skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would assume a mechanical keyboard is not being used portably? Couldn't the dongle just stay with the keyboard?

I do not use Linux on my XPS15. It's just a personal preference but I prefer Windows on my personal machines. I use many virtual machines on the laptop, and those have no issues, but that is a bit different than running it as a OS ;).

But I do love the laptop a lot! That is quite annoying that there are some Linux problems and that you pay a bit extra for MS. I stick with using Linux at work when I am purely doing development work, and at home when doing casual stuff, like a little coding, gaming, and web browsing I prefer Windows.
I'm confused why this is news or surprising? At least for the audience here.

I remember plugins for various IM clients would do the same thing in a chat window some decades ago. And I remember my days as a sysop in the good old single line dial up BBS days. You could watch users browse and type all the way back in the mid-80's and I'm sure this has existed about as long as multi-user computers have.

If you're typing into an application which is any part of a networked or multi-user system, assume someone can see what you do while you're doing it (and can log same for later review).

...maybe I'm just old and don't understand the kids these days... or maybe it's a slow news day...
This is written in such a pessimistic tone. I mean sure, tech giants want to have lots of labour available, we get that. But is it wrong? At least some people who wouldn't have had the change to code will get a sniff at it now.

Also, I wonder whether it will matter much to supply. How many CS grads are actually being churned out? I heard it hasn't changed all that much. And people leave the profession too, either they don't like it or they can't hack it.

I somewhat liken it to sports. It's not that easy to like programming if you didn't like it as a kid. Sure, you can learn to kick a ball around when you're an adult, but you're not likely to have time, and the best opportunities to learn and progress will have passed. (OTOH your body won't start failing you as a coder in your 30s.) That's not to say you can't, I'm sure a bunch of late bloomers will appear if I left it at that, just that you tend to know that coding is the kind of thing you like when you're quite young.

So the undiscovered pool of talent is probably quite small. We can give more kids who don't have access to a computer some gear and some intro, particularly in poor countries. But there's cultural and legal issues with tapping that pool. With advanced societies, probably a lot of kids who are going to like coding will already have been exposed.
What were the exact freedoms your child was missing?
I think you misunderstood my post. I am arguing that I would prefer Firefox to Chrome.
When I was younger I used to tease my Mom & Dad for essentially treating their reading glasses like pens or pencils, and letting them diffuse around the house as the acquired new pairs.

Now that I'm in my mid-40's, I take it all back. Having a pair, even if it isn't the exact right one, always with reach is a godsend.
> Content Adaptive Brightness Control

It is part of Intel's shenanigans to improve battery life.

CABC bothered me on my surface book too, fortunately they allow you to disable this. It previously (pre-9350) required a firmware update but can now be switched off using the latest intel display driver control panel.
Sorry, Ajit: Comcast lowered cable investment despite net neutrality repeal
Why not just have immigrants, who come to the US as free and full citizens, at liberty to decide on a job in response to personal preferences and market signals? If that means going to med school or becoming a florist instead of working in the valley as a dev, that's the market's answer. This whole notion that there's a "shortage" because people won't do this at a price Oracle has decided is reasonable is astonishing to me.

About 1.2 million immigrants come to the US every year. Unfortunately, these free folk don't appear to want to become devs in the valley at the rate Oracle thinks they should, any more than the people born in the US.

The problem is that immigration slots in the US are generally based on family reunification, and don't come close to meeting demand. But a bug can always be a feature. I think tech companies like this. It creates scarcity, which makes their control over one of the few avenues into the US very lucrative. They can use this to ensure that would-be immigrants are not in fact able to participate freely in labor markets, but are beholden to corporations for their right to stay in the US and not be deported.
Why do you think I need to have a solution to the problem in order to call out a bad faith article? How do you get from "weberc2 doesn't have a solution" to "readers are forced to believe weberc2 favors the status quo"? Does AOC need to have a solution in order to call out the status quo? If so, what is her position? I didn't see it in the article.
This is nothing new. When i worked for a shady video game repair company in the early 2000's, the (male) boss would play 3 (female) customer service roles and know exactly what they were typing even back in the early days before facebook.
The problem is equality of opportunity is it's invariably applied in a way that ignores some very racist and uneven starting conditions and the effects of the past. Consider as a small example how schools are funded in the US, which is largely by local property taxes, so poorer places have poorer schools. These areas are heavily skewed towards minority populations because of some extremely racist issues in our past like redlining which kept blacks and other minorities out of the housing boom which drove a lot of middle class wealth growth through the 60s to 00s. So we build on this cycle generation after generation where kids in poor areas go to poorly funded schools and experience poor educational outcomes.

