skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The point is that the debugger is an essential tool for debugging because in most cases it will do what you want and is faster. Most coding errors are not race conditions. I don't know why everyone must pipe in with the edge cases where a debugger might not work. In 99% of scenarios where you want to test some code in a development environment, setting breakpoint is the quickest way to see what is wrong. Log output is useful too, and you will probably use both. But, if you are a developer and don't have the ability to step through your code in a debugger, many problems will take much longer to fix.
Nope. lol. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A113
IMO `async/await` (C# / JavaScript), `defer` (Go), and `guard` (Swift) have changed the structure and flow of programs and are commonly used in their respective languages. Why do you believe that `by` and curiously `data` are so powerful?
> DOM manipulation and queries will always be far far slower than the logical equivalent in JavaScript.

That really depends on what you're doing.

Reimplementing querySelector in JavaScript (even if you do it on top of JS-only node representations, not on actual nodes) is likely to be slower than the built-in version, for example.

If you're doing a "modify-read-modify-read" cycle, then things are different because the contract is different: the DOM promises that reads will see all modifications, while some of the other systems built around it don't.

> Is it not really saving us much in Firefox?

It really depends on the shape of your workload. There are various cases where React's virtual DOM is pure overhead and just makes things slower.

[Disclaimer: I work on a browser rendering engine, and have done a fair amount of performance work, so I may have my biases about what I see in profiles.]
It's harder travel without a smartphone when the travel world is set up expecting that you DO have a smartphone.
No advisor worth their salt should be recommending naked options to individual investors but to utilize naked options on natural gas in retirement accounts is unconscionable.
>America didn't have net neutrality up until fairly recently and before it was enacted, the internet worked just fine.

Yes, America did have Net Neutrality. Net neutrality was the norm for the entire history of the internet, and it was formalized in law in 2009 after Comcast started blocking torrent traffic in the late 00s and people asked the FCC to do something about it.

The net neutrality kerfuffle in 2014 was due to a court decision overturning the earlier law (based on the logic that "net neutrality" and "common carrier" are similar enough that it's unfair for them to be different categories".
> That doesn't seem like a bad goal.

Like most sales goals, it seems reasonable. And then you remember that when it comes to pay, some people will do anything.
Books and magazines need a sense of purpose
Firefox persists which tabs are in which window across restarts, if you have it set to restore your session.
Ask HN: How to build developer empathy in non-tech folk?
What do you wish you could teach non-developers in management roles, or those you have to work with, about how to communicate with, understand and treat developers?

What kinds of lessons would be great to teach that would force them to understand what developers have to go through? e.g. give them some sort of memory intensive challenge and then constantly interrupt them for pointless messages so they lose everything they were holding in their head and have to start over.

I'm thinking it could be fun to setup a training course for folk that will help these folks better understand how to work with and understand us Devs, but also give them a taste of their own medicine (for their own benefit of course!).
I watched a video of Nancy Pelosi speak to Google after the 2008 election.

For every problem America had at the time, it seemed like her solution was “rural broadband!”.

Not saying that’s bad at all, but this has been promised for a while by many people.
+ forced the presence of the following word, but multiple + operators did not force a specific relationship between the keywords. And google massages input keyeords a bit. A typo in combination with the +operator might have been corrected. With the multiple meanings of the double quotes this is not possible without being inconsistent.
> it's definitely wrong.

I'd say it's debatable, but in the right ball park.

English is probably the language with most words, though I've seen estimates around 300k, though even that might be high depending on the definition.

Here's Steve Pinker on it (from his 1994 book “The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language”):

> The most sophisticated estimate comes from the psychologists William Nagy and Richard Anderson. They began with a list of 227,553 different words. Of these, 45,453 were simple roots and stems. Of the remaining 182,100 derivatives and compounds, they estimated that all but 42,080 could be understood in context by someone who knew their components. Thus there were a total of 44,453 + 42,080 = 88,533 listeme words. By sampling from this list and testing the sample, Nagy and Anderson estimated that an average American high school graduate knows 45,000 words—three times as many as Shakespeare managed to use! Actually, this is an underestimate, because proper names, numbers, foreign words, acronyms, and many common undecomposable compounds were excluded. There is no need to follow the rules of Scrabble in estimating vocabulary size; these forms are all listemes, and a person should be given credit for them. If they had been included, the average high school graduate would probably be credited with something like 60,000 words (a tetrabard?), and superior students, because they read more, would probably merit a figure twice as high, an octobard.

> Is 60,000 words a lot or a little? It helps to think of how quickly they must have been learned. Word learning generally begins around the age of twelve months. Therefore, high school graduates, who have been at it for about seventeen years, must have been learning an average of ten new words a day continuously since their first birthdays, or about a new word every ninety waking minutes. Using similar techniques, we can estimate that an average six-year-old commands about 13,000 words (notwithstanding those dull, dull Dick and Jane reading primers, which were based on ridiculously lowball estimates).
> a useful last-mile role in public transit is one that's beneficial for society and civic infrastructure

You could also call it "a last-mile role in public transit that's completely inaccessible to the disabled".

