skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Being depressed and depression aren't the same thing though.

I feel like OP just used described how he fixed a problem that had him down.

Depression can occur without any real problems or issues. It's not something you can "just fix" by paying your bills.
Do such organizations really still exist?
I bloody wish there were a really good TUI toolkit for Python, something like Visual Basic for DOS but with a bigger selection of more advanced widgets.
Because a new company would have nothing to offer for that 30% that Patreon doesn't have. Facebook has an audience.
So? I remember a large bookshop in my hometown in which each section of the store had a terminal with DOS-like interface to their internal database. Employees were able to use it blazingly fast, and they still used it a few years ago. Except for security concerns, why should newer software automatically be better?
> Issue: Control systems for most of the city’s 3,000 traffic signals date to the 1960s and make it harder for the department to manage congestion. Cost (per intersection): $175,000 to $735,000

That cost seems outrageous. Are traffic signal control boxes really that expensive?
There is https://park.io
Oh well, good for them, have you seen the software they make nowadays?
What compiler does that? None of the ones I tried on god bolt seem to (after fixing the missing type on the function parameter)? And what's the undefined behaviour here?
The Brain That Remade Itself
Well, my questions are:

What was the original budget?

Were there cost overruns?

Who got the tender, and why?

Where was the complexity that made it a $100M, decade long project?
How can sorting trash be built into culture, when it is quite a new thing itself? Did people sort trash in the 19th century? Did they do it in the 1950s anywhere in the world?
I'm willing to believe that 4 year olds can be better at understanding texts in two different languages[0], but I've yet to see a 4 year old translate a piece of text from one language to another.

[0] Though I have no idea how you'd measure 'understanding'.
Anyone knows if there has been progress with thorium or cold fusion?
I agree. Fun idea and keep up the good work!
> As it turns out, billions of dollars tends to get people's attention.

As Sir Tony Hoare lamented:

> At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implmented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars.

I get the feeling that a lot of modern products are boondoggles on the merits but "doomed to success" because FAANG et. al. put them on a pedestal and the media is all too happy to go along with corporate marketing narratives if it grabs eyeballs (see e.g. the ridiculous amount of hype around foldable phones, which are sort of neat but hardly a revolutionary advance).
Ask HN: A small-scale business idea with gmail API?
Indeed it is my friend. One more thing I'd like to share... A lot of companies start their process by having someone in HR reach out to the candidate. Often these calls provide little of no value to the candidate. They are simply another hurdle. Here are some things I wish the HR folks would take into account:

1. Please be prepared to actually sell your position. Most recruiters simply explain what the business is and then tell you that their engineering team is really tech focused. It's totally generic. It's nothing the candidate hasn't already heard from their recruiter or read on the web site.

What's special about your product or company? What kind of benefits do you offer? What makes your tech team so great? Have you built some amazing open source library? Is the CTO an ex-Google guy?

2. Please be prepared to answer some basic questions that an engineer will have. For example, what is your tech stack. "We use JavaScript on the front end" is not an acceptable answer (unfortunately, It's one I've received several times). Tell me what frameworks you use. I know you're not an engineer, but you could ask one to write it down for you.

3. Please know what the technical assessment process is. "We have a technical assessment" is not an answer. Is it a take home assignment? A hacker rank test? A remote code pairing? If it's a take home assignment, how long does it take? Again, you are likely not the only company the candidate is interviewing with. The candidate needs to know how long the process will take and how much time he has to invest.
Things like this obviously attract headlines, but the real problem comes from the millions of other machines, decades newer than the ones in TFA, that are still irredeemably EOL.

I contract for a few companies that supply local governments in the UK. I regularly have to fill out stringent checklists about IT security provisions. PCI-DSS and beyond.

So I always chuckle when we meet them on-site and they're running an XP install with IE8, plastered with toolbars. These are machines I would sooner throw into the abyss than try to rescue. They'll make me jump through hoops but there they are inputting and manipulating citizen data on machines that are almost certainly part of a botnet.

Tablets are also increasingly a problem. As a b2b-service webdeb, I still see a lot of first gen iPad Minis in active service in enterprise. Last patched mid-2016. Oh well.

The next big worm attack is going to be devastating to organisations like this.
Simple and Revealing Lessons from My First Side Project
You need to make clickable URLs more expensive!
Most governments are bound by laws and regulations that effectively require waterfall development as every request has to be signed off before work can begin or money is dispersed. They also try to get the cheapest bidder in many cases.

The entire industry knows this doesn't work, but there's no political will to fix it because it's easy to attack an opponent for spending money with no defined goal or for wearing anti corruption measures that drive a lot of the regulations that require defining everything up front
You can, but why would you? You're advocating slapping lipstick on a pig not really engineered for this use case vs. using something that was designed for it.