Even if we solve the funding problem it's still not actually equal opportunity because the poorer kids don't get the same support outside of school due to parents working longer hours at lower paying jobs because they got a bad education or living in a crummy house with lead paint (because that's all your parents could afford) or living in a town with contaminated water (Flint is just the one to grab headlines cities all over the country have abysmally high lead levels). Even if you want to blame community culture for some of these issues the question becomes where do you think that culture comes from, perhaps just maybe it comes from decades of lack of opportunity and systemic abuse?

How do you possibly hope to close the gap in our system where wealth almost invariably builds on wealth?

tl;dr: Equality of outcome doesn't mean everyone has to have the exact same exact life, it's just acknowledging our opportunities are directly tied to the outcomes of the generation before us.
Can you have USB 3.x over Type A?
No surprise when there is no competition in the market. Companies are just greedy and margins are high in almost everything these days.
Ever wonder why you cannot get glasses made of glass anymore? (At least that’s the case in Israel).

Glass used to be a lot cheaper than plastic, more durable and long lasting. You rarely needed to replace them every year or two like with plastic, unless you really smashed your lenses hard and got a nasty chip.

All plastic lenses get scratched within a few years and your sight becomes gradually foggy until one day it dawns on you. “I can’t see anything!” - and then it’s time to renew the... What? The SUBSCRIPTION!? Sorry, the prescription. Right.

With glass that would never happen.

The repeated mantra I’d always get from the optometrists is that glass isn’t sold anymore because it can shatter and splinters could get into you eyes.

I don’t know about others, but I’ve been hanging on to my glass pair for over 18 years now, not a scratch or a chip or anything, and they are on a half frame! And I’ve done sports with them too... maybe not the smartest thing to do, but I will not give up seeing cristal glass clear!

At one of the optometrists I used to go to where they’d sell me plastics I discovered they would use acetone to clean the glasses. Yes, acetone, which eats the plastic away. Something to make your subscription a little more often. I’m Never going back there.

What’s funny is that my glass pair has lasted so long they have gone in and out of fashion multiple times now.

I really wish they’d bring back the glass. I’m in the off fashion period now.
Venture Chills
> Your last two examples are ones where a conservative ideologue would look and say "No, they aren't being granted equal rights".

Unless we're "no true Scotsman"ing things here, conservative ideologues in the US (and a variety of other countries) have strongly and consistently opposed gay marriage, often arguing they had the "same rights" as others and that allowing same-sex marriage would be "special treatment".

Before that, the same was true for conservatives and interracial marriage.

The point of the cartoon is not to advocate for the right to watch a baseball game. It's an analogy showing how the binary "you either have to have an unfair situation or give someone preferential treatment" isn't always the only two options.
: unless you're absolutely sure otherwise, you should always assume any ZIP program you're using doesn't actually encrypt password-protected ZIPs.

so 7zip AES is not actually AES? Obviously the source code shows it is
True, on my machine it uses 150MB of my RAM. It's a lot compared to native apps, but it's really at the point where it's not that bad in the grand scheme of things.

Our companies customized eclipse on the other hand hogs 8GB ram when doing nothing, needs 2 minutes to start, and is sluggish in general. It's our course written in Java, which is much closer to native than electron, but still they wasted resources everywhere they could.

You can't run a compile on a 8GB ram machine, it will start swapping to hard disk.

Sublime doesn't have all the features, notepad ++ neither, and I just don't like vim style editing.

That leaves vscode.
How A Group of Daring Bootleggers Created NASCAR
If degrees are no longer requirements to get tech jobs and tech companies start paying significantly lower salaries, what can one do to become competitive in this market?

What value do Masters and PhDs (in CS) have in the current market?
my point wasn't to highlight definitive issues but to point out that it's not always as simple as "we'll just tax more". You're talking about a pretty big impact to the share of the population that generates the most (economic) value per-person - it's unlikely to have no negative effects beyond complaining.

Your first response doesn't establish a causal relationship between new business creation and marginal tax rate so I'm not sure what it adds here.

Consider this: I'm from the UK, and the US government seemingly spends more per capita than here ($22,726 federal + state [1] vs £12,757 total [2]) and we have a much more comprehensive welfare system. I don't think the problem in the US is a lack of budget - we have our own problems with wasteful spending but the US takes the cake there. I mean, the military industrial complex (aka defense budget) alone is a huge cash sink.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_spending#Per_capita...

[2] I previously cited for this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18939418
That's why C is the way it is, for all the hate it gets. I've been teaching my son the beginnings of C now that he's proficient in JavaScript and Lua, but making sure that every step of the way, we jump from a concept he already understands, to a new but related concept, and how they're connected.

For example, when I explained signed and unsigned to him, since we already covered the concepts of groups of bits having 2^n possible values, he quickly understood that signed has just as many values as unsigned, but the upper half just become negative inverse of the lower half.

