skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It may be true that Mandarin is based to a very large extent on what the people of the Northern Plain speak, more specifically those of Beijing. I have no idea, but I've heard it said so many times that I'm willing to consider the possibility while waiting for an explanation to my question.

My question is: if this is true, why the heck is the pronunciation for standard Mandarin so different from the standard Beijing and northern accents? Seriously, especially with all the "er"s at the end of various characters. It does not sound similar to what is taught in standard Mandarin classes, and I speak as one who learned standard Mandarin for a number of years (in Canada and in China) and also lived in Beijing for a bit. I'd really like this explained to me, because the ear test tells me this is not true. But again, I've heard it said so many times that I am willing to consider it's possible.
The JDK is under the same license as Linux, so however closely you pay attention to the Linux legalese, that's as much attention you need to pay to Java's.
Languages yes, but then one starts deploying into cloud based solutions, none of them compliant with GPL ideals.
Strange, because I did not notice non of them on the front page. Maybe I left my guard down somehow.
Ask HN: What (desktop?) software have you paid for recently?
For me possibly the only thing I've bought in years is Simplify3D - http://Simplify3D.com/ - which is a fairly powerful STL-slicer-to-any-3d-printer magic box of tricks that I'm very happy with. There are open source kinda-solutions that I got tired of fighting.

I'm getting pretty close to buying Scrivener - https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview - despite it's various weird interface choices and apparently multiple conflicting codebases for difference OS.

I've also run in to the limits of Inkscape and can crash/hang it reliably which will mean a move to Adobe, which I've never touched before.

Curious to hear what else is out there?
React provides an immediate mode API (virtual DOM, which is recreated from scratch on every render) implemented on top of a retained mode API (the actual DOM which is stateful).

Diffing and piecemeal updates are an implementation detail/optimization.
Yuvanestham number
While the conference is actually close to wrapping up, there was a great setup for live streaming this year. You may still be able to catch the last few hrs of talks via the live stream: https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/streaming/
At the cost of privacy? Wouldn't that make a huge part of the population "criminals"? They hardly teach law in UK schools meaning most of the population may be unaware of some of the smaller offences which are usually not much of an issue. It could also be used to wrongly place you at a scene where you had nothing to do with it.
There’s a solar power plant in San Benito County, California where you can see something similar. The surrounding area is a blasted hellscape where marginal ranchers graze struggling cattle on BLM land they lease for $1/acre/year. The power plant owns about ten times more land than they need and the difference, after only a few years, between their land and the surrounding ranches is stark. For one thing their riparian habitats are recovering and host many wild species, where as soon as those streams cross the fence they become trampled muddy ditches. This is all on top of the obvious benefits of having a solar power station.
> I’m finally groking what rms has been banging on about for so long. It is completely unacceptable that we are running software that does this to the user. Users need to be empowered and able to run code that they can control.

There are plenty of high-quality mobile apps on F-Droid, even with downloadable source. This is purely a PEBKAC issue.
Tips to Help You Write Faster MySQL Queries
The author isn't suggesting that gas taxes should vary with income. His point is that they're a flat tax and flat taxes are regressive.
Yeah much of it doesn't transfer, but on the subject of the taxes in The Netherlands a lot of it is nonsensical:

1. You pay tax per weight of the vehicle, and that's a (mostly?) linear relationship. Whereas a 10 ton vehicle causes much more than 10x the wear & tear to roadways than a 1 ton vehicle.

2. Even if it were adjusted for the wear it shouldn't be a fixed fee, but based on actual usage. Paying it for a combination of the weight and mileage/yr would still not reflect reality, but would be closer.

3. There's no tax for vehicle size, just weight (the two don't always closely follow each other), which produces an externality on small Dutch roadways.
Anyone easily confused by how to quit vim should not be using a computer at all, much less vim.
> As someone who works at Oracle ...

Ahhh. Your other responses were so positive and promoting of Oracle, I nearly accused you of working for them.

Turns out you really do.
“Denver is quickly becoming the illicit drug capitol of the world,” Jeff Hunt, director of the Centennial Institute, a conservative think tank at Colorado Christian University. “High potency pot, proposed needle injection sites, and now an effort to decriminalize mushrooms. … As a state, we should be encouraging a healthy lifestyle with less drug use, not more.”

Why do people consider harm reduction to be incompatible with other strategies, like limiting access (via minimum age laws, high tax rates, etc) or active discouragement (scary TV ads or whatever)?

EDIT: formatting
No, but there were probably a lot more opportunities for solo types in the past. In a world that was a lot less committed to everyone oversharing and having a full set of soft skills even to be an engineer or accountant.
> I presume you mean SPA, and you’re probably correct. What limits do you think are reasonable?

Yes, I meant SPA.