UInt64's are going to be all around more efficient.
Meanwhile, my modern engineering organization has projects less than three years old that are already obsolete or orphaned because they were built on someone's favorite JS framework or CMS that isn't relevant or growing anymore and no one wants to touch them now.
If you mean domains that expire, I've used https://www.snapnames.com/ several times over the years to do this with success each time. park.io, mentioned below, is also good but not so useful for .coms.
> the shift from old-school servers to rented cloud storage has made it tougher than ever to fund upgrades

They do know that it's still possible to run old-school servers, right? There must be some upside or need to switch to cloud computing, either that or people just get blinded by buzzwords.

Hard to say from the article. Anyone know why governments may switch to cloud despite the issues in the article?
Dinner around 21 (9 PM) would be quite late for me. What time do you then go to sleep?
Your worst ordinary mistake about Bondora and P2P Lending
China’s tech giants are firing people as the economy slows
> a four year old is probably better at translating language she does speak.

> "Pull the briefs." Garbage. After several tries, I tried "download the briefs.”

I have no idea what you mean by the first sentence, and would never guess that it was the same meaning as the second sentence if you hadn’t told me.

English is my native language, and my first assumption was the first sentence meant “remove the underwear from sale”.

Language is hard. So hard that I suspect current AI has a comparable understanding of natural language to a six year old (sure, if the six year old spoke 26 languages to the level of a normal six year old, but that’s an easy difference for a computer).

Comparably, I have moved to Berlin, and on paper my German vocabulary is about the size of a child’s vocabulary. I have difficulty parsing word boundaries and correctly recognising even those words which I do know when they’re spoken outside lesson environments.
Solar and wind met nearly 9% of U.S. power demand in 2018
It's easy to just continue believing in your own path. I could not care less if a random HN user finds my answers vague. My comments here get flagged the majority of the time so I put very little effort into the responses nowadays. And to answer your question, I live in very dry climate.
Don't overestimate how logical and structured 4-year-olds are. (I have one right now, and I would trust an AI I trained for a day over the child I trained for a day -- for just about any task.)

A 7-year-old, on the other hand, is a tall order for AI, especially once you introduce the complex combination of skills with optical image recognition, haptic feedback and physical principles that need broader context and/or creativity...
There is shame in breaking a promise. Bankruptcy breaks a promise. Being a tool in your toolbox, even being necessary some times, doesn't neutralize a shamefully act, to the extent that your choices contributed to it.
Is there a video that links to the PDF?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RHYevLZARCaamucIoBKRbhOCTKu...
if it ain't broke..
What Makes the CPU Usage of Java Applications Soar?
It is OK, my phone is really old and not suitable for surfing the Internet. Thanks though!
I work on several pieces of business software at my job. One was built for UNIX mainframes, almost entirely in C, with the end-users still capable of running on dumb terminals (or these days a PuTTY window). The "successor" runs on Windows servers with J2EE, a GUI, and all the modern niceties.

The most common complaint I hear from people who've switched from the legacy software to the modern one is that their end-users' productivity is greatly reduced by the point-and-click interface. The older software's TUI had a very steep learning curve, but almost like learning Vim, once they developed a muscle memory for the necessary keystrokes, they could access and update information much more quickly.
This is why defaults matter. People sometimes downplay changes with "well, you can just tweak it if you don't like it", but in the long run tweaking the install every time is effort. Especially when you're working on non-internet connected machines. It's why I get annoyed when for example Ubuntu stops shipping the ability to burn DVDs on the install disk.
The time instructions take are usually boiled down to two metrics: reciprocal throughput (you can issue 1 instruction of this type every N cycles), and latency (an instruction can use the result of this instruction N cycles after it executes). Latency is necessarily an integer number of cycles, but reciprocal throughput can be less than 1 if there are multiple execution ports in a superscalar machine.

For example, the latency of a multiply instruction is usually about 3-4 cycles. But the reciprocal throughput is generally 1 (or 0.5 if you have two multiply units)--the execution unit is pipelined to allow a new input every cycle.
These aren't "crazy expensive vandal-proof high-tech toilets" (which TFA says failed in Seattle); It's an example of "hostile architecture."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_architecture

Outdoor urinals are controversial.
https://ktla.com/2018/08/14/open-air-public-urinals-cause-co...

Of course, the problem with pay toilets is you have to actually have change on you.
Fantastic response, thank you.

Project officials did not enforce proper code development practices, and there was insufficient testing of the software.

