skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a Dell XPS 15 running KDE (on Arch Linux, but that shouldn't matter). I use the Thunderbolt dock (1 cable to charge, connect USBs and Ethernet, and connect up to a few 4k displays). It works great, with one minor issue related to hidpi switching.

I don't have a touchscreen so can't comment on that, but pretty sure KDE has support for that stuff - their art/drawing/painting app Krita works with pens/tablets, and there do seem to be some touch gesture related options in the settings app.

Docking just works. Monitors automatically remember your config and switch when you dock/undock. Also it's very easy to make scripts to swap monitor layouts using xrandr (of course, you can do this with the settings GUI, but with scripts you have all the layouts you use just a few keystrokes away if you want to switch to a special layout).

I use 1.5x DPI scaling with my 4k external monitor. The laptop screen is 1080p, so no dpi scaling. It works well, with the one issue that you need to log out and log back in to switch the scale factor - this seems to be the same as on Windows, but not as good as macOS. One option I just started using a few days ago is font scaling. I set the font DPI to 144 (the settings GUI lets you do this), so all text appears at a normal size. Some icons are still tiny - mainly things like the checkmark in an OK button. But it's good enough that I don't notice any egregious issues and don't mind using it. The advantage of this is that you only need to restart a program for it to use a new font DPI. So instead of logging out/in, I just set the font DPI and restart any programs if I need to.

There are a few minor graphical glitches left if you use fractional (not 2x or 3x) DPI scaling, mainly related to 1 px lines sometimes appearing between lines of text in the KDE terminal and text editor. But they'll hopefully be fixed soon, and I haven't noticed any other issues.

KDE has had a bad reputation in the past, but these days it is a very polished, fast, and feature-rich environment that just works and lets you get your work done. They have KDE Neon, which is the 'official' (I think) Ubuntu-based KDE distro, if you want to try it out.
I don't think reason works with flat earthers, with creationists or conspiracy theorists in general.

They'll cling on to any piece of information that confirms their world view and ignore the rest.
Earth can't possibly be flat. If it was, the cats would have knocked everything off it by now.
Following the link to the blog of the author I found a blog post titled “postgres cluster management system in GoCardless”

http://www.interdb.jp/blog/pgsql/pg_pacemaker_01/

Which in turn lead me to

https://github.com/gocardless/our-postgresql-setup

And in turn to a fifteen minute talk titled “Zero-downtime Postgres upgrades”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAkNBiZzEX8

Which was interesting and informative IMO.

After watching that one I was lead further via the YouTube suggested videos to a 45 minute talk titled “Tuning PostgreSQL for High Write Loads”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrMbzHdPLKM

Which I liked a lot as well.

I think anyone who came here because they are interested in the subject of the OP link might be interested in watching these videos.

Though disclaimer of course: These videos told me things I didn’t know about scaling PostgreSQL, because there is a lot I don’t know about that. But if you already know a lot about that then of course these videos might not be so interesting to you.
Ask HN: How can I learn penetration testing?
You just have to accept that most people are not rational. They don't experience reality through a scientific (for lack of a better word) perspective. Most believe in some sort of magical deities or spirits or life force or whatever. Most operate with a physical model of reality that's clearly pre-Galilean.

So flat Earth? Why not?
Seems like the virus has a greater chance of spreading when its host is behaving more social.
They basically think there's a dome over the earth, and the stars are just a flat projected/printed surface on that dome (and other variations of that idea, like that the sun/moon are inside the dome going in circles overhead).
You would be surprised. Even if you control for income (rather than blanket exclude "3rd world countries") I bet the majority of the population, across all age groups, could not proficiently use a traditional computer, let alone own one. While more and more are getting used to smartphones every day.
I find front end development extremely boring. Just my personal opinion. So you make another web page using a new framework. So what? How is it better or more valuable than what you could have built 5 years ago? Did you discover a framework that gives you faster time to market? Is it easier to support because it’s a smaller code base and multi platform? Is the performance that much better? Did some Ab testing really prove to you that you need to optimize load times because millisecond scale differences impact dollar value? You could have and that could perfectly justify a new set of frameworks that solve those use cases. The majority of the time in my experience, people just move from one toolkit to another not because they evaluated requirements or pain points and found something truly better but because it’s the cool new thing. It all ends up being garbage tech debt.

Building a native application with native APIs using JavaScript sounds interesting. Okay, you built another user interface. How many of these do we need to build? How many apps does the typical user have installed or even use among the ones they did install?

I remember recently turning on some tutorial for a web app that was linked from HN. Angular on the front end, node on the backend, framework B for writing tests, framework C for running them, some other tool for the build process. Another tool or plugin for minification. Okay great. You know the frameworks of the month. Congrats.

