skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I don't think either Gimp or Blender have bad UIs at this point.

I'm reasonably fluent with modern tools (Photoshop, Sketch, Figma, etc.) and consider GIMP to be an incredible accomplishment. But as much as I'd like to use GIMP, I find it too painful to use even for simple tasks.

I wish someone would start a "sister" app leveraging the GIMP codebase as much as possible, but with an entirely different user experience and name, starting with Apple Preview-level MVP functionality and building from there.
No GPS sat's are in GEO - they're all in MEO, which is about half as high, though comparative in terms of dV requirement.
Re React: I totally missed that train but was forced to learn everything about ES6, Promises, React and Redux in one gig. Fortunately I had someone who showed me the ropes, otherwise I would have wasted lots of time. Still, I never really understood how things work until I made my own side-project. Don't give up, React is worth it!
> The Pixelbook hardware is unparalleled.

Really? I’ve found it awkwardly designed; it’s really a “form follows function” laptop to me–especially the palmrest, which makes my fingers angle downwards while typing and has an unappealing material which seems to gather sweat. I know why it’s there, but I feel that it could be significantly improved if the keys were placed in a depression rather than trying to add stuff to keep them from hitting the screen.
It's too easy to use shell corporations to hide the trail. And when talking of the case of manipulating public opinion, it's hard for the legal system to work fast enough to deal with it. Moreover, it's not just ads... it's sockpuppet accounts, and other things.
I use my iPad as a YouTube / Netflix machine. I'm very happy with it for that purpose. I also don't understand who would make their tablet their primary work device, or even a secondary or tertiary work device.
The Farm
Ask HN: Have you been to any conferences that changed your life in some way?
Ask HN: Have you been to any conferences that changed your life in some way? How?
We don't do poster sessions, but we have a dedicated slot for lightning talks in one of the two days. Shoot us an email at info@qosf.org and we'll see if it's a good fit.
Chrome might be horrible on desktop, but it performs great when it’s the only thing running. Chromebooks are quite snappy for the amount of resources they generally have.
This is great. Thanks for sharing.
When everyone's anonymous, anyone can speak their mind without worrying about offending anyone.

When everyone's identified, only the crazies and extremists truly speak their mind - they don't care about offending anyone.

You might end up with a mix of crazies and extremist "thought leaders" with packs of quiet followers - a suppression of the moderates and deep thinkers.
I would be very okay with that. The iPad Pros have amazingly strong hardware, it's kind of wasted on anything but games and professional photo/video editing software.
Could you please identify the difference between beginner friendly and user friendly for me?

I’m not convinced that there is one.
> "That it's all the same methods is the issue."

Only if you're abstracting away the value of real human lives. If a tiger breaks loose you should be concerned by that tiger but ALSO be thankful that nobody has been eaten by it. If you forget the later, you forget your humanity.
Yes, open source stuck state. Version N is no longer being worked on, and Version N+1 isn't fully ready yet.

Commercial products tend to avoid this, because, in that state, sales of the product drop as customers wait for the new model.

The Blender API has changed incompatibly, too. I'm holding off on porting my personal add-ons for now. 2.8 looks great, but not fully here yet.
I use reader mode because my preferred mode is what I've seen referred to as "wall of text"

I rarely (~5%) find pictures of any sort improve the understanding, even in "mainstream" news sources.
It reminds me of the Digg exodus to reddit.
Author here. I'm sure you're right. I pretty certain I could have charged them much much more and they'd still have accepted it.

In conversation with the software eng it was implied that they intended to send someone on site to each of over 500 sites to reimage the devices. That must have cost them way more than £70/month and the way that after ~10 months the number of devices actually went up to over 1,000 suggests they were happy to just keep paying.

The thing is, it was essentially no work. All I did was remove a firewall rule. I had to run NTP anyway for my regular customers. Initially more time was spent just in email back and forth and honestly I was enjoying that.

Because of it being basically no work, I had a moral problem with trying to find the absolute highest amount of money they would bear.

I know that is wrong and it does me no good, but I couldn't get past it.

What did annoy me was their inability to pay bills on time, and time I spent chasing invoices and creating custom late payment paperwork that is never relevant for my usual customers.

That was the main impetus for doubling the rate, and despite me jokingly suggesting that their product was not good enough to be profitable (I have no real data on that either way) I suspect they had much bigger organisational problems to be consistently paying late and ending up insolvent.
I find this interesting,
>Simply stay in the waiting orbit until the target reaches the angle 3 from the local vertical [...]

