skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This study forget one important fact - reliability of the wind or solar. Unless there is a serious breakthrough in the storage technologies, nuclear is irreplaceable, be it for the good or bad.
When you start stacking up evidence that by itself is inconclusive, you find that the overall probability starts to get very tight.

For instance:

suspect was in this neighborhood at this time
suspect was wearing a blue jacket
suspect had short blonde hair
suspect was an acquaintance of the victim

Each of those by itself means next to nothing; you can't go around arresting anybody with blonde hair because there are millions of people with hair like that. But if you find somebody who fits all four, they are almost certainly your guy. The chance of there being two acquaintances of the victim with blonde hair and a blue jacket in the neighborhood at the time of the murder is much smaller than the chance of a false positive on any one of those individual conditions.

With enough circumstantial evidence, you can blow right past "reasonable doubt".
I was in the same boat as you, just a couple years older, and decided to attend university to get my bachelors in CS. Mind you I was working in the field already and making good money.
I discovered that not having the degree meant I had knowledge gaps in a lot of areas.
The popular opinion is that you can learn everything online and degrees are entirely useless. In my opinion going back to university to get the degree was the best decision I ever made.
It's disingenuous to say that if one cares about animals they must not eat them.

> it's a much better solution than paying some company to call you a good person.

If you can afford to and understand the terrible conditions of battery chicken, but wish to still eat meat, then one choice is morally better. It's unrealistic to think otherwise. Signaling intention with your purchase decisions is real. Not eating meat is of course the better solution, but is again an unrealistic expectation to have for many people.

You seem unable to tolerate incremental improvement. Why is that?
Show HN: Stop refreshing HN
But you amortize it over the remaining lifetime of the plant. Those costs won't be materially greater after, say, 10 more years of use, but you get those additional years of output.
Way to derail the conversation. Gender is a protected class, as is ethnicity and religion. If a group of people belonging to a protected class are systematically paid less than their peers, it is grounds for a lawsuit.
It could be both, no? Climate change leading to change in the nutrional makeup of their regular diet?
Surely this is pretty obviously true for any (US) business person? The S&P 500 represents the top 500 market listed companies, so if you run a company that (within an order of magnitude or two) has the same capitalisation as one of the index companies, then you should expect (on average) to have the same returns as the index. Maybe some people earn a bit more, some less, but they are all operating in the same economy with the same risks and so forth.
Ask HN: What are your favorite board games?
Can you recommend some great board games, along with a little about why it's great?
Jenkins isn't a terrible experience, and I've used it personally and professionally (and would do so again where it's a good fit), but for my current project it missed a few of the requirements. In trying to rationalize the whole NIH thing, I talked to some friends and peers about their CI experiences. I got pretty consistent responses on Jenkins.

My relevant requirements:

1.) The software needs to be self-hostable and run on the BSDs. For the most part this narrows down the options to buildbot and the Java based CI options (Jenkins and GoCd). Travis could probably be run on FreeBSD, but the open source bits are essentially abandoned (e.g. some repos are missing) with no documentation. Nearly everything else these days is strongly tied to Linux via docker. Some free hosted services offer a FreeBSD target, but I'm looking to test on DF/Free/Net/OpenBSD.

2.) The software needs to scale down. The GoCd folks suggested that the agent would need around 500 MB of RAM. I haven't profiled Jenkins, but I can't imagine the agent being that much lighter weight. Certainly the Jenkins server process is glacially slow. By contrast my prototype in Rust is showing memory usage of under 5 MB for each process (agent + server). I expect that to grow a little but, but not by an order of magnitude.

3.) The software needs to handle multi-arch builds. Travis does this extremely well. Buildbot and GoCd, kinda. Jenkins does not handle this use case (e.g. pipelines + matrix builds are not supported). I really like the way Travis basically handles these as sub jobs.

My experience:

A.) The Jenkins documentation is terrible, if it exists at all. I've heard that this has been improved in the year or so since I've looked at Jenkins (but that hasn't been my experience). I mentioned this to one of the CloudBees guys at the DevOps Days conf I went to last year and got an ack that this is a known issue (although CloudBees has driven a ton of Jenkins documentation and improvement). At MegaCorp we paid a fortune to CloudBees, which helped a ton but didn't really help end users. I cannot understate just how much of a detriment the documentation is.

At the opposite end of the spectrum rust (except for the async stuff) and postgres are just a dream come true. If it's any consolation the GoCd documentation is pretty atrocious as well. Almost none of it is up to date with the current UI.

B.) The Jenkins community tends to cargo cult Jenkins-Groovy snippets like crazy, potentially as a result of #A. Having a good community helps documentation and helps when there are gaps in the documentation.