Sheesh, I wonder how much of the budget was burned on inflated admin fees?
It is as shameful as the bank charging you interest. Which is to say, not shameful. It's just business.
It seems to me that in the past decade or so, gas station restrooms in the US have gotten much better. Yes, you can still find nasty hole-in-the-wall toilets if you look in small independent gas stations that have been there forever, but nearly all of the chain stations are at least cleaned regularly and many are almost luxurious in comparison to the past.
Is it a bit premature to promote this given that there's almost no information of any kind (docs, examples)?

As an entertaining aside, I find the consonant-vowel balance fascinating: KrzysztofSzewczyk/Euboea
It's also not necessary for a short lease. If you're going to pay every month or every year, a mortgage is pointless. If you want to pay it off for 50 years, that's when you're probably going to need a mortgage.
Read the Tao of Tmux – Leanpub
Which old software are we talking about? Is it the Clipper Card system that has tens of thousands of business rules that prevent transit agendcies from rolling out new passes and pricing strategies? Or are we taking about the software that runs the trains and currently causes a bottle neck through the transbay tube?

Not everything needs to be rewritten in React using Google’s Material UI design standards, but my god, our public software really sucks.

Even as the article talked about the tax assessors office... I know someone who bought a condo, but SF can’t collect property tax because their office is so backlogged. So instead they told the owner to make sure they save the money because in a couple of years they’re going to come asking for it.
Common carrier status for phone companies in the U.S. was the price they had to pay for the monopolies they received to run telephone lines on public property or easements on private property, probably dating to earlier with telegraph companies.
So who pays the credit card processing fees?
I used to support a few assessors offices.

The software is pretty simple, and mistakes were almost always process problems associated with complex exemptions and classification.

The other set of problems were related to small market sample size for some corner cases. You can see this at play with Zillow.

Software is used as a boogeyman for leadership and process failure. A clipper system from 1985 is a great solution. The problem with it is that it’s highly likely that the needs of the business have changed over 30 years, and the software has not. That just reflects the lack of capital investment and process improvement typical in municipal government.

It’s easier to say “OMG, Clipper from 1980!” Because that is better than “we are a bunch of idiots”.

In the town that I grew up in, the process prior to 1980s computerization was a 100 year old paper process that was essentially the same as the computerized process — maybe better as the internal controls were better. Some of the properties in that town had deeds dating back to the Dutch colonial period, and in many ways the 1650 process was similar to the 2019 process, except they used percentage of rents and a levy of crops based on market value.
Bitcoin Is Helping the Unbanked
A few years ago I had to update some FORTRAN code written in the 1980s that did bond valuations and some other financial stuff. It hadn't been touched since it was written and was now running out of space because the number of bonds keeps increasing year after year.

I'd never done anything with FORTRAN before, so I spent a couple days reading about it and looking into how it works, fearful that I'd muck everything up trying to fix it.

I open the code and find that it was the most elegantly written software you could wish for, with fantastic comments and structure. I changed two numbers and was done, buying us another 30 years or so of rock-solid service.
The bank charged you interest based on what they thought the risk was of you breaking that promise. They knew the risk when they put out that loan.
Before modifying an existing line of code, understand what it's purpose is/was. Even if it doesn't appear to have one, or make any sense, someone created it for a reason.

Also IDE/search tools for determining where a function is used are great for removing stale, unused cruft.
I'm constantly and pleasantly surprised by how nice and feature-ful text utilities are. First time I used htop, I was much happier than most of the GUI task managers I had used. It seems like having a simple user interface helps the designers focus more on having it actually do more of the useful things than on how many pixels to put on that margin...
Modern UX has ways to compartmentalize information on a single screen for when it's needed/not needed.

This assumes that you're not also trying to make it a mobile app. Many of the more (in)famous public redesigns in recent years went for "open" and "spacey" UX because they erroneously tried to make their main design a mobile-first design, when that wasn't their core business need.

(Often, a second application can be built that satisfies mobile needs. Many uses of reddit or gmail, like myself, are more than happy to use a separate mobile app for consuming data.)
I have suffered from depression. I have suffered from financial woes. I have discussed these matters with professionals.

Adverse life events can trigger depression episodes in some people, and when you’re in an episode, adverse circumstances can both feel worse and lengthen the time in the episode.

Finding a way to solve the problems or avoid them entirely is thus an important part of being as healthy as possible, but it is not in and of itself sufficient for maintaining or returning to health.
Audiobooks Every Entrepreneur Must Listen To
I always find the benefits of portability to be a rather funny one: It's always immediately followed by 800 lines of dotfiles that do an incredible amount of customization.