On terrestrial flight (airplanes) the standard approach to landing glidepath is 3°, while the standard rate turn is 3°/sec (a "two minute turn") — I wonder if 3 degrees is some magic value in flight dynamics, perhaps determined by our local (Eatths's) gravitational force (G).

/Acey

Disclaimer: I haven't read Buzz's thesis, so this is purely an off the cuff observation.
According to the SpaceX stream, it was a combination of satellite weight, high orbit, and inclination change (tilting the orbit)
I've found that it still happens almost every time I try to install a consumer Windows edition on server hardware, or server Windows on consumer hardware, even for Intel Ethernet. And it's often necessary to edit an INF file so that a perfectly functional driver won't refuse to load on such an "unsupported" configuration.
No, for nontrivial software you can't, not without putting a manual in the UI, which is infeasible for advanced software and complex UI.

You can max out on discoverability and consistently, but the user ultimately will have to learn, through reading or experimentation, how to use the program.
Almost without question I'd choose Unity for most projects. Its rich ecosystem, large community, and decent documentation make it a solid choice. Many of its warts like only supporting an ancient version of C# have been remedied in recent releases (as of Unity 2018.3 you can write C# 7.3, which is a nice language indeed). Unreal's Blueprints are slick for gameplay scripting, but I'd choose C# over C++ for game code any day.

In the end they're both excellent engines, and I suspect a AAA game would be better served by Unreal, but I find Unity far more flexible for arbitrary game designs whereas with Unreal you sometimes feel like you're fighting its roots as an FPS engine (though if you're making an FPS, UE4 might be just what you need).
The Orwell game seems to do something very similar. It's a very impressive game, I highly recommend it.
Yes, that's why it's better to do social activism organizing on Twitter. Much easier to be anonymous, much harder to suppress.
It just depends. Yes, Rust has no UB in safe Rust (modulo bugs). Sometimes, that means compile-time checks. Sometimes, that means runtime checks. It depends on the specific thing.

The compiler _will_ attempt to prove that bounds checks aren't needed and eliminate them; see https://godbolt.org/z/7QPfhR vs https://godbolt.org/z/Vx39fv for example. In the first, there's an array and the compiler knows that it has a length of 3, so an index of zero needs no checks. In the second, we don't know how long the slice is, so we have to do the check.
When I was in high school, this was MySpace. I remember all my friends learning HTML, or at least enough to copy and paste sufficiently, to build out their custom profiles.

It was a constant process of landing on a friends profile, being amazed by some feature or design and then going back to work on your own.

It also felt more like people’s profiles expressed through design, or music, or gifs, or other media, rather than what they had to say or any form of posts. I don’t really remember “posting status updates” at all, but I’m sure it was a feature.

And then at some point Facebook wiped it all out.

I can’t see people wanting to manage their own homepage. But then again, I remember we all did in high school for MySpace... maybe we will again.
This makes me sad. Not because I don't like grid. But because two weeks ago I found out that a very senior person in the company has a computer running IE11, and will not let IT upgrade her machine.

She recently discovered that one of the company's web sites doesn't look right in IE11, and shit ran downhill into my lap. I checked the logs, and yep... she's the only IE11 machine to hit any of the web sites in a year.

I spent a day and a half downgrading the site from CSS grid to Flexbox only to discover that once I found an old machine in a closet that has IE11 on it that I could test with that IE11 doesn't fully support Flexbox, either!

Solution: Each building on campus has its own IP address. Connections from her building get a table version.
The article Hearths, Clubs Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit Muds ( https://mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm ) looks at that aspect. The types of players the designers design for and the types of players that the game creates aren't always in alignment.

One of the games that I've played over the years that specifically embraces this is Kingdom of Loathing.
I feel a little passive aggressive today: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ntp+server
FreeCAD 0.18.15468 Dev/ FreeCAD 0.17.13541 Stable Download
Actually that's exactly what I expected. If you replace A with B then I fully expect you to (1) first say how A is inadequate -- which the article did -- and (2) why is B better, which the article didn't state.
I have little experience in this area, but if your workload size isn’t static and is dependent on say user input, I don’t see a good way to select “the better option” at compile time. Plus, do compilers take into account graphics capabilities when compiling programs?
Cloudflare is trialing chromebooks as a replacement for MacBooks:

https://twitter.com/jgrahamc/status/1068120826678001664?s=19
This. The dollar and euro are the rocks of stability in the currency market. To convert your money to yuan is the same as giving your money to the Chinese Communists.
I was worried as well but as a sibling comment said, The iCloud for Windows client is quite adequate. I use it to have bidirectional bookmark syncing to and from both Chrome and Firefox. Works pretty well, never made a mistake so far.
The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project
The Theory of Whiteboard Coding Interviews
If our worst enemy is indeed a bad enemy, then why should we cheerfully give anything of value to them? (except maybe some fast-moving lead balls)

Lots of those countries (e.g. Iran) we have full trade embargoes against.
Today I wonder how feasible it would be to spread the fake news that Donald Trump was poisoned and assassinated by the CIA/democrats/Iran etc, just to cause panic across his electoral base.