I learned HTML back in late 90s in grade school and went on to build PHP apps in the early 2000s for my Unreal clan. By college, I supported a stack for my university written in CakePHP. I remember using django for a class project in my CS program. My first job out of college, there was a tangled mess of asp.net, .NET web MVC and .NET web apis. My next company, there was a ton of stuff in Spring and various APIs using jersey.

Honestly, none of the real value was in any of the web apps. The value was in the backend logic (if there was any significant business logic at all) and more so in data and real system design, balancing between function, redundancy, resiliency, extensibility, and some notion of scalability depending on who the customer was and what expected or unexpected scenarios could arise and how our systems would behave.

Unfortunately I see too many folks caught up in the framework of the week or framework of the month when there’s so much more depth if you’re willing to explore.
He didn't mention having one either. It's weird not to mention anything at all about surge protection in a story about a power surge destroying important equipment. I'd assume if he had one he'd mention the state it was in after his equipment was destroyed.
Something like PER–SCL or AKL–CPT would fly over Antarctica in strict great circle terms, but would require ETOPS-370 rules to fly. Also, I have no idea how prevailing winds would affect the optimal routing. And it's not like these are highly trafficked city pairs.

I seem to remember that Qantas has had flights crossing Antarctica in the past; their point was probably to cross/sightsee Antarctica rather than be the optimal routing for a flight though.
Altruistic Autonomy: Beating Congestion on Shared Roads
The flat earth thing is actually a new twist on flakey spirituality that has always resonated with a large portion of sheltered Americans.

Growing up before 2000, it was a lot more Noah’s Ark, The Shroud of Tourin, Bible Codes, whether angels are real, and of course, exorcisms.

I can only laugh at this flat earth shit, but it actually fits right in with how people would buy right into what used to be on TV. Only nobody watches TV like they used to, so whatever’s on the computer shall dominate. And that’s all there is to it.
Pop Music is Stuck on Repeat – Colin Morris (TEDxPenn)
There are some additional insights at a similar Hacker News Discussion. Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17190992
The drivers provide instruction in a form that will be retained by the software?
Let's also mention Vorta, an open source GUI for Borg to make it as easy to use as commercial backup tools. We just started translating into different languages. All input and PRs are welcome.

https://github.com/borgbase/vorta/

(I'm the original author, but Thomas, the current Borg maintainer is also very active.)
Higuain deal, Rashford contract offer,Cech offer, Piatek agreement in Chelsea
They "show me that you use it" wasn't only for bigmac, it was also for trademarks they did not used but:

> "trademark bullying; registering brand names... which are simply stored away in a war chest to use against future competitors".

https://www.independent.ie/business/irish/its-like-connacht-...
Agreed for Vuejs. I'm trying more and more to push back on developping de-facto SPAs because they _seem_ just easier to build now with React or whatever cool framework, but actually bring so much complexities.
Unless there is a real reason for a complex SPA, I try to stick to normal MVC patterns, where each page is independently rendered from the server. In which case, Vue is to me the best framework to be able to t generate those type of "micro apps" for each page.
I'm sure they have a good explanation for it that I don't bother to google, but how do satellites orbit a flat Earth to give us common experiences like satellite TV and GPS? And what about the moon.
Kumbh Mela: WORLD's LARGEST PILGRIMAGE
I recently had a chat with a “flat earther”, well not really but a ... believer in the same conspiratorial vein. It was quite fun to suggest that chem trails flat earth etc might be a anmerican corporate conspiracy to extract woulrd dominance.

Once you put it in a langugage they can understand, a real conversation can be had. I did not convert him or anything but at least managed to make him ask real questions.

And to be honest this is not that far from the truth - all those cult leaders are just praying on people with hightened curiosities and pushing them into a “local maximum” of understanding, one that they can extract money / fame from. A textbook conspiracy:)
I can tell you one big difference, the set of statistic formulae that are now available.
My father-in-law is a carpenter. When we talk about work, he talks about things we can drive around and see: porches, houses, parts of big buildings, housing projects. I have nothing to point to that would mean much of anything to him. At least I didn't up until the last ten years or so.

I used to focus on the code. People wanted stuff and the code had to be "correct" so that they could get what they wanted. I found "correct" to be endlessly complicated, but heck, that was part of the fun of it.

Then I focused on the people. How am I interacting with the people I'm trying to help such that I have a better idea of what "correct" means? I found that people don't know what they want, they don't know how their desires might change, and even if they did they are incapable of describing that to me in a way that would provide significant architectural guidance.

Finally, I balanced them. I created a definition of good code. Good code is code that does something for people that they value that I can walk away from and never touch again If the code doesn't do anything valuable or I can't walk away from it, it's not good code.

This made me realize that as much as I knew about people and programming, I suck at good code. I get wrapped up in the people part, not figuring out value or being able to scope it well. I get wrapped up in the coding part, building out things that I'll only need in my imagination.

