skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Funny enough Emacspeak for the blind totally owns any new GUI technology. They can do everything from inside: IM, web, news, coding, playing music, reading ebooks, MUD's, check the mainstream news...

I didn't know this. For sure GUI are useless for persons with significant visual impairment. Thumbs up for Emacs developers for helping people in need.

> Your reality and bullshit applications such as Electron based bloatwares are a bad joke against disabled people.

"Electron" apps are not my reality. I didn't know what it is (until now).
Germany gives nod to US$8B tunnel link to Denmark
Just 4 frames per second sounds crazy slow.
For the UI rust has bindings for a lot of stuff and it's easy to generate more.

I use Rust as my main language, but as far as I have seen gtk-rs is the only somewhat mature binding for an existing UI toolkit. This is not coincidental, since Gtk+ is a C (with objects) toolkit, it is much easier to bind than toolkits in other languages. Unfortunately, outside Linux, Gtk+ also looks pretty out of place.

AFAIK, there isn't any binding for e.g. Qt or Cocoa that has wide API coverage and is mature. Definitely not for production-level work. I think currently the only viable solution is to write a core in C++, expose C functions and write the UI in C++, Swift, etc.
No insurance from my job since I'm freelance. It's $900/month for me and my wife.
The article refutes its own premise:

Net spending cuts, rather than stimulus:
“Mr. Costa made up for the givebacks with cuts in infrastructure and other spending, whittling the annual budget deficit to less than 1 percent of its gross domestic product, compared with 4.4 percent when he took office. The government is on track to achieve a surplus by 2020, a year ahead of schedule, ending a quarter-century of deficits.”

Growth is slowing, minimum wage is lowest in the eurozone:
“Growth is cooling from 2.7 percent last year, as Mr. Costa keeps public investment at a 40-year low to cut the deficit. While he restored public sector salaries to previous levels, they have barely budged since before the crisis. And the minimum wage of 580 euros a month, although up, remains one of the lowest in the eurozone.”

Gov cutting taxes as well:
“To cement the growth cycle, the government is putting what little investment it makes into targeted initiatives like tax breaks for foreign companies and training for the unemployed.”
That's a disingenuous argument. We're talking about guns and in a broader sense encryption access as it pertains to the article. Which are two things that have legitimate and defensive purposes.

Something like a "nuclear gun" or DDoS attack has no defensive purpose. In the terms of firearms, you jumped to ordinance when the topic is about arms. I hope you didn't do so intentionally.
No, the article says "Dexter’s optical encoders are placed directly on each joint, and have resolutions that aren’t possible with any other control system." The usual approach is an encoder on the motor, before the gear train. They probably have one too, so they can see what the motor is doing vs. the joint. Remember, none of this is rigid under load.
Burning leaves is no more harmful than deodorants.

Burning known and non debatable evidence of toxic chemicals in tobacco leaves harvest curing.

Marijuana comes out ahead.

So much misinformation about drugs. Heroin is safer than alcohol if moderately consumed. Addiction wise, not so great. but Tobacco is said to be harder to quit than heroin.

I can attest to that.
Is that really an argument anyone would want to make?
If gov at that level can't afford to consult, decisions on that infrastructure should move up a level.
This is an important point that is commonly overlooked.

Traffic is a sign of something. It’s a sign that the benefits of transportation outweighs the costs of transportation. Given this, high traffic often implies that there is pent up demand out there - more cars that would be on the road right now if only the roads could support it.

When more roads are built, this unlocks some of the pent up demand, as the cost of transportation has effectively declined due to more available roads.

However, this reduction in cost / hassle etc and the previously pent up demand may be so large that in encourages much more driving, such that in equilibrium the traffic could be nearly as bad as before.
My machine is from 2008 (partially) and doing fine.
> I'm pretty sure that the VIX only looks at implied volatility in options ~30 days to expiry.

even then, this factors into the point. Implied volatility is just how high over the theoretical price of the option people bid. If the greediest speculators aren't bidding those up anymore, and instead of piling into nearer term options expiring every day, then the ~30 day options aren't reflecting the same sentiment.
Wells Fargo settles fake accounts lawsuits for $575MM
Likely the latter, and for that we can largely thank large motorist groups in the US. Michelin comes to mind, as they created their "Michelin star" metric to give people a reason to drive places, and then lobbied like hell to create town/city layouts that mandated driving.

A hundred years later, driving is a massive part of US culture, and we have trouble seeing the problem because that's "just how things are".
Haddington's arm is 5-axis, which is not enough to put a tool in an arbitrary position and orientation. To put a tool in an arbitrary position (3 DOF) and orientation (3 DOF), a 6-axis arm is needed.

