skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We couldn't find a programmable temperature controller for a microscope that met our requirements so I ended up building it from scratch. It took me a month and I didn't know electronics when I started, but now we can do our experiments, and I have a skill that will benefit me and my employers for the rest of my career. I'd argue that that's a great use of a PhD, as long as it's not the only thing I'm doing.

Additionally, in my lab and many others, there simply wasn't any tool we could use to answer all the questions we have, so we had to invent them. That said, these are much more bespoke systems, but as we push the envelope of what we need to observe, instrument making and method development are only going to be more critical.

The inflation in the scientific equipment market is also ludicrous. Since I've been in grad school some of the things I have to buy have doubled in price. And it really is pathetic when it's something like a syringe pump - I mean you're rotating a screw with an electric motor to push a piece of plastic. I get that it's a small market and the vendor has to make a living, but this isn't the best way for a civilization to direct its resources.
> Windows is a first rate OS saddled with some stupid bullshit that's been piled on top of it.

I'm sure there are good bits of Windows - Microsoft has a lot of very smart people working for them. But I've never experienced Windows as a first rate OS - it's always had bullshit on top (and beneath) it.

> And be fair, maintaining a Linux configuration just the way you like it is a lot of work too. If it weren't, there wouldn't be hundreds of slightly-different distros.

Maybe "just the way you like it", but "functional and not sending your private information off to a dubious corporation" is pretty easy.

When there are issues with a Linux install, it's usually transparent enough to debug. Windows? Opaque all the way down. Ask for help online? They say "check your anti-virus; if that doesn't work, reinstall your OS". In what world is that sane?
It's not fair to call it a mere backup, it's an upgrade to the iPhone 6 in every respect other than screen size. The SE is effectively a 6S logic board shoved into the case of an 5S.
Thanks. I've sent them a message and included the MIDI file.
Ask HN: Why does front-end development change so often?
All technology moves quickly but front-end development evolves at a whole different level. What is popular one year is “old” the next and often a totally different menthodology. Why do you think front-end development is in such a constant state of change?
Might be a nice alternative to Docker.
C’mon, this ain’t Kaczynski, you’re reading the damn article through a browser and computer and they are actively selling the data you make on their site. If anything, the new york times is pathetically and dogmatically pro tech.
I dream of the time when I go on a road trip with a family and don’t have to drive. No, train, etc is not an option for too many reasons to list here
Because the key difference and value add is about not using other languages. Your title wouldn't clarify that to me.
I guess you would be a heretic to be someone who complains that while the rich want to pay for renewable energy and can afford to live in such a Friedman-esque society in which money buys your civil liberties from the legal system--or even just protection from criticism... meanwhile cost of living, suicide rates, homelessness, civil liberties continue to deteriorate for the working class.

Edit: maybe the downvotes suggest my guess was right.
Google Sheets has a QUERY function which does exactly this.

https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093343?hl=en
Those are pretty powerful ways to learn. With git, you can jump branches pretty easily as you proceed through the steps of a tutorial (either for the student or for the teacher to provide some assets for that step)

Docker allows a packaged environment without having to install a bunch of dependencies, and easily shut down/remove those environments.
God, I get sick of these articles on hacker news. The same regurgitated horse bleep.

This has become a meme around here to laud articles like this that use not so subtle words like "surveillance" and "manipulate" to suggest that something much more nefarious is going on here than actually is.

There are already adequate protections in place to deal with these issues. If you don't want to be tracked don't use Facebook or Google or use them and opt out of tracking. It's that simple.

We don't need these hyperbolic articles exaggerating the nature of this problem.

People have been collecting data on us before the digital age.

Credit Card Companies, Banks, and Credit Bureau's have long maintained profiles on us and sold them to partners.
Doubtful. DNA is stable, but its stability is maintained by a cushy cellular environment which is full of scaffold molecules and repair enzymes. By contrast upon death outside the safety of an intact nucleus DNA will immediately start getting chewed apart by DNAses. Then there is UV, which will slowly but surely degrade DNA over time. I think the record for intact DNA is less than a million years; there is zero chance we could get something from 65 million years ago.
As silly as if may sound, the thing that helped me the most is Ruby and Rails. Rails was designed with the idea that small groups of people could make robust applications quickly. So as a full stack developer, it works out very well. Some would say it accomplishes this at the expense of speed of the application. I write mostly line of business applications with no more than 10s of thousands of concurrent users and no more than 100s of thousands of users total. I would say my applications perform as well or better than any of their competitors that were built on other frameworks but in a faction of the development time.

The Ruby ecosystem is also great for scripting away the most time consuming parts of free lancing. For example, I didn't like some of the existing tools for handling AWS command line deployment, so I spun up my own solutions that fit my needs well in a few hours. I've been using that solution on every project for the last 5 years. It's changed and I've updated it a bit but I'd say no more than 10 hours of total time have ever gone into it in 5 years.

