skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The whole safe but meaningless job is just romanticization. The same job can be meaningful if you are working on a good project. It can also be unsafe if the workplace is toxic.

It is about finding what you really want in life. Sometimes safe but boring is good enough. But sometimes working on a dream project might feel like a chore because of the circumstances and people.
Introduction to Wayfire
Is There a Revolution Coming to C# and .NET in 2019?
Everything you wanted to know about the state of C# and .NET in 2019 but was afraid to ask.

https://cshark.com/blog/is-there-a-revolution-coming-to-c-and-net-in-2019?utm_source=ycombinator&utm_campaign=c_and_net_revolution_2019
To put it succinctly, Red Hat doesn't sell Linux, they sell expertise in Linux.
Hey thanks for the feedback - really appreciate it.

I struggled with the idea of creating a page for every age. I eventually settled on the idea that people could take the platform anywhere they wanted to, whether it was passing generic advice along, or sending themselves a very specific message at a specific time in their life. That being said, it's kind of cool to see the ages that mean the most to people.

I like your idea with the short description - do you mind if I quote your example?
Git add by hunks (not whole file)

alias gap='git add -p'
Never had one. Straight into startups right out of college. Never looked back.

The fallacy is, that a corporate job is safe. One startup got bought by Dell, then we got laid off. Hadn't been laid off before.
The one that has the non-compete signed with the employee is favored over all others that would like to hire that employee.
Dockerfile/binaries for running stsh, the Objective-Smalltalk shell
It's a reminder that browsers are such huge beasts that no one can viable fork them when they feel the browsers are regressing.
"Doze" is a nightmare for apps that need reliable GPS readings.. the only real solution is a service that polls continually to get the GPS when the screen is on so that when the screen is off it can use it to do various background tasks (and of course, it ends up not being super accurate as when the screen is off the user is typically moving, which is when you'd want the GPS to be accurate). This ends up using more energy than would have been saved if the GPS wasn't available periodically when the screen is off! It's totally ridiculous..
https://ideatosafe.com/

visual here: https://imgur.com/17XxTmX

1. mindmap that syncs all devices, type on your phone, see changes on TV immediately

2. super intuitive gamified keyboard shortcuts (no need for mouse); super intuitive mobile gestures

3. has node-level in-browser encryption via tweetnacl so if you provide a crypt key, only you can see what you typed under a crypted node - crypted data looks like gibberish in the db and there is NO way to recover it, except you provide your crypt key. If you lose your key, you have lost the data under all crypted nodes, forever

4. copy/paste nodes to/from freeplane/freemind directly onto your map

5. full disclosure - I am the developer and working on a second release, sign-ups paused for now but I can open it up for signups if there is interest in working on the beta - I use it to organize my entire life

join waiting list here: i2swaitinglist@sonkomail.com
Adobe formats are notorious for bloat and scope creep. Implementing a conformant PDF reader would require you to implement a full 3D engine.
My initial reaction was that it was gamed. 7 upvotes at time of reading is doable by a small group, and it's off peak hours in the US (where I assume most of HN's traffic comes from).
I love this response so much because it encapsulates a SO style response of "why are you soon X, you should do Y instead". The person asked about how to escape from a job he perceived as meaningless and safe, not a job everyone perceived as meaningless and safe.
What about the really terrible things? More emoticons in unicode 11 for example?
> Namely, (minor spoiler) scientists killing themselves when science did something they couldn't explain.

This was more of "science turned into magic", experiments started to produce arbitrary nonsense, though I don't remember if they realized the cause at the time. That said, I found it weak and weird too; I'd expect those scientists to try much harder before giving up.
The big difference between Red Hat and a lot of these other companies is that if you look at a lot of their products, including the cash cow (RHEL), there is not a 1:1 mapping between the product and a single open source project.