C.) Bootstrapping Jenkins is not something easily done in an automated way. The CLI is not stable and I had tons of trouble trying to get plugins and dependencies sorted without having to drop into the GUI. For homelab stuff I've automated bootstrapping of nearly everything except for Jenkins with Ansible.

I don't think these are new or unknown issues as in talking to friends and peers I've found that the typical responses regarding Jenkins are along the lines of: Jenkins works well enough so that we're not motivated to switch, but A & C are our main pain points.
I think one of the most important lessons I took from the coding boot camp I went to was the value of the MVP. There, the first step was to deploy an index.html with "hello" before doing anything else, before even npm init. Then, get your framework running with another hello. Then, the barest functionality possible - if we were building a GitHub analysis thing, make the frontend capable of listing repos before building the server that did analysis on those repos (or vis versa).

Through a couple group projects I refined the concept of KISS and feature prioritizing, siloing, and escalation.
> Sounds like backups were shut off 6 months prior.

Exactly. Onsite backup is not a backup, especially if it is directly connected to the primary data store.
You are describing me... So I'm there waiting for the iPhone mini/nano.

I find it somewhat fascinating that Apple has chosen to reproduce the mistakes of the Mac (in the late eighties/early nineties -> higher prices/margins at the expense of market shares) rather the success of the iPod (own all the market, with an iPod at every price point). I don't think it's a winning strategy in the long term, though it has worked so far.
As with most users people don't know what they need.
For example, in this situation, wouldn't a website to demonstrate what is being done be vital? Wouldn't the software engineer setup volunteer registration page? A donation page? Etc etc
Wouldn't they benefit with some kind of database about the infected people? What help they already received and what not? Etc etc
I think the whole aspect of software engineering is not understood yet.
Fascinating comparison of comments. If you read the comments to the article, 100% of them are "same with me". If you read the comments in HN, 50% of them are "set your expectations correctly."

I read this and I felt like I needed to talk with the guy. It doesn't matter if you "don't have anything to show" for 15 years of work. It doesn't matter. Where is it written that programmers must have a hand-coded website or a open source project to their name?

I also never buy the "I'm too much of a perfectionist" line. That's not a thing.

You got bored. You didn't have motivation to complete. Sure, happens all the time. "Too much of a perfectionist" is not a thing.
I think you are confusing people that want a small phone with people that want a premium small phone.

If you go with the small phone concept then your life might not revolve around your 'hand rectangle'. You also might have bought your phone ages ago and be in no hurry to upgrade.

A lot of the older folk are okay with the relatively basic phones they bought five years ago. So long as the camera is good enough for messages to close family members and the phone works for voice calls then there is no problem. These phones did have smaller screens and, for this demographic, there is no perceived point in upgrading to the expensive, fragile giant hand rectangle. Consequently they are not a vocal crowd. All slowness is them fumbling around or connection speed, the latest and greatest CPU is not important and the screen is adequate for their eyesight.

I run a basic small screen phone myself and I am toying with spending the £3.29 to get the cracked screen replaced. I could get a better phone but I would be looking at something equally small and underpowered as what I currently own, something that wouldn't even be considered a phone by most people here. 4.5" screen with plastic back and replaceable battery, with SD card slot. It will cost a tenth of the price of a premium hand-rectangle and I will probably own it for much longer than how long a premium phone is owned for.

So yes there is 'low demand' but lots of it. This demand is met by products that don't even appear on the radar of the HN crowd as 'viable'.
As a relatively new coder, I feel like I took a lot away from this article. There was a lot that they mentioned that made a lot of sense to me and I will try to hold on to.
Nothing he says Is dependent on the Linux kernel so he could have run WSL under Windows 10. For Linux builds of GUI apps he could use a free X server.

I wonder if this can be applied to the majority of people. If the app is available for Windows then use the Windows version (e.g. Chrome at least until Edge uses Chrome engine) otherwise use the app under WSL.

Microsoft has made it easy to run GNU tools under Windows such that you don’t need to be constrained to Linux installs for that.
Hannah Arendt draws a useful distinction between "labor" and "work." Labor is effort required to sustain life: catching food, finding water, plowing crops. Because living creatures need these things continually, labor never ends. Food is eaten or decays and new food must be grown.

Work, on the other hand, has a defined start and endpoint. Ideally, it produces something enduring and unique.

In ancient times, labor was looked down on as something that slaves did. The lowest in society did the back-breaking, life-sustaining work anonymously, while rich, propertied elites built empires, wrote philosophy, and invented new technologies.

The world has changed since then, but I think there's something useful in that distinction. Capitalism transmutes nearly all work into labor. Almost every profession feels like it's performed solely to "sustain life" whether it's plowing fields or producing software. It's all just a salary. So I'm not surprised when I hear that people feel they have "nothing to show for it": they usually retain no ownership of the things they create and it all seems like one long endless task.
Tangentially-related rant (since the author is pushing Ubuntu): I wish Canonical would offer an 'End-User Desktop Support' offering. Right now Ubuntu Advantage is available for $150 per year, but that's only for enterprise (you have to order at least 50 units).