The IDE vs. vim/emacs purist debate is always crazy to me. There are some places where IDE's are almost certainly better: Java in a large project in IntelliJ has to be 100x better than in Vim. For new languages or languages where there isn't substantial IDE integration, it's probably 5x better in Vim/Emacs with a nice configuration.
Ah, OK. Thought I missed something about this strain. :)
the best AI is much smarter at chess than any 4 year old

An AI is not "smarter at chess" than a 4 year old any more than a calculator is "smarter at arithmetic" than a 4 year old or a car is "smarter at moving fast" than a 4 year old. A modern AI program is simply a computational statistics program crunching some numbers. It has no "smarts" or "understanding" of the game in any meaningful sense. The fact that it can beat a 4 year old at the game of chess is unsurprising and not particularly meaningful.

We have no idea what it takes to get general intelligence and/or understanding. Until we do, comparing computational statistics programs to 4 year old children is rather a meaningless exercise, just as Turing and Djikstra told us decades ago:

"The question of whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim."
Replace half of the labeled buttons with inscrutable generic hieroglyphs and hide the other half under a hamburger menu!

<Aliens Guy>User Experience</Aliens Guy>
Transistors are faster than synapses to the same degree that wolves are faster than hills.

And synergy is just as relevant for digital minds as organic ones.
America's industry is running on software from the '80s. You can't imagine the horrors on the shop floor. Never mind XP or Windows ME - DOS with green-screen terminals; hand-coded apps booting on home-brew hardware; IBM dinosaurs that should be extinct but lumber on in the back office.

And there's nobody that can help them fix anything. So upgrade you say? Then they'd have to start from scratch. And they long ago laid off the accounting experts, tax lawyers and business planners. They have button-pushers and data entry folks. Nobody left who knows were the data comes from, where it goes, or who all uses it.
Depression is an umbrella term that covers a wide range of experience, and includes different types of illness.

That makes a clumsy title -- "I solved the particular sub-type of depression I was experiencing with analytical thinking". We don't need that cumbersome language if we just remember that the word depression covers different stuff.
Top VC's and hedge funds investing in crypto and blockchain companies
> San Francisco spends ~$40k/yr/homeless [0]

Did you forget the citation for this? If so, I'd appreciate it.
reminds me my litmus test for website design: elinks

we should have a curated litmus list.. listmus.com
My point is that the state is not doing enough to protect freedom of speech. Obviously, no 100% protection is ever possible.
I primarily use Java for my job. Security and memory related features of Rust are not an advantage compared to Java. But I like rust because it feels modern and produces efficient standalone binaries. Most of my hobby projects are in Rust now. But I would not rewrite any of my work projects in Rust even though they require ultimate performance. That would be a maintenance burden.

It is great to see people rewriting in Rust where it makes sense.
There are so many good projects on Liberapay:

https://liberapay.com/Mastodon/

https://liberapay.com/archiveis/

https://liberapay.com/davidrevoy/

https://liberapay.com/GIMP/

https://liberapay.com/UBports/

https://liberapay.com/F-Droid-Data/

https://liberapay.com/pixelfed/ (open source federated Instagram)

https://liberapay.com/SFTtech/ (open source Age of Empires II)

https://liberapay.com/Telegram-FOSS/

https://liberapay.com/phpMyAdmin/

https://liberapay.com/Framasoft/

https://liberapay.com/matrixdotorg/

https://liberapay.com/Krita/

https://liberapay.com/Nextcloud/

https://liberapay.com/ReactOS/
The software is not the issue with the tube. It's the fixed block system imposing minimum 1 minute headways.
I hope to god you over sold yourself
BlackBerry files patent infringement suit against Twitter
> SF can’t collect property tax because their office is so backlogged

IME they're able to collect property tax, no problem.
> I have no idea what you mean by the first sentence, and would never guess that it was the same meaning as the second sentence if you hadn’t told me.

But I’m sure you could’ve written down the literal phrase, which is all I asked Siri to do (Siri doesn’t do anything with a reminder other than parse it for dates and times). (Incidentally, my six year old would understand what I mean by brief—my wife and I are both lawyers and even a child is better at context than a computer.)
Because most of their paying customers don't have some idea what they're doing. Remember Windows XP? Remember how bad the security issues were around it that their competitor launched an Ad Campaign poking fun at them?

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

Bad PR is more damaging to market share than the 1% bitching about being treated like Cattle.

If they give users the ability to disable security and update functionality then users will disable them OR bad actors will trick them into disabling them.

You're behavior is not unlike an Anti-Vaxxer's.
Charging interest within a voluntary agreement is shameful? Or just for a bank? Why? This point of view seems to be associated with Islam, is that your faith?
Aah, I hadn't tested grid since it was introduced - yeah, it's definitely the best of both! I wish the support was higher than 87% though, but it's certainly coming :-)