skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Comcast rejected by small town, residents vote for municipal fiber instead
Ideally, all websites should be respectful of the limits and speed of bandwidth and processing power available for mobiles and limit ads. Unfortunately that's not true. And that's not in our control.

The next very best solution is to install Firefox. Then add UBlock Origin. Now all the websites are fat trimmed and lean. I often endup having 200 pr more open tabs on mobile and it has never been a problem (Open tabs double as ToBeRead list) . May be it has crashed twice in the past 2 years. I have never lost a tab during the crash, a power failure or a restart. Always quite fast.

Actually it makes a lot more sense to have Firefox on Mobile than the desktop as it is the only browser (as far as I know) that allows you to block ads.
I'm not sure I understand the issue. Hiring contractors is pretty standard practice at most large organizations.
Splitting Flutter widgets to methods is a performance antipattern
It's reasonable to be wary of unions in the US given what happened with them the first half of the 20th century.

I don't think anyone wants suffering, but solutions are never as simple as they appear to be when poverty is involved.
> the idea being once you have saved enough to "retire" early

That assumes that you have a very high natural ability to lay off gratification to pursue your goals. If so, good for you, most people don't, and this quality (conscientiousness from the big 5) is not really mutable above very early age. So, if you do try such a strategy, most likely you will fail because you don't have willpower for it, won't be able to suffer through the job that you hate and took only for the money, and will hate yourself for it.
- The Prince (get's a bad press, thought provoking)

- Apex [Nexus 3] (prose is meh, inevitable life goes this way)

- Factfulness (Awesome, most important book I read this year)

- Prisoners of Geography (why nations act the way they do)

- Crux [Nexus 2] (prose is meh, inevitable life goes this way)

- Debt: the first 5000 years (slog to get through but interesting)

- Nexus [Nexus 1] (prose is meh, inevitable life goes this way)

- Digitocracy (super short story, super powerful message)

- Artemis (Not as good as the martian)

- Before Mars (Starts out great, fizzles out)

- Down and Out in Magic Kingdom (How reputation based social currency might pan out)

- Blood Sweat and Pixels (How games are really made)

- Masters of Doom (Awesome story of how the game was made and what it led to)

- Foundation [Foundation 1] (Prescient with where the world is, what might happen in reality)

- Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World that can't... (Ok, not great, read it on blinkist)

- Ender's Game (Under rated, most fun I had reading this year, I know...)

- Neuromancer (classic, must read)

- Pre-suation (interesting and worth reading if starting a consumer facing business)

- The Three-Body Problem (Found it tedious, honestly. Interesting though)

- Radical Candour (A lot of common sense advice we take for granted and could do better with)

- Seveneves (Longggggg, but really worth it. Shame about the ending)

- The Virgin Banker (Really good read, how a bank came into being)

- Why information grows (Great read, could of been half the length, would recommend)

- Babylon Revisited (Meh)

- Money: the Unauthorised Biography (Simplistic history of money before and after coin. Good)

- Hellbent (Enjoyed it, good for a holiday read)

- Snow Crash (Classic, Awesome, read it)

- The little prince (must read)

- To Pixar and Beyond (A different viewpoint on Jobs)
I re-read some Sherlock Holmes, which was delightful. They're all up on Project Gutenberg —

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/69

Other books I liked a lot were "Operation Kronstadt" which is an incredible story about British intervention into Early USSR. Had a mix of hard engineering on how they built covert fast ships, espionage and intrigue, points around following orders vs taking initiative in an emergency, and many more. Excellent read.

"Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt" was also excellent. First book to really make my understand the Gilded Age. Terrifying read in a lot of ways, actually, but well-written and insightful.
I agree with you 100%. There is a lot I didn't understand which is surprisingly obvious to me now.
> If Google or Microsoft ever decides to just drop Chromium for whatever reason the code this time around is open, so someone else can just pick it up, and users can migrate to that.

Not really. Let's imagine for one second that Google switches to Mozilla's Servo or a secret in-house next-gen engine. Who could afford to suddenly hire the 200+ engineers it takes to maintain Chromium?