It made me feel a little better to see that so many other developers suck at my definition of good code also, but it was a terrible blow. Humbling.

I'm happy I made the change. I don't feel the way I used to a decade or two ago. My journey is not this author's journey, but I feel the pain he expressed in his essay, and because of that pain I began mine. Best of luck.
Seconded. Extremely addictive. Very easy to find a game online anytime. Part of "why it's great" is the neverending amount you can learn about it, the way you can relive and learn from the games of great players back to the 1850s[0] and much earlier, and the chess community/chess world. But what I enjoy most these days is watching grandmaster-commented videos of games and tournaments. And banter blitz, where a GM plays the public while telling you what they're thinking. Just watching them makes you a better player, learning to think like a grandmaster.

My favourites:

Many GMs on chess24 (favs: Gustafsson, Svidler) https://www.youtube.com/user/chess24media/videos#top

Many GMs on St Louis chess (favs: Finegold, Seirawan) club https://www.youtube.com/user/STLChessClub/videos#top

Daniel King analyzes games https://www.youtube.com/user/PowerPlayChess/videos#top

Simon Williams (GingerGM) isn't a top GM, but his enthusiasm/joy in playing is wonderful. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClV9nqHHcsrm2krkFDPPr-g/vid...

Chess24 en español features El Divis, maybe my favourite commentator/player of all. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTzRQxC3i7GOT4jtiTq4e0w/vid...

Chess + internet is a wonderful combination. At the moment is the Wijk an Zee (Tata Steel) tournament, with an incredible lineup. Being able to watch 5-6 hour commentary videos every day from Gustafsson/Svidler (plus their analysis of the best games) is amazing. Chess24's commentary team for the last world championship was even better: Svidler/Giri/Grischuk - all are/were top 10 players and unique characters. What got me into following tournaments years ago was how the commentary is often very funny, not the serious affair you might expect. (Finegold takes that to an extreme, and is often as packed with gags as chess.)

[0] Paul Morphy, the world's best player in the late 1850s, is the earliest player whose games are considered an essential part of chess education.
From a purely intellectual perspective, this is one of the more interesting aspects to these new models. Effectively, your business model is, "what's the highest share of global discretionary income we can take while blanketing the planet with our product/service?" What you sell just needs to be good enough to keep retention at a level that enables this blanketing. Throw-in the addiction aspect to these new models as well as the monopolistic tendencies inherent to them, and what you end up with is a vision of taxing the globe for the relevant industry. To me, Netflix seems like a global tax on entertainment in some weird way (obviously, not a variable fee, so perhaps a 'toll' is more accurate).
$10 bucks says you're talking about Pinker's Englightenment now
Harvey OS – a fresh take on Plan 9
My understanding is that it is only after Apple failed at setting up their own advertising business that they jumped into the privacy bandwagon.

Now I agree that when you want to achieve something, there is nothing to be gained from questioning the motivations of powerful allies (which in this case I think are more about attacking the competition than guenine concerns about privacy). But it does mean that Apple’s stance could change quickly if its business interest evolves.

Not complaining, I am all for privacy regulations, merely a word of caution.
My working hypothesis is that most people lack the intellectual capacity to understand these things, and they haven't the fortitude to accept that they don't understand or don't know something.

So instead of attempting to understand they select some imagined model that does make sense to them and act as though it is truth.

Challenging them is difficult since they are so invested in their fancies being true; the alternative after all is accepting that you don't understand something and where does that leave them? This is why evidence and rational arguments are futile.

If they could grasp the facts and the arguments in the first place they wouldn't have had to construct these fancies in place of them! It's almost tautological that those who can believe flat earth stuff are also incapable of accepting science.
Gates' claims are entirely concerning a world wide decrease in people living on "pennies a day". This is essentially just that group of people who lived outside the economy entirely now finally entering it. It really has nothing to do with the conditions of the average person already living in a money based economy.

We have seen a decrease in US median income over the last however many years [1]. The way rent tends to be excluded from this underestimates the increase in impoverishment here imo also. There are also the frequent articles concerning how many people are $500/$1000/etc away disaster.

For increased social isolation, Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone is the classic (Note, Gates is neither an economist nor a sociologist. Putnam is a well recognized sociologist).

Note that the Average American's life span decreased for the second year in a row. This is notable since increases in medical technology tend to increase this life expectancy even when nothing else changes[2]. A big factor in the reduced life expectancy is what's termed "deaths from despair".

[1]https://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2015/01/20/who-is-the-middle...

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/21/health/us-life-expectancy-stu...
Driverless cars are IMHO a classic example of technology looking for a problem to solve

The "problem" they are trying to "solve" is driver wages.
"What do you mean, 'we'? When I look through a telescope, all I see is a fuzzy dot. Scientists keep conveniently coming up with these photos that supposedly show the Earth and other planets to be round, but the rest of us have no way of verifying that they're anything other than pure fiction."