C evolved from actual needs, and the fact that it's still widely used today shows how incredibly well designed it was for practical but relatively general problem solving. The C committee's job is mostly just a matter of saying "no" to every new feature request, because C has proven to be versatile enough to work in an extremely diverse array of situations.

We've been using Lua's C API and the Win32 API[1] to make cool things, such as a primitive Love2d clone, and just last night he said "Wait, you're telling me this is the old way of programming Windows? It just makes so much sense and seems so well designed!" C isn't perfect, but if you start from where C started, and trace it until now, you'll learn all the reasons behind its decisions, and they make sense in practical situations.

Kind of like the difference between metric and imperial measurement systems. Metric makes sense in an isolated mathematical world (i.e. science), bu imperial units make sense when you're working with real physical objects (e.g. construction).

[1] http://laurencejackson.com/win32/
They sell recordings of your activity for money, and you don't even get a cut. No royalties, no nothing. So they are profiting from your actions, without paying you. Bit unethical right? I generally consider my time valuable enough to sell it, and my actions even more so.
The GP's claim is that yes, it is _literally_ impossible. He cites a source[1]. If you have a disagreement with that theorem then by all means, share. Right now you're just saying "Nah I don't think so", which isn't very convincing.

[1]: https://www.chrisstucchio.com/pubs/slides/crunchconf_2018/sl...
Slightly rambling here: I think the charitable interpretation of "virtue signalling" is that the person sees "bragging", "showing off", or "holier than thou."

In contrast, there are some people out who use it to mean "that subject is taboo because it makes me uncomfortable."
It helps the amount of garbage put into the environment, which is good regardless.
Disclaimer: I'm a string theorist.

Please try to be at least a little bit skeptical when a handful of naysayers claim that an entire field's worth of very smart people are all spending their careers on pointless work. Those naysayers could be right, obviously! (Even as experts we have to recognize the possibility, and to the many laymen looking on from outside it's even harder to judge.)

But if you read Peter Woit's dismissive rants and accept them as gospel truth, just remember that in doing that you're choosing to believe that hundreds (thousands?) of dedicated, passionate, deeply knowledgeable physicists are either painfully deluded or deliberately running some sort of collective scam. You're choosing to believe that either none of us have bothered to read Woit's objections or that we've all failed to accept them even though they're right.

I'm not sure what our motivation for that is supposed to be. I promise you: people who go into fundamental physics aren't in it because it's an easy road to a steady paycheck! We do this because we're driven to understand the building blocks of the universe. If I were to become convinced that my current approach to trying to understand the universe was fundamentally a dead end, I'd be wasting my life if I continued to study it! I'd be throwing away everything I've trained for, everything in science that I care about. And I have no idea what Woit thinks I'm getting in return.

So your call. Either Woit's right and we're all knowingly wasting our lives, or the situation isn't as cut and dried as Woit claims it is.
You might also be interested in another pop-history book, _Paper_. What I'd call its central thesis is that society changes technology, rather than technology changing society. It explores this thesis through the history of the adoption of paper, trying to substantiate the claim that paper was available for centuries before it was adopted by civilizations, and it was only adopted after those civilizations developed a pressing need for massive amounts of cheap, high-quality writing material -- prior to that, people persisted in using more expensive, difficult to produce parchment despite having the option of cheaper paper.

Another thing to consider is any technology you might mention, like glass and iron, are relatively recent as developed technologies, about 2-3000 years old, with some older precursors. Moreover, they were developed and spread over the course of hundreds or a thousand or more years. Different parts of the Eurasia entered the Iron Age ~3000 years ago, while other parts -- parts connected by trade and separated by a few hundred miles -- didn't enter the Iron Age until ~2000 years ago.

So the other question is, to what extent is it meaningful that the Americas, which did not have the benefit of Eurasian trade, had not independently entered the Iron Age ~500 years ago? Is that a meaningful delay that needs to be explained, or is it just the variation that should be expected to occur by the accumulation of chance factors?

Re: domestication, there were domesticated dogs in the pre-Columbian Americas, but it was not an independent domestication. Deer and buffalo are not regarded as domesticatable; there were llamas and alpacas as large domesticated animals, but their range was limited and mountainous.
That's when you use the Nintendo Switch Parental Controls app, with its charming video to introduce it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03bAayBtcb0

Plus, it's nice to play in the lounge with all the family. I'm glad to hear you have the previous consoles and can do so!
If you add a backlit KB I'll buy it. Room for a second HD would be a bonus but not a requirement.
I'm always looking for good computer tools to assist with learning Math with computers. I found this: [1].

Are there any other resources like this to learn fundamentals of Math with Julia? ([Linear] Algebra, Calculus, Geometry, Basic Physics, Discrete Math).