But that's not the real problem. The real problem is that Google will have de facto control on all web technologies. Chromium is open-source but has a closed governance, so nobody can say "no" to a Google patch, while Google can say "no" to any outside patch. This means that Google can, if they so decide, leverage this monopoly against the competition.

In theory, Google would have the technological means to kill the web presence of Facebook, Netflix or pretty much anyone with a single commit, which would automatically be propagated to Edge, Opera, Brave, Dolphin, ...

Similarly, Google would have the technological means to decide which credit card you could use to pay on the web (at least through WebPay).

I don't think that Google would do such a thing, but that's a lot of power in the hands of a single entity, exactly the problem that we witnessed at the time of IE6. Also, Google has, at times, be known to muscle in other browser's territory by using Google Search/Google Docs/Google Hangouts/..., so the temptation will certainly be there.
Thanks, this is actually a good read and clever bit of marketing. Cheers.
A few of my faves.

Non-Fiction

By Adam Tooze: Crashed, and Wages of Destruction. Both excellent economic histories, the former covering the recent financial crisis and its aftermath, the latter on the Nazi economy. Tooze does an excellent job coming up with larger trends and global narratives, I'm often amazed at just how much he's able to keep in his head.

By Richard Rothstein: The Color of Law. A quick, informative, yet more than thorough enough on the factual, legal prevention that American employed over the majority of the 20th century to prevent black Americans form participating in the housing market, both personal home ownership and public housing (a major institutional driver of household wealth and success tarting in the early 20th century).

By Jeffrey Lockwood: Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier. I had no idea the American frontier was home to devastating largest-in-the-world locust plagues that suddenly disappeared near the end of the 19th century.

By Peter Brannen: The Ends of the World. A great primer on mass extinctions and their often geologic causes.

By Rick Perstein: Nixonland. Still working on this one, but a deep dive into that era of American politics feels quite relevant at the moment, except that everything today feels stupid in comparison.

Fiction

By N.K. Jemisin: The Broken Earth trilogy. A really great self-contained story, extremely evocative, and the author actually puts out great books at an amazingly fast pace.

Cooking

By Stella Parks: Bravetart: Iconic American Desserts. If you like baking, and the history of iconic American baked goods this is a must have/read. Never thought I'd spend so much time on a carrot cake.
I fail to see how that would be useful. Commits are supposed to be atomic, self-contained changes by themselves. More often than not, I see merge commits only when people abuse commits for temporary state of work (with useless commit messages like "fix" and "temp"). Instead, if each commit did one thing and one thing only, why would you need a visual indicator that these set of commits came from a particular branch?
I don‘t have tapes but more than 100 old floppies.
I still have the original 1541 II the disks were written with. I‘m willing to throw some money at the task but can‘t spend more than a day or two for this. Any tips for a realistic plan to save my floppies?
Three standouts for me this year:

Educated - Tara Westover: Perhaps the best memoir I have ever read.

Killing Commendatore - Haruki Murakami. Japanese mystical fiction.

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing - Hank Green. A really fun page-turner
>Unions are mandatory to join

Only if the company is mandatory to work for.
Life-changer. I read the book based on this series [1] when I was progressing from doodling / being mostly unaware of visual art to being interested in (seeing and making) visual art. I've never looked back.

In the book, the image quality in it is low so I recommend watching the TV series as linked

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/014103579X/ref=asc_df_014103579X...
Not an exhaustive list but these were the books I felt moved to record[0] reading:

The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Welles --> kind of trashy but fun and enjoyable.

Priest by Matthew Colville --> terrible, don't read this.