Or something along those lines.
As a “pragmatist”, you support the status quo. You place agency not on society’s need to change, but on the individual within that society.

This means that you seem incapable of being rational and critical of societal norms. Your independent variable is an individual, not society.

Voices like yours are well-meaning, and ultimately tools for oppression. If that sounds dramatic, just look at history.
I think it is unnecessary. (However, I would not complain even if it was implemented; I don't care either way.) (I don't use upvotes and downvotes anyways, and if such a new feature is implemented I probably would ignore that new feature. I don't use flag either, except to flag duplicates posted in quick succession to each other or posts that are entirely empty and are therefore not worth anything.)
I have not read Bill Gates' book, but I have heard little dispute that the material conditions of the working class _in the developed world_ have not improved much in the last forty or so years. The "elephant curve" is the best simple depiction I've seen of this: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2016/09/17/s...

The article goes on to describe why it's not quite so bad as the original graph made it seem, but even the "Alternative" shows the same general pattern.
Also a good way to find a local maximum when there are much higher maxima not far removed.
” had this policy for single women in order to prevent other problems.”

Right there, that’s sexual discrimination! You can’t have one rule for single men and another for single women.
Wow. Downvote. When I was 11, I was writing assembly to modify SEGA Genesis games, writing my own C++ functions for SRB2, a modification of the DOOM 2 source engine, and experimenting with my own raycasting 3D engines.

People can do really serious programming at virtually any age. I’m 29. I’ve been coding for almost two decades, extremely seriously. I got my first job as a software dev for Chase banks directly out of high school, and I’m currently employed at one of the top banks in Canada.

I would argue part of my curiosity as a kid really blossomed my coding ability, especially in terms of stretching limited hardware to its limits.

Don’t discount kids. They are the future.
Four years is nothing. That you seem to think this is a long time is telling.

My tech stack dates back to 1972, with the last major update in 1999 and the last notable minor update in 2011.

That isn't even a particularly old tech stack. Some stuff dates back to 1957, with major updates in 1977 and 1990.
I mean, the simple explanation is a) that there are flights that cross part of Antarctica, and b) that there isn't much there. The Southern Hemisphere is pretty empty.

There's Sydney-Santiago, but apparently that doesn't always cross Antarctica depending on winds.
Which was dropped from Edge anyway.
Ways How AI Will Augment the Human Workforce
Netflix was up until a few years ago a content provider but not a content producer - they became one so that they could survive the time that they could no longer provide enough content.

I don’t think it’s an unreasonable assumption that a publically traded company cares about retention rates for their primary product - of course it’s not the whole picture but it’d be rather radical for it not to be a factor.
Having driven very new cars, rentals mostly, there are few compelling features that I can't just add to an older, not smart car.

And that is exactly what I plan on doing for some time yet. Frankly, the bright nav screens, menus and other gunk prove quite distracting. I really hate most of them. A few can be dimmed, or turned off, but none seem to remember that state, always eager to display some warning or other.

Seems to me, if it always needs a warning, I really don't need it in the car.

I feel we are way over hype on self-driving vehicles. The tech is advancing nicely enough, but the problem scope still seems very large relative to what we've solved for.
There's a difference in clinging to something you learned in school (e.g. tastes being localized to certain areas of the tongue. Countries neatly dividing into western and third world countries. Pluto being a planet) by not keeping up to date, and believing something we've known to be false for literally thousands of years...
Understand TensorFlow by mimicking its API from scratch
Fairly recently rendering in the client became possible and desirable. This was a paradigm shift, it raised a lot of new problems, and a number of attempts were made at solving these issues. The field is settling now on the ideas with the most merit. Reacts idea of the virtual dom is an example of an idea that is becoming a stable standard.
Can Apple refuse to give information to the US government? Can they even disclose it if they do? After the Snowden NSA revelations it seems any corporation in the US is suspect. And that's not even counting the fact that all the telecoms sell your data anyway.
I feel like the Flat Earth movement is, at it's core, a hack on the human mind.

People want to feel important, and they want to feel in control. When the world is so large and uncaring, so horrible and meaningless, and people are so small and unimportant, a good conspiracy theory lets me be someone important. There are evil people out there who did this all to us, and now I get to know the truth. I get to be in better control of my life. I can keep reading and researching and with each step I feel more in control. I've got hope now because I know what's really going on!

Anyone who challenges this worldview is not attacking my logical argument, they're attacking my emotional investment in this hope, this piece of control of life. When you challenge me, you aren't debating what is and isn't, you're trying to take away this one little bit of control I have. Why would you do that to me? Perhaps you've been brainwashed by the evil people, or maybe you're part of the evil people who did this to us all.