skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for making DeskGap!

I have been watching these types of tools (desktop js frameworks) and I'm glad the DeskGap docs[0] explain the difference between existing tools like Electrino and Quark although the most notable difference is that those two projects are no longer maintained.

I just added DeskGap to my list of Awesome Desktop JS frameworks[1].

[0]: https://deskgap.com/#there-are-already-similar-attempts-elec...

[1]: https://github.com/styfle/awesome-desktop-js
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Also worth noting - consumer app or website designs that cram negative space everywhere are almost always slow as shit to use compared to their older "ugly" replacements. The way new Reddit renders content is an excellent case in point. An older example is the Guardian website - it's design about four or five years ago was despised by users (which was ignored) because it was slow and made using the site slower.
Show HN: NestEgg – AI and Maintenance Marketplace for Landlords
This is a use case for a programmable editor. Emacs might be the easiest to program for this type of task. Whether or not learning Emacs is justified is an orthogonal issue.

A programmable keyboard is another, but less universal option.

If you're willing to give up WYSIWYG, then parsing the input is an option. Near real time (for some definition of "near") is probably possible in Emacs.
You replied to a comment specifically about being the butt if a joke (making fun of Brazilians)
Thanks for the information.

I can believe that work done by professional employees outside of work hours related to their employment might sometimes be works for hire, since they're not hiring professional employees. But that just covers work related to the employment, not everything the employer might do.

If you're an accountant for Bloomberg NY who somehow avoided any contract provisions affecting this question (itself an unlikely scenario), they wouldn't own any spare-time Kubernetes hacking you do, since that's not part of an accountant's job.

In California, a contract might be able to make the employer own the Bloomberg accountant's spare time Kubernetes hacking only if the courts decide that it's related to other parts of Bloomberg's business, which is hard to predict; indeed, parts of Bloomberg do deploy and hack on Kubernetes and use it to run important stuff for their business, but of course their main business line is financial news and not container tech.

The difference with New York is that sufficiently inclusive contract wording would be able to assign that to the employer even if Kubernetes were not related in any way to Bloomberg's business, unless NY courts would it unreasonable to apply that wording.

(For example, I doubt NY courts would find it reasonable to assign any employers copyright over an employee's written grocery shopping list, aside from household nanny/errand-runner situations.)

The work-for-hire rules are actually federal: anything covered by them is employer-owned by default in all of the US including California, not dependent on a contractual provision which California could choose not to enforce, with the employer being treated as the actual author for copyright purposes rather than just an assignee.

So the only relevant difference between the states would apply in cases where federal law doesn't automatically do that, where people incorrectly assume it doesn't do that, or where a contract or other agreement by the employer explicitly overrides the work-for-hire rule (if this is legal) or reassigns or disclaims the employer's interest in certain created works.

I'd be interested in a citation to either a court ruling, a statute, a regulation, or similar to clarify this as applied to software workers.
Ask HN: How to Create DIY MySudo Alternative?
MySudo allows you to create virtual phone numbers so that you never have to give out your SIM card phone number.

Is there a way to do something similar using a VPS and other open source tools? I've been working on self hosting a lot of my services (Nextcloud has been great) and a MySudo alternative would be really great. They've also been iOS only and I'm on LineageOS.
Do you believe there will be an industry of similar funds 5 years from now? If you're able to share, what is Earnest Capital's return profile? Do you have LPs?

Thanks for doing this AMA!
Pack Anime Attack on Titan FREE
So these satellites are no more complex than the amateur radio birds which function as simple FM repeaters?! Typically they'll have an uplink in the 2m band, and maybe a downlink in 70cm band, or the other way around. How can a military satellite be so casual in it's decision to relay audio? You'd think some authentication method would have been built in. I guess not?
His responses sounded pretty scripted. To a question on what Twitter has specifically done to combat abuse on the platform (a question that's been asked over and over for years now):

1. We have evolved our polices.

2. We have prioritized proactive enforcement to remove burden from victims

3. We have given more control in product (like mute of accounts without profile pics or associated phone/emails)

4. Much more aggressive on coordinated behavior/gamingAlso this wasn't a real-time face to face conversation, so you can be sure

Aside from #3, all of these sounded like CEO-speak to me. No specifics, so nothing to attach personal responsibility to.
If you use uBlock Origin or compatible ad blocker, you can remove most Medium nonsense across all domains by adding these filters:

##.overlay-dialog

##.overlay

##.u-fixed

##.metabar
The people in #4 thought a recovery account was harmless. They were wrong. Google's automated systems are merciless, impersonal, and ruthless. They showcase how much faith you should put in their support for even paid services.
U.S. National Debt Hits $22T – A New Record That's Predicted to Fall
GCP's documentation has an aesthetic quality but is lacking practicality.