It's Behind You - The Making of a Game by Bob Pape --> Interesting if you grew up in the 8bit era

Jade City by Fonda Lee --> Basically Jedi street gangs, pretty great

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson --> Near future hard sci-fi with a Big Dumb Object, excellent

Making the Monster by Kathryn Harkup --> Non-fiction about Mary Shelley, disappointing

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer --> Effectively creepy and well written

The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin --> Absolutely fantastic, highly recommended

[0] https://sheep.horse/tagcloud.html#book
>* Anecdata from one of the wealthiest doesn't give a full picture of the entire system....*

And in fairness, anecdata from those most poor doesn't give a full picture either. I'd argue that so called "non-profit" universities are indeed better off at the mean than is generally known.

Also, any university with a reasonable endowment, especially if it is small to boot, is not nervous in the least. The "nervous" set of universities would include, in this order, for-profit universities, small privates with small endowments, and large privates with small endowments. (The last category, large private-small endowment, should be all but dead. So if any are still out there they have something else going on. Maybe a good football or basketball team or something?)

I'd also add to this list small publics which have small endowments and are located in states with upcoming, or current, fiscal shortfalls. (Especially states with both, like Kansas, Wisconsin, etc). Though these universities are not so much "nervous" about going away, as they are "nervous" about what will happen when their states merge them together to streamline costs. I doubt most states would get rid of their small universities, even in lean economic times. (I could be wrong about that though? I just doubt it.)
NOAA report warns Arctic is in ‘most unprecedented transition in human history’
Strange, I just started using it again and I'm finding it a lot faster than Chrome
"the article strikes me as an article written by someone who has a beef with Marriott"

Another comment here references a post he made in 2016: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/marriottstarwood-back-future-...

Seems to be more of the same.
Zoom CEO Ranked #1 by Glass Door
The purpose of the fiction is to show how it happens so we believe it, even expect it. The "suddenly" part is what makes it bad fiction. Even if it happens in real life, in fiction we want to see the mechanism and have it convince us.
America's Growing Cop Shortage
In my case I have commits that say "check server fingerprint" then "check server fingerprint but this time it works in production" and then "check server fingerprint but this time it ACTUALLY works in production" followed by "check server fingerprint works in dev and test what is actually happening here" and the final commit of "i hate everything about all of this". Of course that last unhelpful commit message is tied to the code that actually works in production so it's what sticks.
Bring that up young Jamie.
Author here! Really excited to release this at KubeCon; happy to answer any questions you might have.
Pls stop with the TLDR that's three paragraphs.
> The program isn't using more than 2G of RAM it just mmap()s more than 2G of files and so needs enough address space to fit those mappings.

If you need the address space, then use 64-bit.

I don't need the address space.

If that was confusing, my apologies.

> Sure but that's at the base of the call chain. Each library will then bubble up those 64bit pointers to it's callers.

Which will have clear upper 32-bits, which means using %eax instead of %rax in main() will work fine.
> (Tip when writing atomic commits: Use `git add -p`. That lets you stage patch hunks.)

Tip when using patch modes: spend time learning edit mode, and IMO avoid edit mode for checkout or reset patch modes.
What you say would definitely work for front-end features – the kind of things that could more or less be implemented by extensions already.

It would not work for back-end features, such as WebVR or WebAR, for instance, or WebPay, or WebGL, or wasm. All these features need low-level support and low-level patches that only Google may decide to accept or reject. For the moment, Google doesn't seem overly interested in WebVR/WebAR, for instance, so it doesn't seem that any of the Chromiumlings will be competing on that field.
Tripple upvote for Accelerando -- my all time favorite sci-fi (I even re-read it).

Anathem was great
oh man. yes, I experience this everyday (awesomewm user)
The funny thing about this one is while it mostly satisfies the constraint of not having consecutive numbers too close, it has a very obvious pattern to it. A nice example of overfitting, perhaps ;)

What additional constraint could you add to shake this up? Perhaps a rule that, as well as number adjacency being penalized, adjacent distances between consecutive numbers also get penalized?
I just picked up "How Markets Fail" at your recommendation, thanks!
I have almost succeeded Stripe CTF 2 (runed out of time on final step because of the crowd). I am sure I can not give clear definition during an interview without a good refresh before.
Sure. Parts of my (multi-process) application can use 64-bit pointers and parts can use 32-bit.
Episode 4 on how we are surrounded by images of "alternate ways of life" is amazing... it's like "taking the red pill" in the Matrix. So much things we take for granted, never even question, taht we take to be the "normal" way of life.

edit: YT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jTUebm73IY
I read Stories of your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. It features a bunch of stories that intersect a lot of science and philosophy.

