skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That’s a problem with the Myanmar government, not location-based services. People have also been jailed for articles they publish in newspapers or private letters they write. In those cases no one blames the act of writing letters- it’s fairly obvious that the government that’s reading mail is to blame, not the letter-writing in the first place.
One finance job I worked in had that regulation. (But it wasn't a general thing in that country.)
to be fair though, __del__ did cause problems. when the app was exiting, PyOpenGL would release the GL context before my buffers were __del__'ed, so the __del__s tried to free a buffer that stopped existing and crashed. it'd be nice if those methods were called at a predictable time and not "sometime after the object's RC drops to zero, maybe".
I hope they do that instead of adding planned obsolescence.
This is why working remotely is fantastic for work life balance. I can do my personal tasks, travel, visit my family, etc. and still be available.
> It may or may not have been an attack but what’s the explaination for 24 embassy staff members randomly experiencing the same symptoms and all showing brain abnormalities?

I haven't followed the story in detail, but the claim of "brain abnormalities" appear to come from a small number of doctors who likely were primed with irrelevant information. "Doctor, take a look at these CT scans of diplomats in Cuba who might have been attacked using a sonic weapon." It is not far-fetched to imagine that this priming caused the doctors to see brain abnormalities where none existed.

Oh, and someone who was down-voted to dead status already linked to an article from 2017 in which the Cubans said they believed crickets were the culprit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18837926

See also this blog post, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2018/04/07/ba..., which in not so kind words calls the original study junk: "The condition suffered by the US diplomats in Cuba has been labelled “mysterious” (Rubin, 2018). The real mystery though is how such a poor neuropsychogical report could have passed the scrutiny of expert reviewers in a first class outlet."
"Now, if the market isn’t growing fast enough anymore that means that there are generally only two ways to continue to grow — either increase your market share by drawing the customers away from competitors, or raise prices."

Incorrect. There is a third way: reinvent the smart phone.

Back in 1899 the Commissioner of US patent office stated that "everything that can be invented has been invented." No doubt there are plenty of people thinking the same thing about the smart phones we have today. i.e., every feature that can be added has already been added. They are wrong.

Keep in mind that right before Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone people thought the same thing about the mobile phones we had then. Then Jobs reinvented the phone. Can Apple do it again?
Doing exactly this but from time to time I move my old desktop folders in a backup folder with a date. But now I have so many in there with duplicate files. I'm sure I'd win a lot of disk space by merging/deduping those folders.
* ~/Projects/<git-repo-name> - all my git repos

* ~/.bin - only scripts, so this dir is in my $PATH

* ~/Pictures - only images, my rices, wallpapers, screenshots, etc

* ~/syncthing - files I sync with syncthing (my .kbdx and my memes folder)

* ~/Documents/<topic> - my university stuff, a courses folder (files I created doing some courses), some cheatsheets in .md, a library folder where I keep all material I have colected throughout my life, and a backup of my memes folder

* ~/suckless - suckless software with my modification (dmenu, dwm and st)
I was wondering if you like to contribute better scalar code? I'll be happy to include your (or anybody else) code and then compare different approaches.
Ask HN: How do you transition to a new stack or language for your next job?
I'd like to switch to a new stack or language for my next job, but it's always the most practical and easiest to stick with what I know. What are your strategies for diversifying your experience and actually landing jobs where you're new to the programming language or stack?
Some jurisdictions even require it, e.g. in my country you get 26 vacations days per year, but you are expected to take at least 10 of them continouosly (which, if you add weekends typically results in 16 days without work)
How about using plain files?

With files, you have the entire operating system at your disposal to manage them.

You can organize them however you see fit with folders. If you are using links, you can also create additional hierarchies.

If you are looking for old ideas, you can use grep or ag (silversurfer) to look for keywords.

The operating system keeps track of access times so you can restrict your search to a time frame.

If you use git, you have a full history of your versions.

With some discipline, e.g. you can use the first paragraph for a summary, you can easily extract content for meta documents like todo or priority lists.
hey lordnacho, how to contact you directly?
Most users are also unaware that they can collect used cooking oil from local restaurants to use in their diesel cars.
Getting a stable job at a big company to be able to support your family after taking a risk on a startup doesn't sound like a terrible outcome to be honest.
If you want "big screen, small CPU" you might as well buy used/refurbished. Unless you care a lot about that battery life, I guess. Oh, and I don't think mainstream OS's are going to work so well on a weak CPU, though a well-maintained Linux distro (read: not *buntu, not Mint) is a different matter.
- A folder called Repos on a data drive, not attached to the OS drive

- Each folder in Repos holds a repository for different types of work:

- Personal holds important documents, CVs, clearances

- Sensitive docs are passwd encrypted before push

- Thesis work in its own repo, now dormant

- Business in its own repo(s). Folders for individual contracts and personal dev work.