Their gripper option adds another axis.
Copying what I said previously

> I traditionally haven't been the biggest fan of this book. Most of what they list is stuff that just looks like using C++ just for the sake of it, with no real benefit over a C codebase.

> For instance they don't appear to use RAII at all, even in places where it's an obvious win (InterruptLock).
is this because they decriminalized drugs? seems like when the government lets people do what they want, it helps the economy.
When you look at the engineering of the Wright Flyer:

1. propeller nearly double the efficiency of flat blades other contemporary experimenters used

2. a special engine that had about double the horsepower to weight ratio of any other engine at the time

3. a wing shape designed in a wind tunnel rather than seat-of-the-pants "bird shapes"

4. a 3 axis control system that worked

5. a research and development program that first identified the problems and solved them one by one with a series of prototypes

6. every modern airplane can trace its design back to the Flyer, and no other

7. the Flyer exists and can be examined

8. exact replicas of the Flyer have been made, and they fly like the Wrights documented the way theirs flew

it's pretty clear that none of the other "first flight" claimants have much of a case (especially since none of their alleged machines exist and can be examined).
> what did Houston do differently, to get these uniquely Houston traffic problems?

Not sure they are uniquely Houston, and definitely not their explicit fault, but I'd say the issue is (obviously) large concentrations of people going to the same area. The DFW metroplex has some traffic issues like any metros, but not to the same extent as e.g. Houston despite being a larger metro (but smaller city). And that's the point. Were Houston's employers to fan out even more than they already do, you might see the suburb-to-suburb commutes that many other sprawls enjoy. Maybe there are plenty of people that live in Katy and work in the Woodlands or vice-versa. Not having to ever even enter the city on a regular basis is very welcoming to those who hate traffic.
I think the first one I read was Lean Software Development then I went through Leading Lean Software Development and Implementing Lean Software Development.

It's been a while, but as I recall the latter two can be treated something like workbooks. How to go from "traditional" project management towards lean/agile. The former introduces many Lean concepts but within the software development world. So that's where I got the idea (maybe I'd seen it before I read that book?) about treating developed, but not integrated, code as "inventory". It has a cost because we have to eventually integrate it but it'll become "stale" over time as its interfaces or other features become further from the main branch.

If you have a Safari Books Online account they're probably in there. I found them to be fairly easy reads, perhaps spending 2-3 weeks on each. Applying it at work, of course, has taken a lot longer.
> modern-ish JS tooling

This need a lot more scary quotes around modern and tooling.

The JS "ecosystem" is a cancer: nowadays when you want to do some front-end work with some CSS you usually end with an install of node and npm/webpack/the-shit-du-jour, half of them crying about incompatibilities and how you should use the shit-du-lendemain instead to compile you don't really don't know what, it still takes 20mn to see the result. All you wanted was to edit some CSS. And surprise: now half of your other projects won't build anymore because you had to install npm-1.911-HELP-ME-DAD and the option to not install globally changed from -not-everywhere to --just-a-local-beer.
Dood, I am NOT a fan of Larry but he was a very, very booster of the cloud... and I'm not even a fan of that idea. But give credit where credit is due.
Thank you Dan. This post was a great piece. Being a person that truly admires you, and now knowing that there are actually a couple of things that I appearantly know more of than you.
Your inspiration is even greater now.
Slacking on Slack – Where Work Doesn't Happen
But it is making trips possible that weren't before; it's not strictly money going down the drain. I have trouble seeing a fully utilized resource as "a waste".

Saying "traffic will be solved by this!" is clearly misleading. But those extra cars on the road must be benefitting, or else they wouldn't make the trip.
Isn't there an emergency alert system -- should take as long as sending a radio signal?
I wasn't aware that we have money for that kind of stuff... Also, it will anyhow turn out to be late and way beyond budget. (Sorry for the rant)
I think the Austrians have a fair point that overexpansion of credit during booms is a key cause of recessions. However, the medicine they prescribe once a recession occurs, namely allowing the money supply to contract and letting many businesses fail, is not only inhumane but less effective at encouraging recovery than the Keynesian approach.

I lean toward the view, espoused by modern liberal economists like Paul Krugman, that goverments should tighten spending and run surpluses during booms, so they have some cushion to increase spending during downturns. This tends to run counter to human psychology, as during a boom, people have trouble imagining it coming to an end. And politics tends to interfere with good economics; thus we have the spectacle of the Republican Congress passing a major tax cut when the economy was already heating up. (I'm actually sympathetic to the argument that the corporate income tax rate was too high and needed to be cut, but other taxes should have been enacted to make the whole package revenue-neutral.)
That's a nicer notation than me! I thought you needed a ; before the 'done', and & ; won't parse.
StreetComplete: Android app to correct OpenStreetMap data
Is that because the underlying indeces are defined as each asset being a fixed percentage of the whole? Like, hypothetically, the S&P 500 would define MSFT as 1% of the index so if MSFT goes up then the fund would have to sell it to keep it from being more than 1% of the total holdings?
Elixir was literally written by a Rails core team member as a response to issues he had in working on enterprise Rails apps. The Phoenix framework as well was written by a long-time Rubyist, and the book they wrote together, Programming Phoenix, reads in places like a treatise on lessons learned from working with Rails.

