we don't like instead?
Do they?

Our whole neighborhood remained indoors 97% of the time because most days in the summer had temps of 95-100F. Every house nevertheless diligently watered their lawn, multiple times a day, to keep up a perfect shade of green. The one house that wouldn't would be shamed relentlessly until they straightened their act.

Our neighborhood did not "enjoy" its lawns. It was collectively petrified into maintaining them to avoid public scorn.
> Nobody is really looking into stuff like resource allocation during modern war like WW 1 and WW 2 on the level of military gear developed.

From a German perspective there is a lot of discussion on this, especially on WW2.

Lot's of debate on forced labor for military production (Spielberg even made a movie about this - Schindler's List), discussions on the role of women (who had to take over men's work in civilian areas to keep infrastructure running), lots of discussions in food supply and lots of debates about development of submarines and the V2 rocket. The impact of war on coal mining as well as factories and supply chain and being target for air strikes.
The idea for Helsinki is to stop discriminating, not to solve inequality.
That was due to a bug in LLVM when noalias was used in conjunction with LLVM’s stack unwinding facilities. It’s since been re-enabled now that the upstream bug has been fixed: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/50744
Can only do this if able to build up a state of flow around it. Start small, as small as possible. Not everything good has to be big.

All the comments like "dump everything and dive in head first for X months" sound like some weird cult of extreme heroism to me.

Everything is a process, not some abstract form that can magically be reified into existence by wanting/trying harder. We are animals and have to build up the habit and curiosity in tandem, else risk burnout.
I imagine if there was a Jira created to fix Facebook, the status would look something like:

[ Closed: Works as designed ]
Glad I wasn't the only one to get that vibe. This is some James Damore ish
> - some goals are contradictory (ex: end-to-end encryption and searchable histories)

I still don't buy that. If you do search client-side, then history should be trivially searchable even under E2E encryption.
Well they can go right ahead. It won't really matter to me. If they end up better than me, I just don't buy that stuff. Don't need it it's a big world out there.

That's pretty much a policy. If I pay for it, fine. But I have it in generally useful form. No lock-in. Or I don't buy it.

And I don't mind hacking to get it in general useful form. Easy peasy.
What's the alternative? Being more prone to ageism, racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry e.g. anti-LGBT? Sure hyper-focusing on merit has flaws, but it's a lot less susceptible to a "good old boys" network than the current status quo.

> it doesn't matter that you are a Native Fin and your competitor

I feel you're making my point for me.
This works well if you are in your early 20s or otherwise have no real obligations, but otherwise it becomes very untenable unless you are ruthless about carving out that time, and the other people in your life are accepting of that prioritization.

The best I can do is try to carve out a couple of hours late at night or early in the morning, when everyone else is asleep. But you end up robbing Peter (sleep, chores, exercise, cooking, time with loved ones) to pay Paul.
I've never seen downvotes used as a tacit admission before.
In case you were as annoyed as me by the verbosity:

"[A] 2014 review in Science tried to quantify these declines by synthesizing the findings of existing studies and found that a majority of monitored species were declining, on average by 45 percent."
That is not what a merkle tree is. In a merkle tree, only the leaf nodes contain data (or hashes of data).
I really miss working on personal projects. Having young children at home makes it pretty impossible. The only time I have to work on personal projects is after the kids go to bed, and by that time my brain is done.

I have pretty much resigned myself to not doing any personal projects until they are older. If only I realized how much time I had in the before-time....
"Many believe that it’s complex and outdated. Programming in Fortran is perceived like riding a horse-driven carriage to work. Fortran?"

That's incredibly ignorant, and shows very clearly how much we suck ass as an industry, and why we're such a bad industry to work in. I'm currently working on LAPACK, and that's written in F90. Why? Speed!