Hell, my disability is relatively minor—I have developmental dyspraxia (a.k.a. developmental coordination disorder)—and I attempted to ride one of these scooters once, and I was so completely out-of-control riding it that I had to stop after a block, drag it back onto the sidewalk, and tuck it in a corner so nobody trips over it. It took me several minutes to stop shaking.

And they can also cause externalities for people with other disabilities. For example, people throwing them down on the sidewalks can create tripping hazards for the blind (though from what I've seen, this was a much bigger problem with the bikes that predated the scooters than the scooters themselves).
Compare Amazon's (at least network) pricing to Google Cloud or Azure and its roughly competitive.

The scale of the networks these companies are building is unlike any of the novice-level stuff companies like Hetzner deploy. As one example, in one region AWS has deployed 5 Pbps of inter-AZ fiber. They build all of their own SDN switches/routers, all the way down to the chips now, for maximum performance and configuration with the AWS API. And don't forget, they maintain a GLOBAL private network; companies like Hetzner or DigitalOcean just peer to the internet to connect their "regions".

I'll keep saying this on HN until people start listening: If you buy AWS then complain about price, you might as well go buy a Porsche then complain about the price as well. They're the best. Being the best is expensive.
You own your dependencies and will need to support and audit them in the future.

Note the lack of conditions on that statement, up to and including the fact this statement isn't even about Go, nor is it even about open source! It is simply a fact. You own your dependencies and you need to support and audit them. You are free to support and audit them by not supporting them at all, not auditing them at all, and blindly pulling in whatever random mutations they may go through in the future. You own the consequences of such terrible support. You own the consequences of good support.
I really like Erlang and Elixir, but I'm really worried when I see a tech stack that is still trying to figure out deployment and runtime configuration of systems.

I'm not trying to be inflammatory here. As per many resources such as "Phoenix in Action" deployment is still a major culprit. And Dockyard themselves (one of the major Elixir shops, where McCord works actually) have a full time guy on the payroll to try to solve the problem of runtime configuration.

It just sucks, because these are 2 major concerns of any production-ready stack.
What's the difference between Plaid and Yodlee?
A Unicode codepoint chart
This is false in my experience (more than 10y). Most teams use a linter and a formatter.
The situation is worse in any other language, except maybe golang.
Not fantastic, but necessary in any web development activity. Being logged in as different users in the same browser, while at the same time not suffering from the limitations private mode has. Makes testing and developing very easy and saved me a lot of time.
"but unless I was able to inspect the board I wouldn't believe it's happening"

"but that kind of attack has never been seen in the wild and is highly unlikely"

"but large tech companies have teams that vet the hardware they use on a unit by unit basis and would notice something like that"
From SG-1:

Maynard: Mr. President, I'm here to bring you up to speed on a program we've been running out of Cheyenne Mountain for the past seven years.

Hayes: I've already had my top secret briefing.

Maynard: Yes, Mr. President. But not this. Mr. President, for the past seven years the United States Air Force has been sending teams to other planets by means of an alien device known as a "star gate".

Hayes: That's funny. That's very funny. My first day. This is a joke, right? I have a great sense of humor—I didn't know that you had one—but this is good because we're finding out about each other. Now I have to call the ex-President of Togo, and when I'm done, apparently, the rest of the world is coming to an end.

Maynard: The ex-President of Togo will have to wait, sir. This is not a joke.
In theory, yes. In practice they are heavily favored because companies love them over legally required to be fair, impartial, and unbiased courts. They favor them because their arguments are usually secret. You don't know what has worked in the past, but the corporation does.
If it can be gamed for profit, it will be gamed.

> The tactics include pummeling rivals’ listings with overly positive or negative reviews, and repeatedly clicking on links to products they want boosted to trick Amazon’s algorithm into ranking them higher in search results

Amazon is seemingly coming to this realization very late. The downfall of many search engines has been the inability to deal with the tricks that subvert their ranking systems. If you take any external signal as an indication of popularity, it will be manipulated.

The overly positive reviews is an interesting spin on this manipulation; it creates seeds of doubt when a product looks like it's been overly reviewed. The "fake review" is easy to pick out.

[edit: formatting]
My (anecdotal) experience with dodgy sellers was this: I bought something that didn't work correctly, I left a review. The seller contacted me and offered money direct to paypal, bypassing Amazon. They did so by attaching an image with the offer to the ticket.