There is a story that is about humans having a finite germ line. There is a story about a future scenario where humans can turn off their conception of "beauty" when looking at others. Then there is a story that turned into the movie Arrival, but the story is much better because it brings in a lot more physics (principle of least action equated to foresight).

Definitely the most thoughtful and inspiring book I've read this year.
Might be a nice step towards rebranding for a bigger audience? I use DDG as a default search engine, but the name doesn't roll off the tongue nicely at all...

Edit: It doesn't roll of my fingers either, I didn't even type out the full name...
Create video animations with your logo
No details?

I need to duck the web to find out more about this. :)
I disagree, we've been using it with friends of mine and I enjoy it. The main reason is so that's it's easier to generate a changelog as we're following the Angular commit guideline.
I would consider Angular a successful project and this is their git history: https://github.com/angular/angular/commits/master
That is also exactly what a new dev goes through, so one should remember that it's not just for themselves.
Can kindle tell me when I finished books? I read a few (say 10-12) but I can't remember which ones were this year and which ones were last for the Nov-Mar time frame.
Writing the good quality commit message is not that hard and is sometimes actually enjoyable (after all i get to brag about this feature / bugfix / solution).

What does cause a lot of mental overhead (and consider myself a decent engineer) is creating commits that have a single purpose in the first place.

Working on a new feature I often have to refactor something, and while I am at it, I clean up some related parts. That is at the minimum 3 commits applied in the correct order, sometimes over different branches. At that point there is a lot of `git add -p` and `git stash apply` going on, which takes considerably more mental energy while you see some colleagues getting away with `git commit -a`.

Writing good commit messages itself is the reward for creating good commits.
A lot (most?) Laptop keyboards don't have pgup/pgdown or it is hidden behind some shift-ctrl-fumbling.

For most longer texts, I hate "click to here" on the scrollbars. It's impossible to get it right. Them working as pgup/down makes much more sense.
If you have a keyboard which has those and it doesn’t require moving your hand off of the mouse to hit them, it might be easier. Many smaller keyboards (e.g. most laptops or Apple’s non-pro keyboards) either omit them entirely or require a modifier key.
7 steps to increase your Amazon sales
Haha. I say that just to tease Doraemon. People think he looks more like raccoon than cat. He gets really riled up by that.
Wrong guess, I've done my time on minimum wage work.

I wasnt going to make a career out of a job that gave me a free shirt for working extra hard.

But then again, I'm an engineer, so maybe I make better decisions.
On the desktop, the site instaloaded in Safari + Ublock Origin and I haven't noticed any ads :) The keyword seems to be "UBlock Origin".
> Three Body Problem - Ken Liu

This isn't entirely wrong, but it's written by Liu Cixin in Chinese originally. Ken Liu is the translator. I haven't read it yet, but I'm looking foward to it. Stories in "Paper Menagerie" convinced me that he could skillfully deliver different kinds of stories in different voices - and good translators need that.
If one was able to collect, say, a couple dozen tapes of the same game or magazine supplement, and the tapes all had different bits lost, would it be possible to recreate the tape with the WAV representations?

May be a way to find a bunch of different tapes on ebay, and recreate old classics.

EDIT: this is actually performed later in the article, whoops, I should have read the whole thing before commenting.
Adult Swim: Choir
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) was my flat-out favorite series this year. I'm positive that a lot of HN users would love it. The Punch Escrow by Tal Klein was also a favorite of this year.
We can't know the full details of this particular case because nothing seems to have been independently verified yet, but there's a distinction between

1) Someone finding a suspicious package and falsely thinking it's a bomb, and

2) Someone calling the police and saying, "I'm going to bomb Facebook" (when they actually aren't)

All of your arguments thus far have pertained to 2. You have repeatedly cited the definition of "threat" underneath that context, and scenario 2 perfectly satisfies that definition. Furthermore, so does "terrorism", because a bomb threat, real or not, causes terror and has high potential for real physical harm.