I'm sure there are enough people who would believe it, but I wonder how long it would take to be debunked.

I don't really know why I thought about that, I just hope people would just believe it, but I'm curious how the world would react to it.
Pretty funny, 100% probable action by China. The crash is creating a "deer in the headlights" panic in China...,
Well it starts in a second and then you just have everything available you ever dreamt of.

But seriously: don't let the price fool you. This is production ready software.

There is also a lot of professional support available like training by certified trainers.
Currently writing code targeting the perf_event_open system call. It's the nastiest thing I've ever had the displeasure of working with. clone() is similarly "interesting".

Glibc really does a lot of good work to hide the mess underneath.
Great point. I used mine in college extensively now it sits and collects digital dust.
> For example, why do I need the splat on the list?

You don't on the RHS, or rather, it's redundant in the given example. On the LHS you need it to prevent single element capture.. and within the ruby language, it's a fairly consistent sigil.
There's always Elixir :)
As I understand it, their issue is that it's not relevant for their customer base (nobody has requested access to the weird non ICANN top level domains), and it risks balkanizing the established single global Internet into things that can't talk to each other.

Essentially the same problem as if people started picking random non-RFC1918 /8 IP space ranges and numbering their networks into them, or choosing their own arbitrary AS numbers.
Did they originally intend to use a bigger rocket? It seems unlike them to throw one away at any price.
I would be cautious in assuming that mockery is an effective means of communication, at least if your goal is to influence people to adopt your point of view. In my experience, the result is that the subject of mockery becomes even more entrenched in their views and many of those that agree with the one carrying out the mockery become alienated and distance themselves. While mockery certainly garners attention, it's largely a self destructive endeavor.
I often find that people conflate ease of use with ease of learning. Both Vim and Blender are very easy to use. Blender is astonishingly easy to use, in fact. I've been using it for video editing and it's ridiculously more efficient than anything else I've ever used.

Both Vim and Blender are very hard to learn and discovery is extremely poor. There is just no way to figure it out without reading the manual. Even after you read the manual, you have to practice it frequently to get good at it. After that it's a dream.

I don't really like characterising a UI as "good" or "bad" in a one dimensional perspective, because whether I will choose an easy to use or an easy to learn application depends entirely on what I'm going to be doing. For example, with video editing (and also code editing), I'm doing the same actions over and over and over and over again. I'm also combining actions in different ways and I want a kind of "UI grammar" that lets me efficiently express myself without searching around for some drop down or macro. I use these tools for hours on end, day after day. I don't really care about ease of learning -- I only care about easy of use and efficiency.

For other things, I really care about ease of use. For example, I make New Years cards once a year. I want some software that helps me make a mailing list, print an image without screwing about, etc, etc. I don't want to spend more than about 30 seconds setting it. It needs to be intuitive. If anyone knows of such a thing for Gnu/Linux, I'd be very happy ;-).

Frequently ease of use and efficiency are at odds with ease of learning. Best if you can do both, but often you have to compromise. Both Vim and Blender compromise a lot, but they are aiming at a particular niche. Not everybody likes them, but those that do love them. Some other applications compromise in other ways, and at least for my applications I don't find them appropriate. YMMV.
GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN: Good Keep it shut down so that We the People …
I was criticizing this statement of yours:

"It's pretty decided that Solar will never be able to produce even close to sufficient energy to serve as a baseline energy source."

No, it has not been pretty decided. You are lying there. I don't need to show solar can do that, I am disputing your claim that it has been shown it can't do that, and calling you a liar for making that statement.

Consider: you are claiming that it has been decided that not just now, but at no point in the future, will solar suffice. Regardless of technological advances, known or unknown, you are saying this issue has been settled. How could that possibly be true?
nice. couldn't proceed till i read your comment.
I do agree. A complete solution is designing a new generation/revision of time protocol with accountability and anti-misuse as parts of its design, just like how people are implementing ASLR and NX in C programs and starting to use memory-safe languages. Or just see how TLSv1.3 removed all unsafe algorithms, so it will be little damage even under the worse case scenario.