I wasn't comfortable with that kind of interaction, so I informed Amazon. Lots of copious apologies from Amazon, and I assume the company was "fired". But the company just changed their name slightly and are still selling the same items.
Ah yep you're right. It has definitely become much much smoother at some point recently, but apparently for other reasons.
Dude I think you need to understand more about radio before writing about it.
I forget where I read that there were estimated to be only about 1K professional Erlang coders in the world. That seems absurdly low. Does anyone believe this is actually true?
A bunch of these vulnerabilities are the result of iterator invalidation in C++. Food for thought for those who claim that iterator invalidation doesn't happen in modern idiomatic C++.
I wouldn't say that the feeling was that I was more FREE. I would say that the feeling I had was that I was more AWAY, remote. But even so, I remember that one of the inspirations for my trip was a pic in National Geographic, a street scene in Herat, Afghanistan. It seemed SO exotic. And then, on my trip, I came to that very spot. But somehow, by the fact of me being there, it was already not so exotic. Like, how exotic can it be if I am there?
Sundar Pichai, Google’s C.E.O, Testifies on Capitol Hill
Microsoft has been doing custom silicon longer than either Google or Amazon, as a part of the Xbox security-related functionality I believe. And then other consumer products like Hololens, custom pen ASIC in Surface, etc. Now Azure Sphere (more so giving away silicon IP to others, but still have their fingers in it.)

Edit: All this in addition to their widespread and well documented usage of FPGAs for Azure network offload and Bing acceleration.
buy as in own? Or rent monthly?
Python machine learning notebooks for beginners and experts
I both admire Elixr for making Erlang “cool” and detest it for ruining my single most favorite part about the language, it’s simplicity and clarity.

There’s only one way to do a given thing and you can learn each of the things the syntax can do in a weekend.

It was my first non-C-like, non-assembler language and I loved it.
I had never watched Erlang the Movie before, this is truly a gem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKfKtXYLG78

This is a great way to explain the benefits of Erlang. Anyone who has tried to write robust, distributed systems should immediately see the benefits. Even all of these years later.
Crucial? I can tell you most of them got spectek's chips inside, no wonder why they fail.
> You take the bad with the good of an internet with fewer restrictions, or you add both bad and good for everyone with restrictions.

One could try enacting clear restrictions that do not require a team of lawyers to divine a meaning, and one of lobbyists to make sure the meaning is correct. You can write regulations that take intention and unlawful gains into account. And, finally, you can get somebody that understands the subject to tell you what can actually be done and what is sci-fi.

But it seems that lawmakers worldwide consider themselves above that kind of concern.
KODAK ICO Blockchain Refuses to Pay Its Staff
Woah. This is a good list, I just kinda assumed it was all unsolved problems (“request for research”) but it’s not!
TPC-H Benchmark: Apache Spark vs. SnappyData
Nope! Wolfram Alpha puts the orbital kinetic energy of the Moon at 3.425e28 joules, or 8.186e18 tons of TNT [1]. The Tsar Bomba, the biggest nuclear weapon ever detonated, had the energy equivalent of 50 megatons of TNT (5e7 tons), which is 100 billion times smaller than the Moon's kinetic energy. The Moon is just really heavy - it's unlikely we could ever do much to change it's orbit (with current technology at least!).

[1] - https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=kinetic+energy+of+the+...
Ask HN: What does your daily schedule look like?
There is a lot of interesting people on this website who are nothing short of my idols (and I can imagine that I am not the only one who feels that way). Without a doubt, one way to mimic the successes of these people is to do what they do. So I was just wondering if some of you guys cared to share what does your normal day schedule look like.

What do you do everyday? What time do you wake up? How do you wake up?
You claiming this pretty much invalidates everything else you’re saying, and makes me skeptical that you’re just lying about the other details. Nobody who has worked in professional circumstances for a while and “seen some shit” inside companies would say something as ludicrous as this.

Right. Because I mentioned “In 20 years its never taken me more than three weeks to get another job” before you mentioned ageism just in case you brought it up. Do I need to mention my experience programming on an Apple //e in 65C02 assembly language in the 80s to validate my old man cred?

If you are concerned with your job as a means of financial stability instead of your set of marketable skills and your network, you’re doing it wrong. Jobs come and go. I can honestly say that I didn’t stay up one night worried about being laid off even though I knew the company I worked for was in deep financial trouble. I had recruiters chomping at the bit waiting to place me.

Those things don’t guarantee you’ll be hired again quickly though, not by a longshot. So negotiating severance is still a critical additional action to take over and above the other items you mentioned.

How much good would it have done to “negotiate severance” successfully at the one company that I was laid off from that went out of business and had no money left?

I’ll take my chances on having a marketable skillset, and negotiating a salary that allows me to save my own money.