I can use the same exact language and features for everything from application development to scripting. If definitely speeds me up. Ruby and Rails aren't cool. But they work well.
Thanks for mentioning exceptions. I've found that Stephen Grider's courses on Udemy are outstanding. He's clearly found his calling in life. (I don't know him personally - have just taken many of his classes).
In 3 years, people will still be playing Fortnite, but nowhere near in the same quantities as today. I think you're missing the point of the post you're replying to.
Oweh t'zherkiam!

Wow. Well played, Mom.
While the work Valve has done improving the Linux gaming situation is actually quite impressive, 'serious' PC gamers already do enough configuration tweaking and working around problems already, it doesn't strike me that they'll really want to deal with even more of that.
I think this library, is exactly that. Cross platform in (C), and works on mobile, browsers, as well as desktop environments.
Vancouver SDE salaries are _much_ lower than Seattle SDE salaries in general, and are even low-ish for Canada.
The various discussions here have me curious if the widespread practice of netflix account sharing (which I believe is forbidden but not really enforced to a degree that they clearly could if they wanted to) actually helps maintain subscriber count by sort of averaging out demand among a pool of people.

If I suddenly am not using netflix more than an hour or two per month because my attention is elsewhere, I would be pretty likely to cancel my subscription, but if someone else were using my account and I either knew they used netflix quite a bit, or their usage was currently unknown to me, I'd be way less likely to bother cancelling my account.
How do you calculate actual value if you aren’t even getting a resalable asset? Whatever the price is is evidentally the actual value. In this case, a recurring price.

A la carte just doesn’t make sense with DRM; there’s no way to compete to determine a fair price.
But of you tackle the problem first, and not the technology, it makes more sense to just build automated road systems. Dumb pod-like cars which are driven by roadside controllers. If we decide to go down this route it can be achieved with existing technology, today. This is the ultimate scenario most people imagine with self-driving cars anyway, a future where hardly any of the cars on the road are driven by humans. We should just go straight there.
I imagine building a new plant -- even to replace an existing one -- would be a politically uphill battle.

There are plenty of folks who consider coal or natural gas to be "more renewable" or "more green" than a nuclear plant.
I've used Linux since the early 1.x kernel versions, but for my next laptop I'm thinking about switching to a MacBook. Not because of the software (I prefer Linux to macOS), but because of the hardware.

Apple seems to be the only manufacturer that so far escaped the race to the bottom and which still produces somewhat premium hardware. I want: a hidpi screen with lots of nits and a good contrast, a trackpoint or a huge touchpad, good battery life and somewhat light weight.

In the past Thinkpads worked really well for that, but recently I had multiple issues with Lenovo hardware. I'm currently using a X1C3 and originally considered upgrading to a X1C6 or T480s, but given there are known issues such as the throttling bug (https://github.com/erpalma/throttled) that Lenovo hasn't fixed in over half a year I'm very close to giving up on Thinkpads.
As another example, Minecraft apparently has about 90 million users 7 years after its release. Games for kids get a constant supply of new players, so it could be a fad or not depending on what else catches their attention.

As was once said about Hollywood, nobody knows anything.
More on this: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/01/18/au...
I know five people with iPhone SE devices (I recommend them to older family members who aren't phone addicts and to anyone who baulks at the cost of a new phone) and all of them are still working perfectly. I do recommend the phone.

Given the hundreds of millions of iPhones Apple sells, there inevitably going to be some lemons.
i was at a company that was acquired by disney. In the welcome speech, the person(Iger maybe?), asks us who we think disney's competitors are. Everyone thinks of the obvious ones, but the eventual point was that anything that takes a person's attention is competing.
I'm not seeing the connection. You are comparing franchines that have been repeatedly rebooted, remixed and recommercialized for decades to a single title released only a couple years ago. None of the things you listed "transcend time" in their original form.
There's probably an actual software rewrite in there somewhere, too. Like, for dual-redundant shutdown routines or something.
>I find it amusing that so people who are quite capable feel compelled to hold onto the hand-rails for so long

Whether I’m capable or not is irrelevant. I consider the extra effort required to configure and maintain a Linux desktop to be a waste of time, because I’m perfectly satisfied with my MacBook, which doesn’t require all that extra effort (for what I consider to be an inferior user experience to boot).
My point is, that Linux is already well usable for gaming, including for very demanding games. "Serious gamer" is too much of a generalization, to assume what people are willing or not willing to do to configure their systems.

Many gamers are actually very much into tweaking things as you say, from custom PC builds to game mods and other customizations. They see configurability as a benefit, not as a downside. So Linux is a natural fit.