I think it would be interesting if Canonical offered an equivalent product for home users, understanding that the $/year would be higher. That would give all the people moving to Ubuntu an option to support the people making the OS.

I do see that donations are accepted (the prompt is on the _Your download will begin shortly…_ page), so at least there's that!
Saying that wrap around doesn't lead to unsafety because "it is defined that way" is wrong. Wrap around is one of the leading causes of security issues in all software. Scroll down to the Quantifying the risk in the blog post. The author says that it is very hard not easy to exploit C libraries loaded by Python.
It includes flagged and dead items (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18950163).
For others: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Z._Jacobson
This article is a bad faith attempt at reporting this story. Here's a previous hacker news thread which links to a less inflammatory article:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18914054
Memex
good intro game - Smallworld - It's easy to pick up, the combat is so common you don't feel ganged up on and you go through boom and bust cycles consistently enough everyone feels like they're doing well at some point.

Intense game - Game of thrones board game, For those enthusiasts of the show/ and board games. Be prepared for a steep learning curve and be sure to 5 committed friends or family that are totally okay stabbing each other in the back for 4 hours.
High Performance Computing Act of 1991 (aka the Gore Bill)
No need for WSL, if you can use Linux proper. In reverse, if you ever need to run Windows programs, you can use Wine.
Steinberg is no longer granting licenses for VST2, so legally there can be no more new VST2 developers. But not all the hosts support VST3 yet and VST3 is over 10 years old. It's a giant pain in the ass.

They are trying to force it, but people just don't want it.
Will they bother to update for temporary speed limit changes (e.g. during construction)?

I had a rental Chevy last week that put up an alert on the dash display every time it decided I was "speeding". Hell, on I-5 in the middle of the night, even the semis are speeding.
> Wrap around is one of the leading causes of security issues in all software.

A wrap around on its own can not cause unsafety in rust, only panics.

As in, maybe you try to use the wrapped integer as an array index, that's still safe even if it wraps (because Rust bounds checks).

It would only case memory safety when used alongside code in an unsafe block.

> The author says that it is very hard not easy to exploit C libraries loaded by Python.

I drew a different conclusion from that section
Are you willing to go to jail if your analysis is wrong?
I'm indeed seriously proposing that the majority, the so called " neurotypical people" are in fact psychotic and autistic people are those who remained healthy. Inner speech is never mentioned in ancient literature. The voices and thought insertions become so deeply internalized when it strikes so early that the person completely believes this is actually how people communicate with them. It is to some degree influenced by actual events and people can always rationalize when it fails.

The majority of people outside the US/Europe seems to be autistic, that is, not psychotic. Many autistic people found out they are normal in Asia.
Apple Musicish
The author says he switched because of “Then came 2018, with its stunning revelations and outrages by Facebook, Apple, Google, and others. With privacy and free speech—in short, digital autonomy—deeply under threat”

Comparing Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple is apples to oranges. What did Apple do that threatens customer privacy and free speech?

You don’t need to switch to Linux to stop using Facebook and Twitter...
ISTR many of those afflicted NHL players had been goons/enforcers, so much of their CTE could be attributed to fisticuffs. Sure, that's one of the most entertaining parts of hockey, but it's not integral to the game in any sense. In fact non-pro hockey doesn't have that at all. (If you get in a serious fight in a high school game you might get arrested, and rightly so.) It seems that the NHL could fund some studies to figure out whether this is the case. TPTB probably want to get rid of fighting anyway to attract the "cuddlier" millennial fan. (cf. NFL's offensive explosion this year due to their new "no touching the QB" rules. I'm not complaining; my team drafted the Mahomes.) If NHL had studies that blamed fighting for all their CTE, they would have an argument to present to their more "traditional" fans while changing the rules to attract the new younger fanbase they desire.
https://musi.sh
Ask HN: Why do tutorial writers combine 10 technologies when 1 or 2 would do?
Suppose I want to learn graphQL - most of the tutorials are a combination of express, react and 20 other things, when most of these aren't going to help me learn what I originally came to learn. I saw a course on blockchain which explicitly stated it is for beginners ("no coding experience necessary") and they picked JS along with 5 other JS frameworks to build a simple toy blockchain when Python would have been a much simpler choice (most of the students were struggling to understand JS Promises and unable to complete the exercises).

Isn't this crazy? I can understand paid courses doing this - maybe they think they're providing more value for the money by tacking as many tech as possible, but free resources? Even they do the same!
Just use a surge protector literally right next to your PSU.