- Data folder to hold experimental data

- Music folder to hold CD rips and audiobooks

- Keys folder for repo keys

- Photos on dedicated external drive

- Desktop and Downloads contain important files, but limited to about 30 max (pending final destination)

- A Backups folder that holds old files from pre-repo days. Most are junk.

- Games folder for all games, Steam, etc. on dedicated drive labelled Scratch.

- Saved games end up wherever the games themselves store them, but I don’t care if I lose them.

- Documents folder holds temp files and junk from other family members. If indicated as important, moved to Personal repo.
I've been fortunate to work with a CTO that sees the value in Elixir and also letting us push forward with it. It has been excellent. At this point we have about 20 engineers who have chosen to work in it close to full time for their services.

It's hard to pick one big draw, but I'd say the biggest for me is that everything I wanted to do in rails has been possible in Elixir and then additional functionality not easily possible in rails is trivial in Elixir. I often consider the distribution techniques as "enhancers" as you could work around them with global locks and data stores, but you don't need to.

I'm very bullish on Elixir and I'm curious to see where it will go. Looking forward to giving my talk about bringing Elixir into production (from a human and technical standpoint) at Lonestar Elixir conference.
They tried with watch, but that was really a limited success, if one at all. VR/AR was supposed to be the next thing according to everyone else, but that still has a ways to go. IoT is also pretty limited, there are only so many people who get excited about changing bulb colors over the internet.

Hard time seeing what’s next indeed!
As another point of data, with FF Nightly on macOS 10.14/2018 MBP and ~10 tabs, I see no fan activity and low-to-none energy impact.
Quirky exceptions
That's what i notced with my friend in the managerial position. He can spend most of the time in Work From Home mode, has really good pay grade, and can't rest. He's looks like he's on a wrist band leash getting mails every 2-3 minutes and needs to somehow react on 10%.

He doesnt do much other than be available 12-16h 6-7days a week. It's taking more toll than one would expect.
Policies like that are often designed to (or at least conceived/fantasized to) ferret out/prevent single-actor fraud.

Forcing someone to take two contiguous weeks out of the office means that someone else will need to be briefed for continuity and there's an enhanced chance of detecting "weirdness" that might be associated with a fraudulent scheme.
You're free not to work on backend javascript (or other interpreted languages) but many people would (and do) disagree with you.
He might be getting downvoted for cultural reasons... in much of continental Europe knocking down and rebuilding a look-alike house from scratch is tantamount to vandalism.

(I voted him up, but the analogy did make me squirm.)
An advice a professor gave me at college a decade ago: Choose what you like, and like what you've chosen.

I guess whatever path you decide to follow, you'll need resilience to achieve impressive goals.
> Doing that makes improving precision a lot easier but at the cost of computation time.

Not quite. The difference in computation time is the current the lack of hardware support, not something inherent to the underlying encoding method. So in practice you are right, but in, for example, embedded contexts without floating point hardware, the performance advantages of IEEE floats should disappear (especially if using a 16 or 8 bit posit suffices).

Posits are simpler to implement than IEEE floats (less edge cases) and use more bits for actual numbers whereas IEEE floats waste about half on NaNs. The use of tapered precision is also nice.
There continue to be many stability issues in the 1.4.3 branch of OpenShot that Debian ships. Version 2.4.3 is not available from the Debian Stable repos but is much more stable. You might want to use the AppImage to get the most recent version if you’re using Debian.
I guess I feel like the annoying formatting is indicative of the community, immature.

Web developers seem to follow trends; Perl -> DJango|RoR -> Node.JS -> Scala -> GoLang -> Elixir -> Something. Or, something like that. To me, it's like buying a $500 pencil and expecting that you should be capable of writing a better book.

If you get in bed with that crowd, don't expect that your program and 3rd party dependencies are going to be stable in 2 years.
Using the same way but for repositories:

~/code/bitbucket.com/<repo_name1>
~/code/bitbucket.com/<repo_name2>
~/code/github.com/<repo_name1>
~/code/github.com/<repo_name2>
I think it is the intersection of what is worthwhile to solve, what is solvable, and what I can solve better than others.

For example reducing the risk of artificial general intelligence meets the first two criteria but Sam Altman and Elon Mush already recruited the best people in the world to join OpenAI. My contribution would not make a difference.

Providing opportunity to people willing to migrate is something that is over-served politically but under-served with for-profit initiatives. I hope to make a difference there.
Two unstated premises here: 1) You can't share quantitative methods in a pop science book. You can't share with a general audience ideas like multiple regression, covariance, controlling for confounding factors. 2) There is no compelling evidence to back up many economic empirical results other than multiple regression. Some intro stats professors and some Kaggle competitors would balk at those assumptions.
Did you read the article? It mentions openshot, and compares the two a bit.
You mean this very flawed study?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/14/cuban-acoustic...
This is a valid point, managers and clients value availability and that's mainly the reason why they want you full time.

