skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Personal websites and email can replace most of what people like about Facebook—namely the urge to post about their lives online.

Only Facebook also provides a number of "friends" you "like" your posts (quotes intended). Those likes and "engagement" is superficial of course, but for most people posting on their own website would be a desert.
Finally! Life has meaning again! :)
> Because people have decided that the benefits of having sports programs are worth taxpayer support.

Have they "decided" though? The reason for their existence is largely historic. I don't think people are really aware of the costs, both monetary and non-monetary.

> This is largely opinion-based - if you feel they shouldn't be, bring it up at a school board meeting. Maybe people will agree with you.

I've brought it up before. I was told that it's good because students can then get athletic scholarships. When I brought up that the sum of the scholarships received this was was very well below the budget of the athletic department, I didn't receive an answer.

> Sports are inherently no more of a distraction than chess club or coding for fun after school.

No, chess club has very little external costs. As the comment I was responding to said, one school cancelled later times (something everyone would benefit from) due to sports.

Also, chess matches aren't a major "social event".

> Yeah, well, you know, that's just like, your opinion, man. I played sports and enjoyed myself doing so, and gained some perspective and habits that I still value later in life.

Which skills? Don't say "team work" or "diligence" or something.

> You are obviously welcome to hold your own opinions about sports, but you're going to have to do better than "I don't like sports" to convince people they are not worth the time or should not be funded by the school systems.

It's not about me disliking them, it's about me having it shoved down my throat and me, as a taxpayer, paying for it.

By the way the sports culture was a major factor in the Columbine shooting https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/june99/...
The user wants the site to actually work. The features don't matter if the site won't load because it's trying to shove multiple megabytes of JavaScript through a congested DSL or dial-up or 2G Internet connection (and especially not if that mass of JS is in turn trying to pull multiple megabytes of graphics before deciding to finally even add the actual content to the DOM). A prospective customer who can't use your website is a customer who's jumping ship to a competitor (as the article described with rather realistic examples).

And for the vast majority of websites, the users don't actually want (let alone need) that degree of interactivity. A blog shouldn't depend on JS to be usable. A storefront shouldn't depend on JS to be usable. A restaurant page (even one with a reservation system!) shouldn't depend on JS to be usable. Even something like Twitter shouldn't depend on JS to be usable. Unless you're building something like Trello that's heavily dependent on drag-and-drop as a basic workflow, there is no good reason to make JavaScript a hard dependency on using your site.

If users are forced to allow arbitrary Turing-complete code to run on their machines because your site is inexplicably incapable of running without it, then you have utterly failed. That's harsh, but that's reality. Your users want oodles of JavaScript only in the sense that a penguin wants to swim through an oil slick.
> Only iff you can be confident that the occurrence of this trigger word means that a person indeed experienced stillbirth

As the original tweet pointed out, if there are only searches for "stillborn" and "baby not moving", followed by days of silence (especially with no "vacation" trigger), then an algorithm should be able to figure it out. Especially if friends and family are all commenting with crying emoji and the user has said pregnancy adds "aren't relevant to me".

But of course, I haven't created a multi-billion dollar social network, while Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg have, so I clearly don't understand how to maximize advertising ROI.
Well, this sounds like the goals of Diaspora, which never gained tons of traction, but has been around for years.

https://diasporafoundation.org/
In this case, I think it's actual fishing...
Don't forget to add airport overhead and potentially the time it takes to get to airport over train station (if you live in the city), getting through security, boarding the plane, waiting to depart, etc. Might not even be a time savings when it's all said and done.

For me, living in Boston, going to NYC on the NEC a lot, I still prefer the train, even though it's expensive (I just went to NYC for thanksgiving), sometimes more than flying.

Some benefits to me (especially because I live 10 minutes from Back Bay Station):
1) Not paying expensive cab fees from La Guardia/JFK airport into city
2) Not sitting in car for the hour it takes to get from the airport, even worse in times of traffic
3) Transport to the airport outbound, waiting in security, checking bags, boarding via sections, fighting to place bag in overhead, waiting while plane loads, waiting to taxi on runway, etc.

And then, once on the train, it's really relaxing. And I love the costal views. Try to sit on the coast side to/from NYC. Trains are clean, too.

It's true, they aren't as NICE or speedy as the Asian trains (I was in Shanghai recently and totally blown away by their train systems there -- most of which was built in last 20 years), but over all trip simplicity, effeciency, etc. are still better than flying for these short trips, IMHO.
Who Goes Solar and Why
I'm not sure that is who I want valuing companies
That's true, but I'm not so sure all of that is still really necessary with the way science dissemination is chaging. In computing science for example the de-facto standard is to self-publish papers on arXiv where there is no peer review prior to publication (beyond arXiv's moderators who check papers are properly categorised, formatted, etc.). The "peer review" comes in the form of the community reading and citing or not citing papers in later publications.