Rather they create enterprise distributions that are made up of a number of open source projects that are (ideally) integrated into a solution. This combined with the right investment in support and training provides a product that is more compelling than "we provide a signed version of $UPSTREAM_PROJECT". I would say OEL is successful for the amount Oracle appear to invest in it (not much).

Timing helps a lot too though, in that they had a lot of success before the advent of the public cloud so are in a better position to weather the storm while they figure out a new model.
No. The best is the enemy of the good. I do not want to live in North Korea rather than (say) in the UK, because at least the NK government is honest about its intentions.
Show HN: Weekend portfolio site for my side hustle
I only know about it being sort-of a prequel because of the afterward material in the audible audio book. The books can be enjoyed in either reading order.
Thanks a lot! Something like that was one of the tiny tools I wrote back on DOS using Borland Pascal (I named it xcd). I figured something like this existed but I never really investigated. autojump is even included in Debian/Ubuntu, so it is trivial to use. I guess putting aside an hour per month to actively apply/install these little tools would be really useful.
People are already working on it. You can check it out here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17629173
> "But since it is user-to-user, you can only trust the user to store it how they want since they are gonna see it in the clear at some point."

That's a problem with almost every messaging system. I wouldn't worry about that.

> "What does encrypting the payload help with when talking to an onion is already E2E encrypted?"

It would be a requirement of PFS, but I meant encrypt at rest - my mistake.
What I find funny is that, even by the time we got to Star Trek TNG, people still couldn't fathom having a device with multiple books. Each reader on TNG and DS9 appears to be a single title that you have to loan/share with people instead of them just pulling the title from the cloud to their own device BUT they're like "oh yeah, we can totally replicate matter and teleport people"...
NetNewsWire works fine right now, and I have been using it for over a decade to follow various blogs and tech sites. I doubt there's VC-level money to be made in RSS, but it's actually useful, so I believe it will be at least as alive as it is now in another decade.
This man Winston Sterzel [0] has been predicting something like this will happen in China, as they have no tolerance for drugs due to the horrors of the opium crisis.

[0] = https://www.youtube.com/user/serpentza
Those questions seem like they’re a part of a course assignment. Ie the replies here will be reproduced in an essay.
I agree. It's important to point out specifically that many companies are paying for OSS with developer time instead of money. IMO, that is better than money and fits the OSS ethos.
He did specifically just say they have to work offline.
Seems it's mainly an issue with Nokia devices, the other manufacturers were minor problems in comparisons.
Just as an example, only chat/messenger apps on my Oneplus with saver enabled (default):

- Skype - always killed

- Slack - always killed

- Whatsapp - sometimes killed, rarely

- Telegram - never killed

- FB Messenger - never killed

All these are fully featured apps with tons of different functionality.

Telegram and FBM never ever trigger "this app is draining your battery" while Skype triggers it regularly when I sometimes start it on phone.

I'm going to generalize and say that probably some apps are simple bad and need to be fixed instead of granting them exceptions and allowing to be battery hogs.
Flash is already disabled by default, by virtue of not being installed by default. It is also disabled by default, by virtue of being click to play by default.

What this actually means, per the roadmap [0], is "stop telling users what they need to do to make the website work".

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Plugins/Roadmap
Infosec with TCFox
Nigerian online grocery startup, Gloo is shutting down ecommerce operations
Ask HN: Is your work meaningful?
In light of the "escaping your safe meaningless 9-5 job" post, is your work meaningful? And how is it meaningful / what do you do?
Show HN: Danger World – an interactive reading game (in beta)
>Feel free to block the installation of your app on devices that you feel unfairly target background apps, they'll just use a different application.
reply

with some devices you just can't find alternative that would work reliably in the background for example. Imagine sport tracker, that needs to record locations even when in background. You cannot just use another app, because any sport app could get killed due excessive power management.