Also, I think NTP needs more publicity. We need people to be aware of it before we could get feedback. The community then can have a watchdog team that spots misuses and publishes alerts.
Flex seems more flexible to me than CSS Grid

It's not an either/or proposition.

I sometimes use both at the same time, depending on the project. Usually it's Grid for the big picture container layout stuff, and then Flexbox for laying out each individual portion.

I'll be happy when another 15% of my visitors upgrade to better browsers so I can use grid on my biggest project. Right now Flexbox fails with orphan elements, even when using margin: auto;, but this would be a perfect place to use Grid.
His commit access was removed. If the recipient didn't understand he will when he tries to push his next change.
That's what works for me, maybe take the space off after "repeat"
Ask HN: The theory of coding interviews
The whiteboard coding interviews are getting very popular; just about every company is doing it. If this trend continues, (and with a bit of imagination) in a few years time every last company on earth will be doing whiteboard coding interviews to hire software engineers.

So in the world of total whiteboard coding interviews, with no room for, say, a hire based on just “regular” interview or good references, each of us will be governed by certain laws of the coding interview. To that end, I propose the general theory of coding interviews:

Each of us SWEs have a defining number called the Leetcode Number – the minimum number of Leetcode problems one needs to solve in order to have a baseline odds of passing the coding interview for a certain company. It is a function of both you the SWE and the company you are applying to:

L(u,Cmp) = Ln

where L is the leet function and u is you and Cmp is the company you are applying to. Ln is your Leetcode number for that company. You have one Leetcode number for each company in the world that does whiteboard coding interviews.

For some lucky ones, Ln is very small, even single digits. They breeze through the onsite rounds and wows the interviewers so much that they are offered the job before they leave the building. For the rest of us, Ln tends higher and for some very unlucky souls, it tends to infinity.

Ln quantifies what you need to achieve in order to have a baseline chance for getting hired. But whether or not you can achieve that is governed by your achievement potential function:

∫ P(u)*E/Cmt = Lnumax

the full text is here: https://write.as/mgh5ghzkd3gxc.md

Any feedback/remarks?
Try Kotlin and its collections.

I used to love Ruby too but the dynamic typing quickly became a deal breaker. So I set out to find a language that's as pleasant to use on a daily basis, with well designed libraries and collections, but also statically typed.

Kotlin met all these requirements for me.
FreeBSD 3 supported SMP. FreeBSD 5 had the "new" SMP.
After reading the author's comment on it I see it as a failure in making the question relevant to the problem they want to investigate, which was "Does the timing of the accusation seem suspicious?".

I would have phrased the question more like: "How many fewer reports of assault would be filled if nominated political candidates would be protected from accusations in media during the limited period of an election? 0, 0.1%, 1%?"

Expanding questions could then follow up to identify how the democratic process would benefit or suffer from having candidates be accused or accuse each other of illegal behavior, and if the public would find it informative or disinformative to read about it in the media. Further exploration could ask if it would be relevant whether the case ends up in the legal system after the election, or if it is enough that an accusation exists to make it relevant in the election process.

Those question would have been interesting to see, both after the 2016 election and the Kavanaugh nomination.
What keeps you from installing an alternative browser, like Firefox or Chrome for iOS? I recently switched to Opera Touch on iOS and it’s been great so far. Definitely worth a try I would say.
As in, you've never heard of it and suspect they've just made it up, or you're aware of the concept but have an unorthodox opinion about it? It's a very pervasive concept among UX people. If the former, try googling "learnability vs usability" or somesuch?
It's nothing new, I was using and also admin for RSA token 20 years ago.
Building a Bug Out Bag at the Dollar Store
I really get what this article is talking about. Most of the friends I've had the longest I met on the internet. I went to a small private high school far from my home and had interests that none of my classmates had, plus it was difficult to socialize after school because I lived far away.

I was into Punk & Hardcore and found a local Punk & Hardcore music messageboard (powered by PostNuke!). I definitely remember being at a show (probably in 2003 or 2004) and someone saying, "Wow, most of the people I hang out with, I met on the internet."

When I went to college I met a bunch of friends on a bike focused messageboard I'm still active on. I met people who went to the same school as me, but what was probably the most odd is that I met them online, not at school.
I assume you're starting from the quasi-libertarian "all regulation is authoritarian in nature" position, which is a setup for "Authoritarianism is bad, regulation is authoritarian, therefore regulation is bad".

There's a problem with this argument. Where it is is an exercise for the reader.
Facebook is indeed the epitome of surveillance capitalism.

A centralized social network is extremely valuable to an authoritarian government and has little value to a democratic government.