Besides, Linux gaming is quite accessible today without any extensive manual tweaking (while you can always do that if you want to, a lot more than on Windows).
+1 for Forbidden Sky as well, which I think is the sequel to Forbidden Desert. I don't play many board games but had a fantastic time with it recently. It does a good job of making everybody feel included and engaged until the end, whereas most competitive games I feel like it can become clear within the first couple minutes who's going to run away with it.
Why would it be a fad though? League of legends, dota2, cs:go are all going strong
Patronising and condescending seems to be something you know a lot about.
Might want to look into Toyota Guardian before dismissing the approach.

As it's exactly what they are planning to roll out in the short to medium term.
I had similar experiences switching from macOS to Ubuntu. I wrote an article about this, where I compare the two OSs as "Home and Hotel" [1].

1: https://fman.io/blog/home-and-hotel/
There are tons of technical problems but the fundamental issue is our expectations.

Driverless cars can’t just respond as well as a human would have - they have to be better.

They have to “know” the black ice was there. Or the pothole was there. Or the construction was there. And then they have to respond “reasonably”, which is tough because computers are fundamentally “reasonless” machines at the moment.

If our expectations were driving during the day on a few defined streets in nice weather, perhaps going a bit slower and with the understanding that things may get a little jerky, I think we would be ok.

In other words...we need to give self-driving cars permission to be like we once were: not amazing at driving.

We need to give the cars a learners permit.
> It makes no sense to me why a library would be AGPL licensed

> AGPL means you have to share any code you write using this framework

I think you've found the reason?
I watch a decent amount of Netflix and have never seen an ad.
The idea that I am forced to drive the car myself doesn’t even crack the top 1000 problems worth solving. Transformational is not always good, and is often a terrible argument for prioritizing it.

No, this looks like SV companies drinking their own coolaid and ignoring actual world problems they can’t get rich off of.
See https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/12/11/why-netflix-isnt-i...
I feel cheated by the TL;DR - you can listen instead of "read". But it takes longer, where's my summary!

I think the tension between perfectionism and pragmatism is intrinsic to programming. You need some perfectionism to be able to do it, but there's no limit to how overperfectionistic you can be.

20 years ago, the "pragmatic programmer" addressed this issue. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pragmatic_Programmer
edit: you have much to learn young grasshopper
I would imagine the main impact Fortnite has on Netflix is average screen time, not necessarily the decision whether or not to subscribe...
Yea it’s important to note these guys are risking breaking the industry. If for some reason pharma companies were unable to at least recoup the cost of their (expensive) R&D efforts, it would disincentive new drug development.
I showed up to learn more about audio engineering.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_clock
I recently had to use a smaller screen phone when my larger one broke and I was waiting for its replacement. I found the smaller keyboard to be nearly unusable compared to what I was used to, and the replacement larger phone only reinforces that impression.
They sort of promote sharing by let you have an account and multiple device. Or just my region?
Or it could be that you were looking to techno-optimists for your predictions while others were looking to those that actually were involved in the tech.
I mean that is essentially how all science is done. It has to go through peer review for it to be worth anything. So that is a strong point. You second point is also an exaggeration. You typically wouldn't compile anything (unless you want to). All supported distros will provide binary updates.
>premium hardware

>apple

if I can't get proper i/o it's not premium at all. beyond that things shouldn't be bent from having them in your pocket.

iToddlers BTFO

https://i.ibb.co/XZhdMn2/smuglaugh.gif
Bits and pieces like trucking or taxis in relatively easy cities have been expected very near-term by a lot of companies for a while. I don't think anyone has said manually driven cars will be entirely off the road at a given point in time. Even the bits, though, should have a hugely disruptive impact on their markets.
Most programmers don't write in Nim. More programmers write in Python. I assume he's targeting the Python crowd.
Really? Not even The Beatles? What about Picasso? Bach? Van Gogh? Gershwin? Miles Davis? All timeless. No reboot required.
Do you have more information on this?

I've just rebuilt my home server/nas going from 2x3tb disks in a mirror no encryption to 4 x 4tb disks in a striped mirror with native ZFS encryption on ZOL.

Most of my data is read only media content, 90% read use which is also extremely low io wise and write is only when adding new media. I was thinking power loss would only be an issue loosing data that is currently being written so would not corrupt the entire zpool?

If native ZFS encryption can lead to loosing a zpool on powerloss I might look in to buying a used cheap Dell r210 ii, stick two 8tb drives in as a mirror then stick it in a collocation data center and use native zfs send/recv incremental snapshots for offsite. Looks to be cheaper then rsync.net $30 per TB/month for ZFS when you got 2-3TB+, also can do the initial sync locally. Still looking at $700+ a year after initial hardware costs.
Which is another way to say that Amazon is their competition, considering Twitch's integration with Prime - and Amazons investment into gaming with Lumberyard and AWS. I suspect Unity was acting defensively against AWS with their license change, with Improbable caught up in the middle. Just speculation.
Whereas Fortnite is itself just a big ad for their in-game purchases.
Neural Networks to Production, from an Engineer
I love it when sci fi and sci fact seem to merge
https://www.npr.org/2017/09/20/548664924/in-a-future-ruled-b...
I have very small hands. Many small gloves don't fit me. I have no issues with keyboards on small phones, especially with a learning keyboard like SwiftKey.
If Weed Is Medicine, So Is Budweiser
> Maybe "just the way you like it", but "functional and not sending your private information off to a dubious corporation" is pretty easy.