1: https://calculuswithjulia.github.io/
The irony around this article is that the hardest part about getting a tech job is the interview processes these companies create themselves. Do companies want to pay less for their talent? I'm sure the answer is yes. But realistically the barrier to entry for these kinds of positions is not a "skills-gap" in terms of the technology most engineers are likely to use in a day's work.

Anecdotally, I haven't met any coding bootcamp graduates that have managed to get software jobs at FAANGs. I'm sure this is because my experience is anecdotal, and that there actually is a steady supply of bootcamp grads that are getting jobs at these companies. But my point is that even with an accelerated program designed to retrain adults to have the skills they need for these positions, the supply will probably not increase to a point where salaries are significantly effected. This especially true when you consider the number of previously non-technical companies that are hiring software engineers at incredible rates to meet expected software development demand in the coming decade.
> and there's evidence they're largely disdainful of it

Maybe it's an immune reaction.

Scientists need to ask and answer to philosophical questions, to know where to search, but they also need to be ready to easily dismiss their philosophical theories to not spend too much time searching in a region with no solutions.

So this necessity of assigning low value to their own philosophical theories, may be causing them to assign low value to the whole field.
Just to clarify, they do the final mix and mastering of each piece on a variety of speakers. But right - the closer they get to the finished product the less they care how it sounds through expensive equipment.
I believe that recycling aluminum takes significantly less energy than smelting it in the first place.

I don't have any idea about plastics/papers.
personally, i interpreted that quote as being mostly about security. a rich person being able to ride the bus - or letting his/her kids ride the bus - without having to worry about being kidnapped for ransom by the destitute.

and you do have high profile politicians or celebrities in european cities (i only know examples from europe though) using public transport or riding bikes to get around.
In theory I agree but in practice that often leads to racism. For example, some people support discrimination for blacks (& against whites) at e.g. college admissions, purportedly to offset their (statistically) worse family background (in terms of education and wealth). Clearly, that's a terrible and racist solution, with the better and obviously correct solution being... to support people from worse family backgrounds! Instead of targeting the proxy for the problem, you solve the problem itself.
> I have Thinkpad X280

I considered getting one. But they don't come with on-site warranty in my area -- and the warranty can't be upgraded to include on-site service. Not sure what their deal is with that. Makes me think they're crappy machines that are hard to service. Or maybe Lenovo just don't want my business?
I don't find this dismissal persuasive. If I understand you're point, you are arguing that without perfect truth, no partial solution has any value.

If that is indeed your argument, it is remarkably similar to the argument "Perfect security is impossible, this system is worthless." I think it is demonstrably obvious that there is a related parameter in both cases, which is the cost of overcoming the system is greater than the gain from overcoming said system.

As an example of how that argument fails in practice, consider textbooks. When I was working on this problem full time the organization had a relationship with a major publisher of textbooks. Consider the system which can construct an ontology and knowledge graph based on the contents of a text book. It may not be 'true' in the Aristotle sense, but it is an effective tool for evaluating whether or not a paper or essay correlates that ontology and knowledge graph or doesn't. In such a system there is value in evaluating the extent with which the knowledge in the textbook has been communicated to the person writing the essay.

Being able to automate the analysis has other benefits as well which extend beyond flagging documents which disagree a previous established canon.
There aren't many "world changing" organizations coming out of SV lately, and I'm not sure that claim holds in any case: http://fortune.com/fortune500/visualizations/

Even narrowing down to "tech" companies, there are enough outliers that I don't buy it.

Change it to "SV has the best developers searching for VC funding," and I believe it, but I'd still question the cause and effect of the situation...
I've stood behind a support guy and watched it, it can be hilarious when you see someone type out a horrible rant, then delete it and send thanks.
These are the boards that I patched:

https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner/issues/233
When doing support over chat it is nice to see ahead of time what they are saying to allow for a faster response.
(1) Comedian Kevin Barnett Dead at 32
Once again, no, CBC IVs need to be unpredictable.
I care...
"Payphone Gun Box" would be more accurate.

> This is a real payphone

> In order to make phone calls (with no coin operations needed), you will need the telephone circuit board optional product. In order to receive phone calls, you will need the Ringer + Telephone Circuit Board optional products

So it doesn't work. It really is just like a real payphone!
Even with JS disabled you can still get a lot of these via CSS. Sadly none of these technologies were designed with privacy in mind.
Outlier on Air Ep 421: Imogen Lehtonen – The Reluctant Biker Ambassador
The decision was from before my time, so I'm not sure what the specifics are. As I understand, the main motivations to move away from Python were that Java/Go provided better performance (e.g. memory usage) and reliability (read: static typing)
But Google Wave was up front about it, and both parties can see what each other is typing.
I agree however this misses a couple of things. In the future there will be exponentially more tech companies than now.