To add insult to injury, Fortran is really nice to program in, especially modern Fortran, especially targetting the GPU's.
The JavaScript Object Paradigm and Prototypes Explained Simply
GDPR vs. Blockchain: The Saga Continues
Through All the Hype, Self-Driving Cars Remain Elusive
The Dragonfly issue would be a line in the sand for me, but they haven't crossed it yet. (Though even starting work on it is more than I'd expect from the old Google.)
Don't worry, the story's worse than the Luddite rumors anyway.
Any tips on pulling that off? You make it sound very easy(couple of years seems pretty damn fast to me), so maybe you, like the author, could share what you think led to your success?
Was this always the case, or is this the face of 21st century?
I used to see so many Mom-And-Pop shops that are now being replaced by the bigger power seeking companies.

If this is the way we are heading, then I am kinda scared and feel like the only way for me to not be in the chopping block is to join them.
> Right now, a lot of people want nightly (and [Rust 2018]) for NLL.

9 more days!
Coming from Crystal/Ruby, I just could never get it to do what I wanted it to do. Tried writing a generic stream API, and using closures naturally like anyone would to do things like "on_data" etc., only to run into insurmountable life cycle and borrowing problems. Tried for 4 weeks straight to get the same 100 lines of code to work. Ended up giving up when the rust gitter told me it was impossible to do this sort of thing, and wrote a perfectly working implementation in crystal in an afternoon.
I only wish 4K was offered in 16:10, or just that 16:10 was more popular in general. I'll be hanging on to my 1920x1200 until it dies.
Feminisation of words for professions has been going on for a while now in French. Either a new word consistent with French rules is made (e.g. "docteure") or the feminine article is simply used in front of the same word ("madame la ministre"). There is also a broader "écriture inclusive" (inclusive writing) movement militating against things like defaulting to masculine forms of plural nouns and adjectives for groups of people of indeterminate sex, but that is less popular so far.
One issue is that cli apps expect a man page to be available, and that you’ll be willing to read it, so options by name alone tend to be more obtuse. Better if you already know it, worse when you dont.

Eg ffmpeg is confusing no matter what, but the cli is particularly obtuse in how options interrelate (or even the format string required for them!). A gui for ffmpeg will naturally have fewer options (less expressive), related features to an option will be grouped by windows, and might even do things like visibly disable options based on current flags set, or even a preview mode.

You could probably get by to a certain degree, when new to the program, on an ffmpeg gui for simple operations; even the most basic action of cli will be difficult just reading the options appearing by 2xtab.

There’s simply a lot more a gui can do to help the learning/interactive process than a cli can (tui is a different story: its just a gui that happens to be in your terminal, and offers the same positives/negatives that any other gui does).
Ask HN: Why is housing not solved, yet?
Hi hackernews,

this will be a long one, so bear with me.
My question is: why is housing not a solved problem?

Maybe to be more precise: why is affordable housing not a solved problem?
Let me start my "essay" with a personal story:

I am 31, and i am employed in a big swiss company. My Salary is quiet decent and i have a lot of fun at work.
Although i like my work, i wouldn't work for free or like to work during the weekends, in fact, i would love to work less than 42 hours. I thought Computers and AI would make us work less, but it is quiet the opposite. But that is a different topic.
I make around 6000 USD and pay around 2000 USD for rent. This is one third of my salary. It annoys me. And there is no way out.

Here are some questions that pop up in my mind:

1. There is so much money involved in this, why is there no innovation, like building cheap housing on masse?

2. Ikea made a fortune by making furniture really cheap. Why is there no "ikea" for housing? What is so difficult about housing that makes it impossible to automate?

3. In this day and age: why are people still living in metropolitan areas? The obvious answer is of course: because the jobs are there. But software engineers can work from anywhere? Why not pick a cheap area and build a new city there?
The chinese people are building new "mega" cities. It seems : in western part of the world. Creating a new city is not an option. Instead the existing cities grow. Why is that?
>search has transitioned from "show me what is on the internet, limited by the power of our algorithms" into something more like "show me what is on the internet, limited by the overton window[2] of our legal, PR, and advertiser-relations departments".

I'd say it has gone full; "Show me what your advertisers and other sources of income, would like someone like me to find on the internet."
I agree. However, for every person who doesn't want to work there, five others are willing to join the company, especially those who live overseas and are willing to work for pennies.
We have time for what we prioritize. That doesn't mean it's easy, but it is possible.