Take for example a fundamental usecase: working with a blob storage service through a client library.

Googling "gcp cloud storage java example" and "s3 java example" returns these as top results:

https://cloud.google.com/java/getting-started/using-cloud-st...

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sdk-for-java/v1/developer-guide/...

The AWS doc is clear and gives me exactly what I want: Java code snippets for doing common actions with buckets.

The GCP doc is about a sample bookshelf application? And it starts off by creating a bucket through a terminal command followed by a couple of massive code snippets specific to the example app?

Changing the search terms a bit reveals this:

https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/creating-buckets#stora...

That's a bit better, but seeing options for the various arguments requires me to copy and paste a non-clickable link from the code snippet, which brings me to another attractive but minimally helpful page.

Another example: renaming a bucket. I find the link easily enough..

https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/moving-buckets#storage...

But only the first code snippet has code samples of any kind. The remaining steps only have instructions for the console and terminal (and the JSON API if you want to curl against that..)

To me, GCP's documentation just doesn't surface information in a way that's conducive to getting work done quickly.
I've found its not that they lie (all the time) it's that often they don't have the time or mental energy to figure out what they want and even if they do they lack the tools to communicate it.

That is fundamentally a human problem and I'm not sure what technology can really do to significantly improve the solution which is to slog through it and listen to feedback.
The real problem here is the lack of UX Research that went into designing the new interface. All of this could have been foreseen before the design project even started.

The whole point of UX research is to avoid expensive redesigns/features/products that users don't want. It is future oriented and pays for itself tenfold in avoided missteps in the product lifecycle.
Hey Tyler! I'm actually super interested in Earnest. One thing I was thinking is, the traditional VC model works in cycles - founders raise some money, build & sell, raise some more, build & sell - by the time they raised $100M hopefully they are at least close to profit.

How does that work with bootstrappers? Ideally they'd only have to raise money once (from you), but what happens after the $100k (example) run out and the business is only generating, let's say, $2k/month? Back to 9-to-5?
>Spotify app, almost crashing my system by playing music

Apparently the debate has matured from focusing on technical downsides to making unfalsifiable claims about technical downsides.
Exactly. Proper white spacing shouldn’t be the problem of any redesign.

Also consider that users often have a tendency to rebel against change. Habits and routines are hard to overcome and the actual might be that features and data simply aren’t in the same place they used to be, regardless of if that new location is much more reasonable.
I saw it again and again: Users memorize hard-coded paths to certain functions - simply changing the name, appearance or position of certain elements along that path was enough to throw them completely off the track.
this..seems extremely cool (?) does someone have a reference or pointer for further study about how this is 'perfect' and not just 'really good'
Israeli Operatives Black Cube Reportedly Spied on Critics of NSO Group
For some of this stuff (Autocad, I'm looking at you...) it used to be the case that you could shell out a one-time $$$$ and get a license for v5.0 that would work for all eternity. The companies even gave you minor upgrades to support new OSes.

But since these guys have now switched to a subscription licensing model, they no longer do that, so there are scattered XP boxen around running ancient versions of various expensive software that just keeps working.
remember a guy who worked in some fany BLUE in basic developed application for accounting on his dosbox windows xp. he wanted a new tool, he had a bunch of web apps made for him, but all the time he hit the simple fact, that page refreshes and lack of keybindings made his work incredibly tedious and slow.

Made a curses implementation of his old application so he could work full speed with the exact same interface and keys. a modern implementation of his oldskool app, so he could finally ditch dosbox and windows xp for a more modern operating system. happy chap after that, he wondered why people even use web UIs for local things.

funny lesson in that 'modern' doesn't mean 'fancy', just like in this case. you can modernise something and not make it fancy, that is what they wanted. this guy made it fancy, which is useless.

i try to tell people (hard to hear for IT people i know) that internal applications are not 'user apps' in the same sense a website is. so they should be treated differently as well.
if you would ask the users what they want before redesigning the thing they use for hours a day i'm sure such mistake can be prevented.
No, only when you unload the page.
> Are we in a situation now where, if I have a bad anti-botic resistant infection I can just order these molecules on the off chance that they will help me?

Very far from it. I wrote a docking program myself (the most popular one, currently, I believe), and I get emails of this nature sometimes.

Molecular docking only makes predictions about binding. Typically, this gives you what people call an "enrichment", i.e. your guesses are better than random, hopefully much more so. Still, most of these guesses are typically wrong. For example, you might go from 1 in 1000 odds to 1 in 10.