Favoring some apps by manufacturers putting them on a whitelist to prevent them from being killed should be considered as unfair practice (potentially illegal).
> Your passion may be a dream job, a special course (masters, software bootcamp, course in another field like marketing or airplane pilot etc.) or a startup. It just has to be something you love but are not doing because you think (you're) job is currently the safest option for you

Hopefully it's not part of a course assignment otherwise the instructor may need a course of their own.
I agree. I'm more of a beer homebrewer, but I have a mead-making friend that makes some amazing meads. He manages to squirrel them away in his house so that he forgets about bottles. Then, when they turn up years later, they're just spectacular!
"Every time this LinkedIn commercial pops up on YouTube I am reminded of how low the company has fallen to."

I recently thought the same when facebook started advertising (to me at least) on silly mobile game (the ads those games show)
I just finished uninstalling flash on all my computers and it feels great, not as great as uninstalling java though years ago. There's finally no sites that require it. I can thank the mobile first trend for this.
How you design your system will dictate how easy or hard it is to move. I've always been an advocate of making sure the design is agnostic to where it's running. Problems with moving start coming up if you've tied yourself tightly to specific services, or ways of working. That's not to say you shouldn't use those services, many are really very useful, just be aware of, and have a plan on how to move away from them (if you need to).
Persistence seems to be via files... So I suppose just as for Lovefield, all the data needs needs to be loaded before use? This also seems to make sharing between tabs tricky?
This was me at my last job. I was there for 10 years, stuck for 5. As other's have said here it is as simple as just quit, but go deeper than that. I'm sure you have come to the same conclusion on how to escape, but you should since down and ask yourself, "Why haven't I quit yet?". Are you simply scared of failing somewhere else, knowing that your current situation is guaranteed? Are you not confident in your skills? Analyze the reasoning for your reluctance, and then working on your confidence. This is at least what worked for me. Good luck!
Depends if you are using the value add services. AWS is much larger than EC2 and S3, but if you only stick to those it is pretty easy to move around.
Second using z. I couldn't figure out how to get autojump working on windows linux subsystem but z worked perfect right out of the box.
Sure, you can use formal methods to prove properties that are hard to test. The point you seem to have missed is that it takes a lot of effort to do that.

The reality is that in most cases there's a cost benefit analysis regarding how much time you can spend on a particular feature and the strength of the guarantees.

>The Curry-Howard correspondence tells us to think of types as logical propositions with terms as their proofs.

Hence my point that you end up writing a metaprogram that emits the logic. Ensuring that the metaprogram is correct is a manual process. The more complex the proof, the harder it becomes to understand.

Consider Fermat's conjecture. It's trivial to state it, it's trivial to test it to be correct for a given set of inputs. However, proving it for the general case is quite difficult, and only a handful of people in the world can follow that proof.
I do agree that the RealWorld stuff is there to enforce control flow, but that is exactly one of the things that we needed. I also realise that the modern GHC optimizes such things away, so there is no RealWorld!

Regards implementation, as the type system available in XQuery is much more limited than that of Haskell, I had to choose some mechanism to represent an IO. Actually representing it as a state transforming function that operates on the RealWorld, as was done in the design of the IO Monad for Haskell, seems to work pretty well.

I tried to follow closely and adapt both:
1) Section 7.3 "Monadic I/O" from "A History of Haskell", Hudak, Hughes, Peyton Jones and Wadler 2007 - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
2) Section 4 "Implementing monadic I/O" from "Imperative functional programming", Wadler and Peyton Jones 1992 - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
"Use a bouncer" might be the answer there. All engineering is compromise, and needing a bit more compromise to support legacy applications is not unreasonable.

(In fact, why are you running a stream-oriented application over such an unreliable connection at all?)
Ask HN: What can software engineers learn from other engineering disciplines?
So you want to start a startup?
Certainly not what I set out to achieve, but I am very chuffed to hear that. Thank you :-)
A bit late, but do you by any chance have some resources to share that helped you? Started drawing a bit more lately and would love to improve beyond just practicing more.
Some of the comments here criticizing the remote work concept are doing it on the following lines:

1. It's bad for SF workers - pay is worse.

2. No separation of home and work life.

3. It's lower quality work.

4. Regulations require local residents.

Then let's agree that remote work/process is to be the default, as long as

1. the measure of quality is quantifiable.