Sure, and that's great if that's all you want out of a personal computer.

> When there are issues with a Linux install, it's usually transparent enough to debug.

Bull. I've been using Linux for decades and it's always the same story. You have a problem with X, you do a search for your problem with X, you find a dozen solutions that don't apply to you because you're on a different distro or they're from 2013 when half the software stack was different. Of course the error reporting is vague and the documentation is out of date, referring you to the source for details. If you dare go somewhere to ask about your problem, you most likely get told you're using the wrong distro. It really isn't all that different from the situation on Windows.
The article really puts an emphasis on recruitment and, as someone who went to a top 5 school and went into business for myself instead of joining the pack, it's not about that at all but rather about social conditioning and money.

These firms pay the best for your run of the mill pre-professional undergrad, it's really that simple. Unless you have a CS degree, the other primary high-paying careers require continuing education (M.D.s, etc).

We live in world where there are three basic economic classes; wealth, wealth management, and the proletariat. It's no surprise that the bulk of top school grads get herded into jobs that serve firms and the wealthy.
I am trying to find cheaper device between NUC and Pi.

Lot fewer choices are available.

NUC is expensive. I wonder when will 8core ARM based NUC will arrive in the market.

No idea is NUC can be powered by Xiomi Mi 2i powerbank but a Raspberry Pi can be

Priorities:

1. Gigabyte ethernet

2. Small form factor NUC or smaller.

3. 8+ cores

4. Very low power consumption
+1 I installed lineages on my HTC one m8, felt like I got a new phone and I am happy enough to continue using my phone which I purchased in 2014.

I am interested in the librem 5 by purism but am still hesitating spending $600 on what I think is a risky investment...
If you memorize them you appear more competent
Linux is fucking trash and lemme tell you why:

First is SMP. Multi-core on Linux is absolute trash and Linus is fuckin' dumb for thinking that multi-core isn't useful and is overrated. A way better setup is having a master/slave setup, all applications run on core 0, and when they want multi-core they make a slave task on another core directly. Linus said that the only thing parallel is good for is graphics but that's because he uses a GPU, if you had a master/slave setup in the OS you could just run graphics on the CPU and it'd be way better than it is now. Linux will proudly run two applications faster, but how about we start running one application faster?

Another thing is it's trying to replicated a 1970s mainframe, like yeah that works great for corporate servers and universities but simple put - desktop users don't need that shit at all, multi-user systems are outdated and single user systems are fine for desktop users. There's no reason to run anything at any security level other than ring 0 on the desktop, obviously it's bad if one process can crash a server, but on the desktop having one process being able to crash the system isn't a bad thing. Just write better software. As for infected software - don't run anything you didn't compile yourself - on any system.

The project has also become bloated, there's an estimated 15 million lines of code in the kernel not to mention the binary blobs and that's simply extremely difficult to maintain, not to mention it's a terrible starting point for any new operating system or for anyone wanting to know how an operating system actually functions, in this respect Minix does a much better job; in fact it was the starting point Linus himself used to write Linux in the first place. Linux is simply not readable by a single human, and that ends up completely defeating the purpose of it being a free software project; you simply cannot check every single line of code for malicious intent.

systemd - what do I even need to say that's not already been said about this steaming pile of atrocious, malicious, stupid, bloated piece of garbage. have fun with your pseudo-svchost.exe.

all in all that's my two cents on desktop linux, I think there's way better systems to use and that linux isn't all that.
The title of the NYT review is "How Tech Companies Manipulate Our Private Data" but the title of this thread omits the word "How", reducing the title to "Tech Companies Manipulate Our Personal Data".
Yes, for anyine who wants to do further research it's called Proton. Valve has tried several times in the past to make gaming on Linux more attractive, but this has by far been their most successful attempt.
Most EU countries (if not all?) have their own Pirate Party.

I'm hopeful - should they reach the required number of votes - that they will find someone just as qualified to send to the EU parliament.
Sometimes people do want to show off their knowledge and in the process loose touch with the needs of the student. That's why I always try to write my VUE Example tutorials in the simplest english language possible, even if it doesn't look sophisticated. https://codeorc.com

personally, I feel I learn best when learning from examples and changing them to experiment with them and find out how they work.
Can you add some more here? Personally I'd probably not use this as I'm already using something with the same aim (dash), I certainly use a project like this for serious things.