In fact IMHO many prefer availability to productivity. Being available 40-50h a week is rather tiring though and it can affect productivity.

For example I found that I perform better on a 32h/week. The availability problem can be solved by having the team cover the full week (different shifts with overlapping days).
That has to be the most hilarious title I’ve seen in a while. The “age of technology” as in literally the entirety of human history from the moment we invented tool making and developed the ability to use fire?

And yes, clearly 2019 is the year that humanity will peak and everything is going to be downhill from here as we will never again be able to create any new technology. I know because somebody posted on Business Insider about this.
A Typical Meeting with a Potential Client
This is a problem with base64 decoding. While there are vectorized algorithms for decoding and encoding, they do expect a text without spaces or newlines. However, by design, in emails the base64-encoded data must be split to lines not exceeding some length.
To paraphrase scripture, it isn’t so much about what you choose to do as it is how you choose to go about it. Whatever you find for yourself to do, give it your very best. Do that, and there’s very little chance you will have regrets at the end.
Usually the tag is only absolutely necessary when you’re re-posting something that’s already on HN and feel that enough time has passed that the link merits another discussion. If it’s from 2018 but it’s never been posted before, it doesn’t really matter.
There are three technical concerns that I think are significant when talking about blockchain projects (ignoring the financial and legal issues somewhat, despite those being perhaps more relevant to this service).

First, obviously, is the issue of energy consumption, although it is hoped that a system like Proof-of-Stake could solve that to some extent.

Second is the issue of unwanted immutability or traceability, in that even the creator of a transaction cannot (perhaps after the fact) demand that their transaction is hidden. Interestingly, work is being done on this too, with Zero Knowledge proofs for privacy, and using Chameleon Signatures for optional mutability:

https://www.cio.com/article/3122846/internet/censorship-and-...

Thirdly, there is the issue of how to correctly set the cost per byte of storage for a blockchain. If the cost is too high, no one will want to write to it (i.e. high transaction fees for a blockchain currency), but if the cost is too low then miners won't want to mine it (due to the amount of storage space and network capacity they need). Market pricing may in practice be sufficient for deciding this parameter, but I don't know if there are strong reasons to believe that the market will always be able to find a price that is sustainable for both users and miners.
Lots of quotable quotes in here!

“generalizations are generally wrong” - Lampson

“We are faced with an insurmountable opportunity.” - W. Kelley

“Algol 60 was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.” (C. Hoare)

Etc. - I won’t go through the whole thing now :-)
Large L2-networks never work well, they all have some issues. Their existence is purely based on lazyness or believing that Ethernet works like the water main... I admit that I might be more obsessive compulsive than most but I find reconfiguring networks to be a whole lot of fun :)

And no matter how smart the peole on campus are, there will always be someone who cannot accept that someone else is more right. I have first hand experience of this since I have tunneled IPv6 at home and know pretty quickly if someone does not listen to ICMPv6 Packet Too Big -messages. Not the first time I contact people about it but so far the only one I have not been able to convince is exactly someone really smart on some campus somewhere. I wrote many emails and tried to explain that IPv6 allows MTU's as low as 1280 bytes and that ICMPv6 is a must allow protocol but nope.
> That has to be the most hilarious title I’ve seen in a while. The “age of technology”

You are supposed to comment the article. Commenting the tile is considered bad form. The article is not discussing what you want to discuss.
Unhappiness.

I find myself constantly drifting toward entertainment. I made mobile games for about 4 years, and now I run an escape room business. I guess I'm trying to get rid of sadness one small bit at a time.
I always knew multiplayer was my passion, so I built a platform that would change multiplayer for the better:

http://fuse.rupy.se/about.html

It took 20 years, 10 years to learn how I wanted to build it and 10 to actually build it.

IMO healthcare is not a solution to anything, good food and people are much better doctors.

Energy is not a solution; but the problem of this century, AI is complete baloney.

I also learned to live like in the 18th century on wood for heat, dug-well for water and perma-culture for food.
Elixir is a niche (that's the truth). Also in the article it is written 'Relatively difficult to "recruit" developers with existing experience in Elixir'.

Why would a SW company invest in niche languages where the resources (software developers) are really expensive and really hard to get? Technologically it's all great but economically that's a nightmare.
It only mentions it at the beginning (not even linking to it), I don't see where the comparison is, did I miss something?

I just confirmed my real-world experience that Openshot is good enough for many quick uses (more than what the Wikipedia article left me to think with the paragraph about stability issues when I first discovered it).
I'm curious why that's the case and under what conditions it applies.