When you do find a drug-like molecule that binds your chosen protein, this is only the beginning of the drug development effort that may end up costing billions.
Why can't they spot cyclists? My 2015 Tesla S 70D with Autopilot 1.5 and only one monochrome camera correctly identifies cyclists most of the time; surely things have improved since then.
Ask HN: Is there any place to get the cache of old top ranked links on HN?
Some of the most ranked links on HN (Mostly old blog posts) are down. Probably the author is not paying for hosting.

Is someone storing a cache of all the top HN posts?

There's a lot of wisdom in such posts.
Whitespace is toxic in design.

As a trend I can't wait for it to die in fire.
"National Public Internet": of which nation?

I don't think that works, but a nongovernmental entity devoted to public service might work.
Wow, very interesting. My only question is about the 3-5x cap: given how many companies fail/never turn a profit, how is that going to give a return?

They must be really confident in their ability to spot good companies.

Very happy to see alternatives to giving away equity however.
It's true, but you still need to ask, and watch them work. But what it often comes down to is that the company underestimates the effort involved, they push you to rush the process, and communication is the first thing to suffer.
The presentation is very interesting. That's always what amazes my with those GAN outputs. These people do not actually exist. Obviously, there are some funky examples. Nothing wrong with mine at first, although his buddy should probably see a doctor: https://imgur.com/a/dkS8Ux5
Facebook Is Calling the Cops on Sad Users
Ashley Madison should acquire this tech.
This is a strong, clickbaity claim, which seems quite hard to prove :)

But seriously: it may be essential for legal reasons to be 100% sure that an automatically generated face does in fact not depict a real-life person.
That is pretty funny. The more you know. I was just a grad student and met Shoichet at conferences.
> 2) The union has a legal obligation to fully represent each one of the employees in department X fairly and equally.

Sure, but what do you see as the difference in representation from person to person? Something that's beneficial to one worker (better conditions, more pay, etc) is almost always beneficial to their coworkers, too. Isn't negotiating a contract to the benefit of any of the workers pretty much automatically to the benefit of all of them?

> Employees who feel they are not being represented can sue their union for inadequate representation

This sounds like one of those facts which is technically true but practically useless. I googled it and found a number of answers that all say essentially: the courts recognize that unions have finite resources, and grant them leeway in choosing what to pursue. You probably will never win a case against your union, even for just being bad at what they do, unless they specifically discriminated against you on the basis of a protected class.

I've never heard of it happening, and I can't find any cases on the internet, either.

> This system has its upsides: German unions never have to negotiate on behalf of non-members.

What does this mean in practice? "We'd like better working conditions, but only for the names on this list"?
Journalistic outlets don't typically have CEOs because they never make enough money. They're owned by other companies or rich people, and have other companies that actually generate the revenue, and there's something like a CEO that lords over both that has to balance the making-money part with the journalism part. The only "journalism" that doesn't suffer from bias are ones that never have to worry about money... so basically, school newspapers.
This is how you get your kid eaten by monsters.

But in all seriousness, this is a good point. In addition, you have to think about the user you are listening to. Are they smart? What terminology do they know that other users don't? Maybe they figured out a workaround to some problematic UI already, and you can just make that workaround global.
The "S" In GCP stands for support.

As a former App Engine user, steer clear of Google cloud.

(And I am aware that Amazon also has what to improve in support.)
I've been wondering what is going to happen when bots start using these images as profile pictures?

Previously it wasn't trivial to do a GAN image generator, now as this site shows it's, if not trivial, also not particularly hard.
IMO, the easiest way to eat more vegetables is to buy them frozen. Frozen vegetables are cheaper than fresh, sold pre-chopped, and often nutritionally better because freezing stops the decay of vitamins. You can buy them without planning ahead and not worry about them rotting. Assuming you have access to a freezer, the only disadvantage is the softer texture. I eat more vegetables than most people I know, but I spend less time preparing them. I think the inconvenience of fresh vegetables discourages a lot of people from eating them, but frozen vegetables can solve the problem.
I didn't add indexes mainly b/c for analytic warehouses that are columnar, indexes are less important / meaningless. Partitions though, that's important!
Your counter counter argument on not being as flexible as SQL is spot on. A DAL that sits in front of storage mechanisms is not a bad idea though.

I've found moderate success in doing the reverse and using communication channels from SQL => services either via NOTIFY or queues.

ie. Dispatching an event that signals a non SQL service to do an action. eg saving a file to S3, then updating the database when the action is complete.

This doesn't really work when retrieving data synchronously but in most cases if the data is stored elsewhere - then you probably want to access it via non db methods anyway (ie. for an S3 file, you'd use the url)

WRT JSON, please for the love of god no. Someone made the same argument a month ago, my reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18870838
I know you're asking about pre-deploy, but for post-deployment, you might want to check out Bash Automated Testing System (BATS) [0].