Well, there shouldn't be a limit in my opinion. Javascript is powerful enough to allow a lot of heavy stuff like Games, desktop class applications, etc. Example (no longer in chrome app store) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfZpRtuPu-o

The issue with SPA is simple: You could use, let's say, React with Apollo GraphQl and the final bundle would be below the 500kb. The problem is when you need some UI components, the obvious way is to search for a plugin for that. Many React libraries use stuff like Jquery, Lodash, etc. under the hood that will increase the final bundle size. Over time, it just adds up with every new feature you want to add. Example: Kendo UI for React is just a wrapper around the jQuery version. Many other libraries follow this approach.
To make things worse, the same package can be added to he client with different versions because they're dependencies of different packages.

We also live in the age of isomorphic javascript (code that runs on the server and client), so there is an "extra" bundle pushed to the client so that the apps becomes more responsive without needing the server that much.

Of course Gzip help to reduce the bandwidth but it doesn't solve the problem that more lines of javascript, means more time needed to interpret the code and memory "wasted". On frameworks like MeteorJs, you could archive a bundle of 10 megabytes or more very very easily. Some seconds into a Meteor app on iOS Mobile, the app would crash. But no one force me to use Meteor at that time, there were plenty of better options. Mea culpa, period.

This problem of slow webpages/"slow" javascript is quite old. Most modern libraries/frameworks already help developers to bring faster apps by having good defaults. Example: Gatsby, Apollo GraphQl client, etc.

Enforcing limits could brings us to a world where we need to use iframes and subdomains to get an app running. For sure no one wants that.
In this particular SO question, the asker has already read the "Type :q to exit" message, but it isn't working as they're already in Insert mode.

Really it should be "Type <Esc>:q to exit"
Yes, I see that now.
Ask HN: E-mail providers in 2019
This year I'm moving away from all things Google.

First step is e-mail. Whom do you all recommend? I'm happy to pay, no need for a free service. IOS and Android apps would be nice to have.
I don't know about other cities, but to understand the strong political push back against congestion pricing in NYC requires a bunch of local context.

Neither the rich+, nor the poor, nor the vast majority of the middle class regularly commute into Manhattan by car. The poor and the lower/middle middle class because parking is prohibitively expensive. The upper middle class and the rich because they either live in Manhattan or they'd rather take commuter rail than sit in traffic. To the extent the latter take ubers or similar such services already pay congestion charges and there isn't too much fuss (except from the drives who don't have much political muscle).

The bulk of car commuters into Manhattan are instead those with de jure or de facto free parking. That's largely government workers (e.g. teachers, cops, firefighters) and members of the trades (i.e. construction workers).

For those with de jure free parking congestion pricing isn't a big deal, whatever authority is setting aside parking will either pay the congestion charge or get it waived. It's the beneficiaries of police and traffic control refusal to enforce the law with respect to certain favored populations that are up in arms about congestion charges. Because a congestion charge is likely to be enforced by an automated mechanism which, unlike parking control, will not engage in public corruption on their behalf. And these groups, unlike the uber drivers, do have a great deal of political muscle.

+At least the ordinary rich, hecto-millionaires and billionaires might be a different story
I cannot fully explain this in any public forum without betraying the confidence of things that were said to me in private messages and our private Slack by other maintainers. What I can say is that I do not agree with the claim that I forced DomT4 to resign, it did not come out of the blue, this was the second time that DomT4 has decided to leave the project and all of my decisions were run past other (still active) Homebrew maintainers before I took them.
Was it really like that and aren't those just myths? You don't become leader sitting in cave, you become forgotten. Your survival in the past was more dependent on community and your place in it, not less so.

Also, based on article, they are in distress and not happy with themselves. Also, they are completely dependent on their families help and don't contribute to household work at all. Even if they would be happy, there is issue of other people being taken advantage off having to care about them despite not wanting to.
Hooks can be abused but they have their uses because some state is temporal. Forms before they're submitted and animations are two good examples. There's no need to store local animation state in a global state store every time you use a new component.
The Python speed issue in my experience is almost never a material concern. It’s fast enough using the CPython reference implementation, and there are numerous options (PyPy, Cython) to squeeze out better performance if you really need it.
In case of apps I imagine something like this:

2kB will feel instant. 5MB will feel mostly quick. 30MB will feel like it had to earn it.

When things are instant then it feels like magic. It's sad that having all those super fast machines everywhere we have to deal with so much bullshit. Your computer can push through gigabytes of memory on a second. Does it feel this way? That's why people still use CLI, at least there, many things feel instant and when not it's usually reasonable.

It's not only download speed, it's also verification time, compilation/optimization and whatever else happens during install. All of those will take longer the bigger the app is.