Cheap whole house surge protectors are pretty much useless. It will work for a few times, but the MOVs will degrade and fail pretty quickly. Every time a big inductive load switches on or off its going to cause a voltage spike that is going to trip the MOVs. or the MOV's Trip voltage is so high (to avoid quick degration) that they really don't provide any protect. Really a good whole house protector needs to use SADs (Silicone Avalance Diodes) or a passive LC filter. Transtector, Thor Systems (SADs) or Pricewheeler (LC Filter). These protectors can take many more surge hits than the ones you listed above. Why whole house Surge protectors don't work.https://zerosurge.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/USTech.pdfE... with a whole house protector it still would be a good idea to use point of use surge protectors. Since the surge has to reach the Whole House protector before it can be clamped. Surges can reach your electrical devices faster than a whole house protector can clamp. It only takes a few nanoseconds to destroy a microchip. For instance say you have a vacuum cleaner plugged into the same circuit your computer is connected to. the vacuum cleaner jams, causing a surge that will hit your computer (since it closer) than the whole house proetector is (down in your basement).﻿

Source: comment section on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PqO0aQaGDY
Unfortunately this time, Steve Jobs can't come back to set things right.
WSL can be pretty slow for some tasks. It's REALLY slow for me when creating lots of files, like a git clone might do. See, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18948601
How is this different from Vaadin (other than the language, of course)?

https://vaadin.com/
A Bridge Too Far: E.W. Dijkstra and Logic
I don't really see why the author thinks this is so funny. While I have no love for giant corporations, I do have a strong distaste for government pushing people around like that. There is nothing more frustrating than having to spend a fortune on lawyers just to deal with the government, rather than adding any value to the product.

I do wonder a bit, if this isn't meant to be a protectionist show move from the EU demonstrating (particularly in the wake of upcoming brexit) that there are benefits to staying in the EU... although I prefer to apply Hanlon's Razor liberally.
I somehow had no problem with the usage of God and found it pretty effective, infact, maybe the other alternative you suggest seem a little obscure.
Haven't heard of this before. Seems cool!
...surely you accept certain risks...

TFA is largely about insurance for youth leagues. Children aren't capable of assessing and accepting certain risks. That's why we don't let them drive automobiles on the highway.
> What did Apple do that threatens customer privacy and free speech

Apple affects many things negatively by being extremely pro lock-in and patent aggressive. So I'd say it's a good thing when someone stops using Apple's products and switches to Linux instead.
Stephen King has frequently said that he just starts writing with a few interesting characters in a room together and the novel flows from there because good characters cause the story to tell itself almost by magic.

The problem with this particular advice is that it omits the first and most essential part: "be Stephen King"
Why? I have lots of PDFs, photos, video. It's a lot more convenient being a 'digital' 'hoarder' than a physical one (though I actually have way too many physical books as well).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers)
> Not a single one is making small high end phones.

This is not quite true - Sony still is producing the high-end XZ2 Compact with the Snapdragon 845 and 4GB RAM -
https://www.sonymobile.com/us/products/phones/xperia-xz2-com...

Sony is the only manufacturer I'm aware of that is still producing smallish phones. It is rumoured to be replacing this phone with the XZ4 Compact, but Sony is not particularly good at marketing or distributing its phones.

> Is every manufacturer blind to market demand and/or stupid?

Quite possibly. Mobile phone manufacturers seem to slavishly copy each other and copy Apple especially, as can be seen with the recent stupid copying of the removal of headphone jacks and the use of notches in many phones after Apple made these changes in its iPhones. Was the market demanding these changes? I doubt it. Were these changes necessary? No.

If everyone wants phones with larger screens, why are so many consumers holding off on upgrading their iPhone? Apple recently blamed its battery upgrade program for a $9 billion loss in revenue, but its very possible that a reasonable percentage of the users of these older iPhones simply don't the larger-screened and more expensive iPhones currently on offer.

> you'll need to explain why every phone manufacturer has come to the opposite conclusion

I suspect that manufacturers are making phones with larger screens as many consumers in what were faster-growing smartphone markets such as China and India preferred phones with larger screens so they could have a single 'smart' device, rather than buy a phone and a tablet as many consumers in developed economy markets did.

I suspect also that the lack of diversity amongst smartphone product managers and engineering staff is also having an important influence on these changes. Men are physically larger than women on average, and are over-represented in the staff of smartphone manufacturing companies. More women, older and disabled people in their staff would likely help to produce devices that suit the needs of a wider range of people, and not just young men with high levels of physical dexterity, good eyesight and higher than average interest in 'working out' how to use overly complicated smartphone interfaces.

I hope that mobile phone manufacturers can regain their ability to segment the market and produce a wider range of devices and form factors like they did until a couple of years ago. Innovation in the smartphone space has slowed dramatically, and it's no wonder that smartphone sales have also slowed.