You could argue that publishers only ever needed reviewers - and all the administration baggage that you mention that comes with it - because they had to choose what to compile into each paper issue that would be mailed to subscribers. If we remove the concept of "issues" and just have everyone self-publish on arXiv, a lot of the value you mention regarding journals is no longer needed.

Of course, everyone publishing on arXiv has downsides. It's no longer easy to just read Nature/Science/Physical Review Letters/etc. to find the best research in the field - some other mechanism will be needed to show scientists the best papers without them spending huge portions of their time reading - but I am sure we will find solutions to these problems in time. In fact, with some of my astronomer colleagues it is also pretty normal for them to spend an hour each morning skimming through 10 or so new papers posted to the arXiv.
Ask HN: What´s your favorite JVM Language?
Interesting, why USA needs to recruiting foreign IT professionals easier? Why the other countries don't have such concern? The right way shouldn't be improve the STEM education to provide more qualify new graduates?
> feeling slightly ashamed that it has taken me so long to give a screen reader a go

Just today I tried using a screen reader to surf the web, for the first time ever. It's a completely different experience, requiring a lot of patience. Many websites were too difficult and frustrating to navigate. And I've been working in web development for years.. It's a shame that I hadn't deeply considered accessibility, and I've vowed to become more familiar with it, to incorporate and apply it at work.
Except having a legitimate personal website is a challenge you can't automate away. Even if you managed to produce a rugged installer script for, say, Mastodon so you can one click deploy a working instance you still need to somehow A. get a domain and B. host it somewhere that will stay online for others to use.

There is no real way to automate domain procurement.

Most people don't leave a PC they own all the time to run a website.

So you end up hosting it. But now its centralizing again. If everyone were hosting their own mastodon instances on the same cloud provider thats barely any different from that cloud provider being a Facebook with all the data access they have. Even with a federated site like that few simply have a computer to leave on all the time to have their own site, let alone asking your average person to setup dynamic dns records if they did.

The fundamental name system of the Internet is too manual to enable average people to have personal sites. And any solution involves centralization which defeats the exercise.
My default action to ensure good service quality for GC'd systems is to, as far as possible, minimize what swapping can occur. Especially important for systems with a big heap containing many rarely used objects taking up a substantial fraction of the space, more so if GC pressure is very low.

This is regime where GC languages simply can't coexist with aggressive swapping. You have to either disable swapping (somehow), or use something like a shared library doing something like the Linux mlockall for the runtime heap.

I believe there is something similar to mlockall you can do on windows to somewhat prevent swapping out the heap, but unfortunately I can't recall it right now.
That is the most obvious problem with developers, thinking that you can solve people problems with tools.

So you are right something is lost. Skype, jira, slack will not convey the feeling that there is another person on the other side of line. You will not see coworkers getting sick, going through hardships in life. If you see someone you can tell he had bad night sleep that is why he is upset. You get the watercooler conversation that other guy wife is annoying... You don't care it should not affect quality of work but no one is robot, via electronic communication everything seems so perfect... Then you expect people to be perfect, and they expect from you to be perfect, then you get upset, but you just have flu and cannot focus really...
My issue with tunneling is that we're already failing at it. In Seattle our new tunnel is 3 years behind schedule.

The problem with infrastructure isn't coming up with crazy new ideas (like "skates"), or being able to use hot new technology (like fully-electric TBMs). Execution in the real world is entirely the trouble we have with existing solutions. It looks like he's trying to iterate on the parts of the problem we've solved already, and ignoring the parts of the problem that we don't know how to fix.

What happens when it hits a steel pipe or a giant boulder and gets stuck for a year? What happens when these tunnels cause unexpected sinkholes, and the governor orders a halt for more ground studies? What happens when you discover 500 leaks a couple years after opening? These really happened in Seattle and Boston.

The Boring Company's webpage doesn't mention the possibility of any such issues, but they're not the kind that are solved by changing methods. We already have the "error". Now we need "trials" that address these errors.
You make a lot of claims without providing reasoning.

> That's amoral bullshit and we must demand better.

Why is this amoral bullshit? It seems like a lot of the outrage around this topic is born out of a 'feeling' that you have an instrinsic right to online privacy. But, I don't see this right clearly defined in the constitution, so where does it come from? Are you sure it exists?

> It should be expected that that connecting accounts means sharing little more than the subset of data required for the integration.

I think it's unrealistic to expect FB to expend resources to determine what subset of data is 'required' for every app in its ecosystem. When inspecting the utility/privacy frontier, the current model of requiring users to grant permission to an app makes the most sense to me. The problem in this case is that the permissions modal may not have been clear enough.
ML Framework for Solar Deployment Database
JeremyRigsEverything showed that you need substantial force to bent an iPad. Isn't this just a single batch that had some bad luck in the factory?
I just used my CompuServe internet account to look up this story.
This is not about governments. It's just a simple customer care matter. Different laws come and go, but a good company can always treat its customers better.
> Most people don't have the ability to work remotely or have flexible working hours.