Constrained geography means that, physically, you can fit fewer people within the same commuting time which means prices should go up faster given demand than otherwise. Given an external source of demand (ie: hot area for whatever reason) that seems a bad combination for a healthy city.
So You Want to Manage Product Managers?
A lot of individuals I've seen in the community so far haven't been the type to quickly jump onto a trend. People have been thoughtful with their application design and have chosen Elixir instead of alternatives. Given how drastically different the BEAM is from these other languages, I have a hard time seeing some of the people I've met (and myself) jump to something else. My guess is that if it does happen to others, it is because they switched jobs and cannot get buy in.

Pretty unfounded comments regarding stability of packages long term. As with any community that makes it easy to publish packages, there will certainly be package churn over time. However, core libraries show 0 sign of this and Phoenix in particular has taken a very mature stance on new features.
I think he was saying before his 32-hour work week experiment, he was working 7-5
If you have a solid background in software development, it's not too hard to become proficient in Elixir in a few weeks. If you recruit good talent with a demonstrated proficiency and willingness to learn, you will be fine. If you need to switch languages or systems in the future, these devs will still be of great use to you.
Kleisli Category Example
Personally, the main rub for me is "Telegram's end-to-end encryption is not turned on by default," which null and voids all of this.
TL: Load Twitter Lite Using WebKit on MacOS
So, if I understand correctly, the source of bullshit here would be some sort of soft coercion/engineering of consent? Over something that people don't need/shouldn't need? I.e. something like working on ad campaigns for cigarettes?
A clean windows install without "crapware" is more than enough to watch movies and web browse at 4GB ram for regular people.

People who buy "big screen, small CPU" are not your usual refurbished hardware buyers, I think they really are "socially antipodal" to them.

Some bling and, "freshness" is definitely a deciding factor for them, unlike to people who buy "refurbished ABS plastic slabs" office class hardware.

Asus has a 15 incher that they sold close to $600 just half a year ago that was Atom powered. It was a very basic machine, with a surprising pricetag.

No wonder, every OEM is already on the trend.
> https://vadosware.io/post/paxosmon-gotta-concensus-them-all

This is pretty good non-FUD post about distributed systems (unlike many posts related to consistency and consensus coming from distributed database startups and megacorps).

Although missing some important real world considerations in reasoning, namely latency in WAN setups (reducing number of RTTs isn't really about that).
I'm curious about the performance of parser combinator approaches to other parsing methods. It seems that generally they are slower, but is this an innate problem, or could clever techniques improve on this? Anyone done work/research in this area?
How well does this play with Multi-Account Containers?
Work on curing aging.

Once we solve that problem, we'd have "unlimited" lifetime to work on anything else.
If we're going to help people based only on need, there's probably a long queue of folks who need help more than he did.
Ask HN: Startup Equity Not in Offer Letter
A year ago I started working as a contractor for a small startup that had only received seed money from one individual. Since then they have been doing well financially and have been paying well and we have a very good working relationship.

They are now about to raise an A round and asked me to join their team officially. In the discussions, they said that I would recieve the agreed upon salary + equity as an early employee (under 10 employees), but they hadn’t established what that equity was yet. They had hired an HR firm and lawyers to help them set everything up in multiple states, so I assumed we were waiting on some of this for clarity.

I now received their offer letter that includes no mention of equity. I really enjoy working with this group, but I just want to be clear before moving forward. Is this normal? Is equity ever offered separately or later?

Thanks
Controlling Neurons with Light, but Without Wires or Batteries
Mostly opportunity. I find many problems in computing very interesting across diverse fields, despite the fact that I have a PhD (which usually implies close study of a very narrow area). Am an applied researcher: I can’t do pure theoretical work, but I can understand it in a knowledge domain, look at the problem and find the appropriate solution given existing knowledge, often developing new tech in bringing that idea or variant to life. I often borrow from completely different areas, including biology, which is a gold mine of elegant and efficient solutions. Phd means I often bring more rigour (better quantification/rationale/metrics) to the solution that quite frankly wasn’t possible before.

I know I can’t develop quantum mechanics from scratch and am happy with this limitation. Would much rather use it to build a quantum drive anyways.

Being happy with your limitations is crucial for personal happiness. And lots of sleep. It is needed.
Please don't. That's the sort of name that makes it impossible to talk about the project, let alone use it at work.
Initially I decided to work on something that interested me, so I ended up in IT and gradually worked my way to the point when I could start my own company.

After some time I decided I wanted to work on things that makes a significant difference to other people (preferably those that have it the hardest) and/or the environment. It turns out there is a ton of stuff to do that I find give great meaning to my life.

One of the organisations I helped create is https://Akvo.org

Akvo now has one of the largest databases of water wells and water sources, covering primarily West Africa but also other regions, with a good data collection and visualisation system. Additionally we have integrated field usable water quality sensors with smartphones for faster and cheaper data collection.

To answer the question: I work on both what I want to work on an what I think needs to be worked on.