If you assume pessimisticly that you will get laid off and have a 3 month gap in employment every three years, all you have to do is negotiate an 8% higher than market rate and save your own money.
8 reasons you aren't losing weight
Well to be fair, there is an entire layer of abstraction at the SSD controller level that does tons of black box magic. It allows the OS to treat the SSD as another other storage device without letting the OS know what is going on.

So the combination of non-moving parts (making it hard/impossible to debug via physical inspection) combined with a tons of wear leveling/misc magic can defo make it seem like SSD's are magical.
Don't use the old ownCloud mess, use the new one. I'm currently running ownCloud 10 and it works great. The stability and architecture of the project have really improved in the last years.

It seems to be scalable too, when you look at the big organizations running ownCloud. All the know-how and feedback of the big instances is flowing into ownCloud, not nextcloud. Speaks for alpha-quality.

I have not tried the migration from nextcloud to ownCloud yet, but it should not be too hard.
Shipped games both on teams/companies and individually are game development gold. You will be in if you have shipped titles especially individually or with a small team that is a decent game.

If you have no shipped titles, the second best way is at least game components, networking, game mechanics etc that you can demo.

Personally I only like to work with people that can take a project to ship and are product focused. Gamedevs that don't know the depth and troubles of shipping a title will have to learn that on the company otherwise and usually don't know when to cut/scale correctly the gameplay/mechanic/product etc. A big problem with AAA development and broken systems is the heavy specialization, it is why games come out bugged as there is very little ownership or people that can ship a game solely and understand how all parts connect.

Unless you are only working on triple-A titles, most game companies are small/medium and need shippers that aren't as specialized, especially mobile. Though most people that go into AAA games think they will get to make their game, but in actuality they work on such small parts that they eventually break out into their own smaller studios or indies to build games.

Everyone at a game company wants to build their games, it is why people go into games. For success you have to have shippers who understand the whole shipping adventure that want to come together to get games out the door that each can have input on as a team, but also have the itch scratched that they already have shipped some of their own games and an outlet for creativity if specialization is too heavy on a project. The best game studios and games are developed by smaller teams and key individuals that understand this, especially during pre-production into early production/prototyping/game mechanics, during production and post-production that is where you want more specialization but even then you want people that have shipped.
So why are we giving these reporters the time of day, then? They've demonstrably published crap and not retracted it. That reduces their credibility to nil in my mind.
If true, it's astounding so few programmers wrote systems that handle such astounding amounts of data.
> I think of movies as entertainment.

This way of thinking is common, but you're missing out. There is an entire world out there where movies are art and they can be as perspective-changing as a good book.
That's fair, I think it's also fair to point out that the people with the technical know-how about these things aren't often talked to by the press. I mean how many stories do you see about hardware tampering like this? They might not be very well versed in how to communicate with them. Also I know that I have a tendency to enjoy talking through possibilities and scenarios and so could see myself (I'm not a hardware or security expert at all but the points stands) discussing at length how such a thing COULD work and just being excited to talk about a field I am well versed in. A reporter could then take that as my signing off on that it DID happen.
Industrial Control Systems and Edge Computing
Leaked Audio Reveals Google's Efforts to Woo Conservatives
The secrecy is so the corporations know all the arguments that work and on which arbiters, and you don't.
I’ve stopped using a number of products because the underlying Plaid connection to my banks would routinely break and take weeks (!!) to get fixed. It got to the point that functioning connections was a rarity, and things not working was the norm.

I want Plaid to succeed and I want to use those products, but beware of building something on top of Plaid; you may be driving customers away.
They've surely realized very early on, they've just been trying very hard to be hush about it. Can't blame them, much as I dislike them.
Not that Michael Crichton should be treated as an authority on truth in reporting. He believed there was a vast worldwide conspiracy to defraud poor innocent oil companies by manufacturing evidence of global warming.
AI researchers debating on Twitter
Recently some hot Twitter debates/discussions from a few top researchers in the AI community:

Gary Marcus vs Yann LeCun on end-to-end deep learning vs symbolic AI: https://twitter.com/yudapearl/status/1071912704313413632 (+ Judea Pearl on causality)

Blake Richards + Konrad Jording vs(?) Dileep George: https://twitter.com/yudapearl/status/1071702641309175808 (+ Judea Pearl on belief propagation)

David Ha (i.e. @hardmaru) + Alexander Lavin + Julian Togelius with interesting comments on brain-inspired AI: https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/1072125703733370885 (following a Surya Ganguli article)

and color commentary from Adam Calhoun: https://twitter.com/neuroecology/status/1071914468932751360
Firefox is never going to lose me as a user as long as the awesome Tree-style tabs extension - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

is supported on it. It completely changed my browsing experience, and I cannot use any other browser except for quick, temporary browsing (like how one might use Notepad on Windows in a bind).

I'd highly, highly recommend this extension to anyone who has never had the pleasure to use it.