Last year, 43 percent of employed Americans said they spent at least some time working remotely, according to the survey of more than 15,000 adults.[0]

Not most but I imagine some have the option but choose not to.

I don't know but it seems to me that the professor is bias, as I am, as everyone else is. I don't think "experts" are any more less immune to bias. And the claims he made are demonstrably false, so I'm inclined to believe he's cherry-picking at best and being deliberately dishonest at worst

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/15/us/remote-workers-work-fr...
A Man Wanted His Amazon Data and Got 1,700 Alexa Files - About a Total Stranger
You made me want to check to see how many lines the biggest page we have is. Turns out it is 12,533 lines long. The kicker is that it could be much longer but there is a convoluted process to adding more HTML. The results from the database are turned into XML which is then transformed via an XSLT which creates more HTML and then Javascript is used to dynamically add the generated HTML
I agree it's pretty meaningless as cheap TRNG's are a solved problem.

Far as dice, one of my experiments in TRNG's was a shoe box full of dice. Shake it up, dump them, put the numbers into a computer program, whiten it, and tada. The first one used 8-sided die since each one maps cleanly to 3 bits (2 ^ 3 = 8). The next iteraiton used regular, 6-sided die just discarding any above four to map easily to 2 bits. Did something similar with a deck of cards after throughout shuffling.

Such methods were good for producing an initial secret that I'd use with algorithms like CPRNG's to produce the rest.
Great photos, but maybe a reminder to take care when using foreign characters in one's designs. The Japanese in the top logo splits "noir" into two words, with the effect that a typical reader can guess what's intended but it makes no sense as written.
On the user side, Corel has been okay-ish with PaintShop Pro. I write Photoshop plugins and I still have lots of customers who are happy Paintshop Pro users, some 14 years after Corel acquired JASC.

That said, Corel added a kind of adware to PSP, where it will display promotions for upgrades to the new version of Paint Shop Pro even when you're not using the program. I really wish there was an easy way to disable it, but I'm sure their metrics show it is effective. Parallels are already doing a version of that (but only when you launch the program), and now even Apple itself is using notifications to advertise products & distribute discounts [1]. There's probably no avoiding it now.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2018/12/18/apple-push-notifications-comp...
It's a used, small-scale boring machine. Literally all the innovations Elon is trying to claim aren't necessary for boring machines that small because the cost efficiencies gained are rounding errors.

Small boring machines work differently from big boring machines. It's like the difference between an toy RC car and...a Tesla. Other than using batteries and motors they're not comparable.
That doesn't seem like a good reason for it to be marked as [dupe]...
In some states driving records are public info. Also you are conflating government records with corporate info. We have different laws regulating both. By in large corporate data privacy outside of fair credit reporting law is non existent. And where the law has teeth nothing has happened (e.g Experian)... really the issue for Facebook is the political foreign influence on elections. Politicians really don’t like it when they have no control over their electorate.
Foreign Owned Store Pulls ‘Make Canada Great Again’ Hats from Pacific Centre
React, Flux, JSX, GraphQL, Jest.

It is a full tool-chain, language, architecture, API spec, and testing framework. They are all closely tied to each other.
The planning equivalent of Thoughts and Prayers.

To speak to the parent's points -- WW1 happened and the League of Nations failed to prevent an even worse conflagration.

Say what you will about US v USSR, or the post-Cold War US hegemony, there has been no WWIII.
"Recently, however, the tenor of our anger has shifted. It has become less episodic and more persistent, a constant drumbeat in our lives. It is directed less often at people we know and more often at distant groups that are easy to demonize."

CP Grey has a great 7min video[1] explaining this phenomena in a very insightful way. Basically controversial pro/con memes (say abortion) aren't fighting each other but are in symbiosis, helping each other grow.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC-cMv0e3Dc
This isn't that. This is like google maps indoors for walking around malls and is no where near accurate for anything else.

For inventory you could use decawave, but it would be pricey.
The flip side of this is: currently, most engineering fields require you to have some kind of professional certification (eg. a PE) from an industry "guild", eg. the ASCE. Software engineers don't really have a functional equivalent. We demand that professional engineers build our bridges, but we'll pretty much let anyone build our software. At some point, changing that may be the responsible thing to do.
The Amazon Alexa Eavesdropping Nightmare Came True
My alarm is the 5mins long hourly news bulletin that does not require data :)
John Giannandrea named to Apple’s executive team
I think there's middle ground that likely is more commercially viable:

1. Everyone makes a website.

2. Those websites submit articles to content indexes.

3. Part of your website hosts your own reader client:

3.a The reader subscribes to a set of indexes.