2. the work does is not for the government.

3. work pays for a co-working seat/equivalent.

The above is close to 95% of the tech/startup industry. It's probably bad for SF engineering, but that's OK. They'll figure it out.

This is better for the world, and for the industry. Let's do this. Everyone has a birthright to opportunity of good life, not those that luck allows to move to SF.
Merge Files and Import to MYSQL Using Python
I found a meaningful 9-5 job.
Because, assuming similar skill, as by living in cheap place I can afford to undercut other people living in more expensive place. That makes me more attractive to the employer.
If he is not Canadian, would it be different for such drug case?
There's a rule I remember, that in hard-ish sci-fi, the author gets to invent one unrealistic thing. I wouldn't put Cixin Liu's trilogy as hard hard sci-fi, as it invents a few more, but all in all, there aren't that many "fantasy devices" there. It definitely has a flavour of hardness.
Etesync – a secure calendar and contacts application
How do you differentiate an apps crash from an OS forceful kill?

Both would show a last good status and no good exit.
This looks very cool, but I agree with the other comments that the README.md needs a better top level description.

From looking at the code, this looks like an attempt to recapture a stand-alone Lisp operations system and Lisp development system. I had a Lisp Machine in the 1980s, so projects like this and also Mezzano interest me.
Ah, you can live like a king in Asia for $20 a day!

Which is very much not true in Hong Kong (where I live), or Singapore (where I have friends), or a bunch of other places in 'Asia'...
Actually nothing, which makes me really frustrated.

I'm just building boring CRUD systems for boring companies. I can use a lot of concepts/buzzwords, like microservices, serverless... But at the end, just CRUD apps.

How can I improve? After 5 years just doing this, I don't feel capable of doing something cool like some of the posts in this thread.
Cookie: A Template-Based File Generator
At this point I think I'm too afraid to ever go to China. You can't get justice there, and you can be swept up into some stupid diplomatic spat.

Don't they realize how short-sighted this is? This is incredibly harmful to tourism.
Sorry, but this is terrible advice. Do not quit until you have something else lined up. Quitting with no plan for the next day will leave you out on the street. Go part time if you want more time to set something up.
China Sentences Canadian, Robert Lloyd Schellenberg, to Death
> How did you escape

Out the window. I had to back up quite a bit and take a running leap, but I was able to easily shatter the floor-to-ceiling pane glass. Marge from Accounting tried to stop me, but luckily I had begun taking Parkour classes recently and was easily able to dodge her.

> Did you have a strategy or was it a leap of faith?

It was a literal leap of faith. Some banners set up to advertise a corporate conference broke my fall.

> Did you regret it later on?

Well, yes and no. I didn't regret choosing to leave my job, as I was able to take a chance and see what I could achieve. But I did regret the broken legs and fused vertebrae.

> Are you happy with the decision you made?

Yes.

> Where do you think you would be today if you had decided to stay in that job?

Probably not in this motorized wheel chair...
Yep, it's novels published online in a chapter by chapter format. You'll also find translations of some of them, but beware that some sites provide automatic translations, which are naturally a bit wonky.
Here's an example site, specialized in the wuxia genre: https://www.wuxiaworld.com/
Why would you expect a viable open source company to be a "megacap" anyway? The whole point of the open source development model is that, properly applied, it's more efficient and less costly than its closed-source alternative, while delivering significantly more value to its userbase. By contrast, the complementary services that an OSS-focused company actively sells (such as support) are in fact quite expensive. You wouldn't expect a support business to be "megacap", unless it actually manages to reach IBM- or RedHat-scale, which by definition very few businesses ever will.