[0] https://github.com/sstephenson/bats
ActivityPub seems like an interesting protocol waiting for a killer app. Mastodon is a reasonable start, but too much like Twitter.
I guess finding training data for bone structure, flesh, and skin textures is harder than finding pictures of faces...
DDT is still being used for mosquito control, because the risks and ecological damage are deemed to be less important than the half million people per year dying of malaria.

Millions of lives currently depend on reducing mosquito populations, so methods of control will be used no matter what. Targeting a specific species of mosquito rather than spraying DDT everywhere will reduce the collateral damage to the environment immensely.
I feel like that was the case here. Even though they said he was "recommended".
You make a really good point. Checking into a flight should not be buried into some dense corner of the website. Users need to do that in one click and not very often. A retail POS UI that's used daily should be optimized for dense logical layout at the expense of learning curve.
Agreed, it’s so much better. Just being able to reply to two people at once is incredible.
The one thing that reddit and Hacker News lack is the ability to easily see new posts on an existing thread (though you can get this with a reddit gold subscription or becoming a moderator). The other thing they lack is an index of comments (like you would see with a mail reader).

Those two features made something like usenet with a good news reader easier to use compared to reddit or Hacker News.
So what is your twitter?

Edit: I found it. So far it's just a bunch of rambling about how you lost your job for saying something that people percieved as bigoted. What did you say?

It doesn't seem like what you're doing is working, if you're homeless and can't find programming work at $15/hr.

I wish you the best, but maybe it's time to consider taking a different route.
Do you think the rate of improvements that have happened to the internet would be sustained if it were run by the government? I sure don't. Moving decision-making capabilities away from the public and into the hands of bureaucrats sounds like a good way to increase surveillance, decrease innovation, and lord knows what else. I really hope that idea does not take off.
> Watch them work.

This x1000! I took on a freelance project for a heavy machinery hauling company. They were a year into transitioning away from some customized off the shelf Enterprise scheduling and dispatch system into some custom built software by an “Enterprise” consulting company.

They were originally bringing me in to audit what the team that was building it but that pretty much changed on the day I submitted my proposal...

In the proposal I wrote to my then prospective client I allocated a couple of days of onsite interviews with “lower than management” people that would be using the system or it’s outputs, and a week of shadowing people in all roles that would be directly using the system. The project sponsor (to his credit) didn’t ask me why I would need to do that, he started laughing and exclaimed that I was the only person to ever even recommend this approach.

We ended up re-writing the proposal into multiple phases where I just interviewed and assessed, documented their current processes, provided business process workflows and suggested ways their current workflow could be optimized, irrespective of any one technological solution. A crappy process, then automated, is still crappy.

I wound up spending 6 weeks before even proposing anything that had to do with technology.

My implementation proposal was set in phases that would bring related functions to light in a way that their teams could begin using them right away and we could collect feedback and iterate while producing the next set of features as well. It was their first ‘agile’ project or contract and the fear was quelled when after the first month I had put more useful software in their dispatchers hands than the “Enterprise” team had in a year.

From day one interviews to “finished” project we spent about 6 months and that system still lives 9 years later- though it has been modernized and upgraded every so often in the intervening time, it is still one of my proudest projects even though it was one of the least “sexy” I’ve ever done.
Also the Guardian article is from December 2017, so the writing has been on the wall for quite some time.

> an overwhelming amount of stupidity [the Guardian] has published

I think on BuzzFeed's part, at least the stupidity is intentional.
The world is global. There is no "local" anymore especially in IT.
it's even worse when you consider that modern computers are much slower than an apple 2e:
https://danluu.com/input-lag/
There was a study done on faces and beauty. They created faces based on global averages of features and found these (synthetically invented) faces to rank even more highly on the beauty scale.
Unbreakable encryption is pretty easy. Just use a one-time pad.
lack of communication is main issue in all issues. people thing 'user' opinion is worthless or they lie or cheat you, but fun fact is that if they don't like your fancypants app, it will get shot down and cost you either time , money or clients or a combination of the three. if you ask ask ask, and then subsequently put it all in writing, verify with everyone they agree on the plan, they can never hold it against you even if they lied and cheated.
And only change what are real problems. Maybe something like a user needs to navigate to three different pages to get the information they need. That's something you can improve.

But resist the urge to do a general facelift or reorganization just for cosmetics. Users can fly through the ugliest interfaces, even text-mode terminal interfaces, once they get used to them. Change that at all, and they will be stumbling around and complaining. That can be worth in the end if their usual workflows are now shorter and faster, but tread carefully. Users of enterprise apps really don't care too much about how they look.
US courts have determined it slanderous to speak the term "ponzi" in describing the DeVos family's great American fortune

Do you have a citation for that? People criticize Amway as a pyramid or Ponzi scheme all the time.