3.b It can also subscribe to individual feeds.

3.c Your client decides how to mix the feeds into displays, eg, you could have several indexes feed into one "feed" and have all of your family feeds in a second "feed".

4. Most of this is actually done via cloud hosting of managed packages, rented.

There's still many strong factors in favor of centralization, but if it's built around interop, then having a few large providers than mesh together is still an improvement and begins a competition to provide better services.

It's what happened with blogs and RSS anyway.
Is it worth burning down Internet commerce in the hope of catching a few individuals?

What's happening here isn't an attempt to catch a few individuals. The goal is to put pressure on the entire government of Iran. This is done by making doing business hard for large businesses, as well as individuals, so that pressure to change is put on the Iranian government from above (businesses) and below (the people).
These iPads can easily be bent in half with bare hands: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUBsxCcJeUc&t=385

Doesn't bode well for them holding up in, e.g., a backpack or briefcase that ends up being sat or stepped on. Or even just being shoved into an overhead compartment or beneath a seat.
In my experience, ironically, a lot of web tooling tends to actually bog you down, especially at scale. For example, I've seen people get blocked from shipping code due to a million lint errors after running some codemods, people wasting a month configuring webpack (and still not get it quite right), people wasting weeks cleaning up flow errors after a patch release. Bikesheds about webpack loaders and babel plugins and lint rules and typescript-vs-flow. Nasty workarounds for babel parsing bugs for non-standard syntax. Erroneously-strict mode bugs in bundling. Minification bugs. `node_modules` peer dep hoisting bugs. Bugs in `yarn`. GYP issues. Stuff that only breaks in CI. VS Code plugin configuration issues. Etc etc etc.

Large companies literally have entire teams dedicated to maintaining tooling. And don't even get me started on monorepos.

At a previous company, a co-worker that had been setting up tooling infrastructure for a project was astonished at my iteration speed when he saw that mine was written with just a micro-framework and ES5. Conversely, when I had to jump in to help get his project back on schedule, we could never figure why the hot reloading setup had a 2 second delay on my machine (among other things).

Having worked on two projects of very comparable scope (two documentation sites for different projects), one written with the "latest and greatest" Gatsby and friends, and the other with just a dirty script, I honestly can't see any reason to do the former: it takes longer to do anything, the final payload is bigger, and now the codebase is using a version one major out of date, meaning a migration looming in the horizon. On the upside... GraphQL; yay I guess?

With this point in mind, your carpenter analogy seems a bit off IMHO. Of course, consumers don't care if the carpenter uses an electric screwdriver, but they do care if a knob gets loose and falls off because it was held by a single rushedly-drilled screw. Also, the employer should presumably be worried if said carpenter keeps spending a significant portion of his time sanding his hammer handles and replacing his workbench legs, or needs another carpenter to do so on an ongoing basis.
I have had really good experience with a Microsoft Research project called Path.
The main usecase I had was navigating places like shopping malls without proper shop numbers or any addressing scheme.

You can find it discussed here https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/path-guide-new...
I do admit, though, that after I wrote that I considered that we'd probably start seeing a lot of movies 21 years after their books were published.
> Of course, if you want to do data science in the real world, you need to learn about data cleaning, manipulation, and warehousing in addition to the "pure" data science process that begins with tidy data.

True, although ideally the data is cleaned/structured before it hits a data warehouse and the data scientist starts working with it. It's an iterative process (DS finds messy data, flags the problem upstream, repeat).

I do wish there were more tutorials with messy data; the ones I make I deliberately try to use complex datasets and highly relational ones, although as a result the tutorials are more complicated and more imposing for beginners.

> As an aside, my impression is that technical assessments for data science positions tend to underemphasize data cleaning and manipulation.

When I was interviewing for DS jobs, I got a lot of the implement-binary-search-on-a-whiteboard questions which annoyed the hell out of me. But for the takehome assignments, they required some data ETL, which I felt was more representative. (some assignments had deliberately flawed datapoints the user was expected to identify and remove while not explicitly being told to do so)
You don't need to know HTML to make a Web site with a CMS like WordPress.
Regarding the "Eat better" thing. It helped me when I heard some lecture advising to be careful with what you eat because what you eat is what you become. Like literally, because everything you eat will be broken into pieces, the pieces that will replace the exhausted cells on your body :)
Rogue Fitness: Privacy Policy
The thing about social media which is slightly different from everyone having their own site (tripod, geocities ..) is that its more interactive.

There is some messaging built into the "new social" that wasn't as available back then (we didn't all have smart phones, and internet was charged by the hour.). There wasn't as much content either which did make it slightly more manageable to surf through the pages you wanted.

polite and interesting exchange though.