The real competition is not Unreal vs. Unity, but both Unreal and Unity vs. e.g. Blender. (Which was actually funded as an open source project by its users, back in the day. But at a relatively low 'valuation', compared to Unity!)
Balena seems to have a developed a docker-native solution; not sure how it's implemented though.

https://www.balena.io/docs/learn/deploy/delta/
Device manufacturers favoring some apps by putting them on a whitelist to prevent them from being killed should be considered as unfair practice (potentially illegal).
A Billion Dollar Opportunity in the Online Gaming Market
It seems that just as bad apps they are trying to shield their website is also badly written and the simple picture of poop is linked from whatever of the 7 third-party sites with spying javascript code they are using and is blocked by adblock. Circles for me too.
Really, it's simply not Open Source software, that's nothing more than a marketing lie, so we should stop calling it that.
That is a good writeup, a fun read! I love Haskell but I tend to use a small subset of the language. This means that I am effective when working in my own Haskell projects but reading and understanding other people’s code takes time and effort.
Shortly after 2008 till around 2017 was when Silicon Valley, HN, and the start-up world in general surged heavily.

Now I think most people agree it's behind it's ceiling point. (most != all)

Of course before the first internet bubble also companies succeeded, but then when the bubble burst there was a dry phase.
A risky, non-9-to-5 job can be just as meaningless as a safe 9-5 job.

The hours and safety of the job are not what give the job meaning; it is you that gives it meaning.

I have worked for large firms and startups (none of them, by the way, were 9-5) and always felt it was a great job to have at the time. There was no "escape" though since the work was remarkably similar. The startups still paid.

To put it another way, I think you're looking at the wrong feature set to make this prediction.
Isn't that basically a death knell - especially if you're not a top 10/50/100 app - when trying to reach customers? If you wait until the customer has downloaded your app, you'll probably have better retention. If you mark your app as incompatible, people won't even bother to install even though there could be a work around. You'd basically be trying to send a message to users about device manufacturers and the Android operating system while killing your own numbers.
HN is written in Arc, which is written in Racket :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language)
Insurers already do this.
It's interesting to me how much China is behaving very much like a "gang", like the Crips or Bloods from the 80's. "You take one of ours, we'll grab some of yours." Doesn't matter what the reasons for the grabs are, it's just posturing.

It's sad when you're international relations are at the level of hoodlums.
Why is "don't say hurtful things" better than "gain empathy and insight into the lives of a group of people who are generally very badly off, in very large part because our country allowed them to be enslaved for hundreds of years"?

Because it seems like "don't say hurtful things" covers a lot of stuff, but you miss out on the specific empathy this specific situation gives you by reflecting on why this one word should be taken off the table for white people.
Just be careful that you don’t use your job as a proxy for life. Understand what you want first, then figure out where work fits.
On Bounties and Boffins
Utility Company PG&E Plans Bankruptcy Filing Over California Wildfires
A relative of mine works at a not-so-small place (some 100s of terminals) that used to run AS400s. Years have passed, but It's still green screens galore. He explained me that most of the personnel have memorized the menu so well that they can do their job without hardly ever looking at the screens. Changing that would spell catastrophe in terms of re-training and lost productivity alone.
It was also possible to run your own services much easier. If you wanted a domain name it or something close to it were unlikely to be squatted. I was able to setup and run a mail server in a colocation as a high school student. Not to mention I easily got email names or account names that didn’t suck - Ie not artificially long or number inclusive. At several points I had email accounts like jobs@domain.com. Most everything has been thought of or just squatted by someone looking to make a big buck.

There was also optimism. The internet seemed impenetrable to the concentrating effects of society - but now we’ve got about 5 companies that run anything you’re looking to do online or with a computer. Even things like movies or shows are dominated with dystopian plots. They’ve even killed Star Trek, a hallmark of scifi eutopias.
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/