Similarly the problem with JavaScript on sites currently is not only download time and request count bloat. It's significant by itself, but it just takes time to even parse all this code and I did not start on execution.

But at the same time for me the proxy effect of "how much bloat and bullshit did they cram into it" is as important and can't be dismissed.
==By American categories, India is 100% asian, and almost every sub-saharan country is 100% black. Of course local definitions vary.==

But the claim was about "ethnicities", not races. People frequently refer to their ethnicity as Irish, Sicilian, Catalan, etc. Rarely have I heard someone say their ethnicity is white.

==The energy expended is a poor measure of the size of the problem.==

Who gets to be the judge of the size of the problem? If a certain race or ethnicity is spending a lot of energy on this, maybe it is incumbent on everyone else to re-assess the true size of the problem.
I've actually been looking for such a thing, but haven't found it... maybe the competitors to PP have a public awareness problem.
Is (Google) search still relevant?
How important is the classical search in your daily life and/or for your product?

Most of the tools and services that I have used over the past years were not found via classical search at all – and I barely use it to discover something new. For regular users, it's more of a bookmark hack – you already know what you want and search is two extra clicks between A-B.

Nonetheless, it is still a huge market driven by advertising. And seems so F lame – that it is still the beginning of many customer journeys. (user searches blablabla, clicks on blablabla)

Why? Is it still important for you and the people around you?
I was approached twice on the same day at a cub foods once by people offering to buy my groceries with their food stamps in exchange for a lesser amount of cash.

I still think the program is valuable, but damn it hurts to see it be abused (especially since one of the guys had his little kid with him). A discount card or whatever that works on the spot is practically guaranteed to be abused as an easy money maker for people, and the net effect ends up being counter to the purpose od the program and many others.
I've been experimenting with this lately for chatbots and I feel like it could be a good approach.
I can't agree with this more or upvote it enough. Having alone time and living a life of the mind was something that was /much/ more doable historically than it is in modernity. It's a great shame of modern existence in my mind, perhaps a cardinal one.
I "love" those kind of articles, though this one is a bit different.

But it boils down to "let's make car owners pay a lot of money - (and this article) except if they're poor, then they can't afford being fleeced for wanting to drive" (really Capt. Obvious? so maybe fleecing drivers is not the way to go)

There's a balance between preferring other types of transportation and hating cars. Not to mention this article is US centric and seems to ignore how it's done elsewhere.

"Not pricing roads, which results in slower bus speeds. " there's an answer for that: bus lanes. Exists in several countries.

"Poor people pay more for parking than the rich" Really? (Oh by the way, they don't because of convenience and you might prefer the parking that's further and doesn't have a cover for your old car while the rich might favour the valet parking one next to their office)

I don't think there's much secret to it. Gas taxes are, in the end, a carbon tax. Use more gas pay more for it.
Go is pretty decent from a few releases back.

If you're using JetBrains IDEA Ultimate, the official JetBrains plugin for Go works really well. It's the same piece their GoLand IDE uses.
If you want to see more PWAs, then go to the PWA Directory maintained by Google: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/gulliver

Interesting, there is one speedometer there, created 2-3 years ago. The source code is even available in GitHub. It seems that it isn't easy to find PWAs? https://pwa-directory.appspot.com/pwas/5079866537934848
I swap ; and : in my .vimrc and I often get stuck for a moment when in ssh cause I never remember to hold shift... then I end up entering into the command line by pressing q: accidentally...
FWIW, Citymapper already does this.
Exactly. Once we remove health insurance from employment, I think everyone will be a lot happier. One of the biggest stressors in changing jobs is health insurance. If employees didn't have to worry about that, choosing a new job would be less of a problem (or quitting altogether to work on a business idea).

Once the majority of people are buying their own health insurance, the market for doing so will improve, and we could see private alternatives to healthcare.gov, as well as more brokers willing to take that on.

If I could change one thing about history, it would be wage and price controls during WW2 that got us into the situation of employers offering health insurance, and if I could change anything now, it would be eliminating that. I ran the math, and _most_ of our employees would've been better off buying from the market (e.g. through the subsidies they don't qualify for because our company offers insurance). I presented this to my boss, and he rejected it on the grounds that people expect the company to provide it.

We need to kill that culture before we can seriously consider changing health insurance/care again.
Doesn't mean the monks or recluses didn't have some type of mental issue

> And lighthouse keepers. That used to be a thing.

Ah yes the lovely mercury fumes.
> 5. Gasoline and gas taxes.

Are they suggesting progressive gas tax? The price of gas you pay at the pump would depend on your salary?
I was missing a ? Mark in there. Other two posters figured it out. Will edit for you.
Yep, I'm looking a .dotnet a .nuget and a .vscode folder right now.
Would you drive a Yaris if you had a Ferrari in your garage?