So Rubyists (I myself have been one since 2011) are drawn to it because it essentially has been billed as a successor to Rails when you need to be concerned with highly concurrent, fault-tolerant, TDD-driven web apps. Most companies who have embraced it are former Rails shops... most devs who use it are former Rails devs.
Ask HN: Do you code 8 hours a day?
I find it very hard to meet my requirements at work. The company I work for is young, there's a lot of work to be done and a lack of proficient coders.

My boss has a very simple outlook on coding: Just sit there, and code. One hour is one hour.

I've been stuck in part time and part time pay because I cannot manage to push more than 4-5 hours of raw coding per day. This results in countless problems because I barely get by financially and am not able to lead a stress-free lifestyle that in return would allow me the mental freedom and relaxation required to code more.

Am I in the wrong to think that coding is not predictable like that? I have good days, I have bad days. This is directly correlated to the amount of stress and trouble I experience in my personal life, and also varies from day to day depending on other factors like sleep, nutrition and even weather.

Should programmers be paid for only the raw hourly output? Do you manage to code 8 hours every day? If so, how?
They really don't share anything except for Elon.. which is both great and drives me nuts.
You can't "do what you want", there is just no jail time for possession.
The new switch was connected to each line in parallel with the old switch, but it was able to ignore incoming signals until told to take over. The old switch was hard wired enough that it could not be remotely commanded to have no effect on incoming signals. The line relay attached to each line had to be physically cut out of circuit.
No, I don't think you have a handle on what reverse engineers are actually looking at when they look at binaries (semi-spoiler: they're not necessarily even looking at assembly instructions), and I don't think explaining it in a comment is going to be nearly as useful as urging you to try it for yourself on a toy problem would be.

Another thing to acquaint yourself with --- orthogonal to the Radare pointer --- is the concept of a "lifter". Or, in another direction, with symbolic execution. Or, still another, with modern decompilation tools.
I was agreeing with you. :-)
This might be a bit of a tangent, but I'll throw in my perspective as one of those who has been "risking it" for the last 4 months or so. (I won't go into why I'm risking it unless asked)

I think it's difficult for a lot of people to justify paying a lot for things that don't provide much of a tangible/measurable benefit. Ideally, insurance would cover a person if something catastrophic happens, but otherwise it's difficult for the human mind to believe it's not essentially setting money on fire when they pay for things that don't have an immediate return. This is probably true now more than ever given our culture of immediate gratification.

Someone might feel better about paying for insurance(aka health care) if they believed they were actually being taken care of today by the dollars being spent today. What I mean is that I know of almost nobody who has anything good to say about any aspect of the health care system; everyone seems to have to shop through several doctors to find one who knows what they're talking about, after having spent maybe 5 minutes with doctors a-piece before being sent home with a prescription for what the doctor concludes to be a textbook diagnosis. Many people complain that doctors don't listen to them, and I can attest to this myself having had doctors completely ignore my evidence that I have a specific genetic condition that can be traced to my grandfather who has the identical symptoms(as one example). A friend of mine with a chronic pain issue(I'm talking severe) regularly has to deal with doctors and healthcare staff not doing their jobs whether it's not refilling prescriptions when they said they would, not returning phone calls, failing to communicate with pharmaceutical firms, telephone ping pong caused by nobody knowing who has the authority to do what, nobody can tell you what the price for a treatment will be, etc. It's often chaos. And we're supposed to pay thousands a year for that shit?

People need to have faith in what they're putting their money towards. If someone doesn't have faith that the health care system actually cares for them, they're more likely to not pay for it out of spite and take the risk when they have to. Those with a lot of money and well established careers might have the time and resources to navigate the bullshit, but many people don't.
My dad spent his career as a natural gas pipeline technician. For a long time they maintained their own radio towers and VHF or UHF (I forget which) radio network. Each district had their own comms guy who maintained the network, and it was very resilient and reliable, allowing the entire company to be in contact essentially anywhere.

In the early 2000s as a cost cutting measure, the company decided to nix the radios for satellite phones on each truck. Of course this proved to be problematic, as the sat phones often had reception issues. They relied on cell phones as backups, which was also quite foolish as the remote compressor stations had very poor reception. They also had issues where someone would leave a voicemail and they wouldn’t get notified of it for days or weeks due to some issue with AT&T.