Under your definition, someone threatening to shoot you in the street wouldn't be a threat unless they actually shot you. In reality, intent is almost always impossible to discern and doesn't excuse reckless behavior. Should you not be charged if you didn't happen to kill anyone while driving home drunk?

You may disagree with Facebook's influence on this world, but advocating for methods that only cause chaos, potential harm, and disinformation is not acting in the world's best interest.
Me too, but I put a full hyperlink to the github/gitlab issue in the body instead of just the number so that someone can just click and start reading what it's about. It also creates a back-reference on the issue page in some web-based issue trackers like Github.
So tell me, this is readable for you?

https://imgur.com/GCWsFwU

And I'm not cherry-picking... I usually see much, much worse git logs than this from merge-commit users. In fact, if I scroll down, this is what it looks like:

https://imgur.com/a/nQXWa4Q

Edit: For a point of comparison, here's one of my projects using atomic commits and rebases:

https://imgur.com/a/vTZ5qxT
The five emoji skin tone options don’t accommodate a diverse world
Maybe they are not including the numbers of unknown and/or didn’t enable crm integration, etc? I know my second company uses Brex, doesn’t use one of those 3, but only has our accounting software linked to Brex, not our crm.
Upvoting the whole Three Body Problem trilogy -- it's an awesome sci-fi!
DOK8s
It's sad to read how the workers respond "they are talking to us like we are robots". Commodified labor is what they are, ever since the Fordist model of capitalism people have been gradually reduced to salary numbers and I for one am happy to see people standing for their rights. Or to remind they have rights, to begin with. Just I think there's not much left of the Left, a lot of people make it less about the economy and more about their hurt ego, at least that's what I think about postmodern leftists which I happen to know quite a lot.
Reamde - Neal Stephenson - Really enjoyed this one, though I’m a sucker for Neal Stephenson books.

Nexus (1, 2 and 3) - Ramez Naam - Great scifi exploring human -> cyborg transformations across the world. An OS for the mind had me very excited and scared for the future of computing.

The City & the city - China Miéville - A weird sci fi based that I had no idea what to expect going into it. Enjoyed it, but not as much as some of the others.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good people are Divided by Politics and Religion - Jonathan Haidt - Great read for this current climate. Allowed me to understand those around me better and to improve relations with family members who are far over on the right side of the political spectrum better.

Robert Oppenheimer - Ray Monk - Enjoyed it, but it was quite long. Oppenheimer was an interesting person who didn’t actually make many direct contributions to the world of physics, but was extremely well read and knew everyone in the industry. And you know, lead development of the atomic bomb.

The Phoenix Project - Gene Kim - Great CI/CD book disguised as a novel, inspired me to push heavily for an improved build/release pipeline at work.

Alexander Hamilton - Ron Chernow - Yes, the book the play is based on, but it goes into such great detail of the life of an incredible person. It’s hard to fathom what the United States would become without Hamilton.

It Doesn’t have to be Crazy at work - Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson - Great, short read about why our corporate/entrepreneur culture is just crap. All this hustle, burnout, and destructive ideas are unnecessary and don’t really bring much improvements.

Hitler - Ian Kershaw - Really great biography into the rise and fall of Hitler and the third Reich. It’s horrifying for all the reasons you know, but also with how much is rhyming with the world right now.

Team of Rivals: The political genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin - Great biography into Lincoln and his cabinet. He was truly a unique president who was able to convert people who hated him into his biggest admirers.
It's better in the short term, for sure.

If you look at the longer term, though, that's not true anymore.

I wrote a few things on the topic here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18664053

That's without even counting that Google get to decide on what can be experimented upon and what can't. You probably don't want a single company to decide this.