Didn't think so
Whenever I end up on another computer without my environment setup and end up in nano because it is the default, it always takes me a while. There is the cheat sheet at the bottom but as soon as the text appears I'll start manipulating it using vim keybindings and delete things and whatever else randomly. I always assume my fingers were not on the homerow correctly or something first. It is very disorienting.

So I imagine it is far worse for someone who ends up in Vim the same way.
A Trip Behind the Spectacle at Davos
People with this attitude shouldn't be using a computer, for fear they might get into software development and alienate an entire swathe of potentially great engineers.
Introduce acronyms before you use them.

I'll say it again for the people in the back.

Introduce acronyms before you use them.
A professional would use the man page.
Knowing Stock Options
To expand: in the waning days of Sun, they open sourced large parts of the Java development kit (JDK). This became OpenJDK, and is GPL v2 licensed (with a linking exception).

Initially, not all code was available under a GPL license.

Separately at the same time, Apache led the Harmony project to produce an open source implementation of Java SE 5 & 6. This was successful.

As time passed, Sun (and maybe Oracle) open sourced more code into OpenJDK, leading to supporters switching from Harmony to OpenJDK. Additionally, Sun made the unfriendly move of licensing the TCK in a way that precluded any non-OpenJDk release from ever being able to claim Java compatibility. In response, Apache resigned from the Java board. And as of 2011, the Harmony project was stopped.

Because of the platform-independent goal of Java, there's a lot of ancillary "not-Java, but needed" libraries to build and run Java. These were not all open sourced by Sun / Oracle, but were reimplemented by RedHat under a project called IcedTea.

So, in summary, you can run OpenJDK/IcedTea and tell Oracle to pound sand.

The primary risk is that Oracle withdraws the things they do still control from the OpenJDK project, or stops working with the project to coordinate new releases. But they'd be shooting themselves in the foot if they did.
The issue isn't just that humans struggle with them or that bots are getting better or what not, it's because there's no way to make a captcha that works across multiple websites like a standard 'library' and expect it to remain uncracked. Anything that becomes common will be attacked and defeated, because there becomes a financial incentive for spammers and no gooders to do so.

The solution is to make captchas that are bespoke to each site, since it means the same bot or script can't be used on every one and spammers have to go out of their way to crack each one. You can already see this right now; sites with their own systems generally get no spam at all.

But given that most people aren't programmers, well it means they're stuck with mainstream captcha systems which present a giant target to the internet's never do wells.

Niche sites can avoid the issue with topic specific questions though.
"Nobody drives a car in Manhattan cause traffic is just terrible!"
Near a federal building in Tampa I usually see the Mercedes SUV with a handicapped tag parking at the meter for free and the used Jetta in a $10/day parking lot.
Retirement schemes are currently funded with such creative approaches that Enron would be ashamed of. No stone left unturned: continuous refinancing with future taxes, securitization, implied zero default risk, assumptions of constantly growing economy, and more. Even then, US direct social security is 25% of all budgetary expenses, and with Medicare/Medicaid it is around 60%, much larger than anything else. Unsustainable means unsustainable.
I want to publish a few (5-10) videos for my students in the University. I don't want to care about hosting videos, upgrading the protocols, bandwidth (it's ok if my machine get overflow the day before the exam, but the owners of the other computers in the network will ask for my head). Hosting video is a pain. YouTube can solve that in a few click.

(It adds a little of discoverability and traffic, that is nice and useful in internal meetings, but it's not my main reason to use it.)
I'll take police you can get in trouble for swearing at over police who shoot you, any day. Also, the UK is far from a free country.

Also: nothing stopping UK parliament passing bills of attainder, even if they don't, so it's far from a free country.
All JDKs are GPL?
I wonder how the cell coverage maps are generated. I think it is common to use terrain data and tower positions to determine line of site to a tower. Is that flawed in some way, or are the results being manipulated to improve them?
Then why the hell are they using Unix at all?!
Thats exactly how I felt at the end of the video. They just ended it, and now they are analyzing the data. It does not say if they will restart the program after their assessment or if they will just end it for good.

From the people in the video, what it seems to show is that it can give people some confidence to pursue what they want to do, but at the same time, it does not seem to permanently change their life.

I think a longer term study is needed. Furthermore, it is not clear if people will start doing more altruistic work if they have UBI like contributing to open source or working at a non-profit organization.
Thanks for pointing this out, I included it in a other comment.
It doesn't take 5 years to teach yourself Machine Learning.

The low-hanging fruit in ML is absurdly low these days, the tools are very good and there is loads of sample code available. If you were already good with Python or R, and already had some nice clean data, you could be doing something useful with Keras in a day, no joke.