After a couple emergencies where communication was identified as a big issue, they proposed moving back to the old radio system, but they had already sold off the frequencies and dismantled the infrastructure. My dad retired not long after this, but the “corporate bean counter” trope rang quite true here, and in the long run we were all a little less safe because some executive with no field experience wanted to make a name for themself by saving a little money on something that proved to be mission critical.
Part of the reason for poor sales of a "play once and done" game is people can just watch someone do a "Let's Play" on YouTube and experience the (in most cases) linear narrative without having to pay.
Well the idea is that the major highways are a good indicator of where people are going. If you build a major high way, and then widen it, chances are good its where people want to travel along.

With respect to getting to downtown Falls Church VA, that is more a last mile problem. One I dont want to dismiss, but not something a commuter rail can solve. The commuter rail does pretty well at getting people to several major job districts (DC, Tyson's Corner)

Building commuter rail along highway medians solves a different problem -- the NYC problem where a city fiddles around for 40yrs figuring out where to dig a tunnel and eminent domain problems.
What has the Rainbow Warrior III been up to? The Wikipedia entry makes it sound like it's just doing press junket runs.

"After its launch in Bremerhaven, Germany, the new Rainbow Warrior toured ports in Europe (Hamburg, Amsterdam, London, Stockholm and Barcelona) welcoming supporters on board the new ship and holding specific events such as onboard concerts. The ship was also visited by celebrity supporters such as Radiohead's Thom Yorke, who was part of the ship's maiden voyage.[8] and 2 Michelin starred chef Diego Guerrero in Barcelona.[9] In January 2012, the ship travelled to the East Coast of the USA, planning to dock at New York City, Baltimore, Southport, North Carolina, Fort Lauderdale and St. Petersburg, Florida.[10] In March 2013, the ship travelled to Australia. "

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Warrior_(2011)
You are assuming my opinion on the subject. Please consider my points in good faith.

To clarify: My perspective is that we have reached a point where it is clear that in the space of online, there are a few dominant companies that effectively control population traffic and attention through hosting spaces. The internet can be viewed as a public private space, with all the consequences of such. Changing it would require government-level regulation, bringing in the established checks on speech restriction that the government has.

I do not want any consequence. I am undecided on the pros/cons of possible soltutions.
California has had a leading role in the black market trade for decades. It’s the legal framework that has been out of sync.
I think it’s because in the US cars effectively “won.” Even if mid and long distance passenger rail were more of a thing, you’ll have to rent a car at your destination anyway.

In other words, with just a car you can get anywhere you want in the continental US in 2-3 days. With just passenger rail (or commercial air travel, etc.), you can get to passenger terminals in a lot of places, but that’s about it.
As with many things, I think the truth lies exactly in the middle! Let me explain..

In 2011, Portugal applied to an IMF bailout. What do you do when you beg someone for their money? You comply! You don't come out for the streets saying you won't pay! You say creditors exactly what they want to hear. You (seem to) reduce costs, you cancel holidays, you go even beyond what creditors ask you to do. You get smart, you understand you're in a weak position and take the best advantage of it. You don't do like the Greeks who let their egos be greater than their brains, and be on the spotlight for being over-spenders by saying they won't pay their creditors. That's what the government did in 2011-2015 and it worked! We got out of the spotlight and stop being perceived as over-spenders..

In 2015 a new government was elected. With the influx of tourists, and being seen as people who saved some money (and learned their lesson), the new government was in a really better position to try "the revival". They started reinvesting and giving the appearance that we are growing (and some things are, but also government spending). And it seems to be working so far...

So, what really seems to work? Both things. When you're in a weak position you comply, and then when you get to a stronger position, you negotiate. So both type of governments were needed at exactly their time.. A good timing - I think that was the key to the current success!
>The truly unpredictable UX is when a noob tries to paste

Yes, and you've not solved that.

You've only solved that one special edge-case where they're pasting "a youtube url".

This only pushes the confusing bit further along, and adds some more cruft on top!

Quoting is a fact in shells. The way these languages work is through loads of string interpolation, so you kinda need to learn that. And I'd prefer to make the rules there simple than add special cases for URLs.
> no jail time for possession.

isn't that the definition of 'do what they want'

if you are not going to put people in jail for drugs

people will do drugs.
> Where's the money coming from?

The federal highway program. Highways are heavily, heavily subsidized by state and federal dollars. That's why their true cost isn't born on drivers, and it's something that greatly exacerbates the problem of urban planning the U.S that leads to vast sprawl, urban decay, hell for walkers/bikers and environmental degredation. If all highways were toll roads, most would cease to exist and our cities would become denser, doubly so if all those highway dollars were diverted to public transit.
Hackers steal personal info of 1,000 North Korean defectors
Absolutely brilliant! You win the internet.