skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Next-Generation Version Control?
I've been thinking, given that GitHub was recently acquired, now might be the right time to consider a better/new form of version control. Here's one idea, and I'm curious what people think about it.

The concept is: magic git. You just write code, and a background service handles backup/sync (ala Dropbox), assembling commits, and interacting with a git server (either GitHub or other). No more pain from wrestling with git, you can just write your code.

There is obviously a ton of complexity here: merging, code reviews, CI, etc., but the basic idea is to handle as much of the goo around versioning as smartly as possible without taking mental energy from the developer, and expose those advanced/custom controls when needed.

What do you think? Is this the right direction for version control to go? Would you use this service?
Dating in Silicon Valley is legitimately awful. It's staggeringly bad.
Death Valley has over 600 miles of off road track which are meant for 4x4 vehicles. Of course these people could have stuck to paved roads and stayed safe but I think they underestimated what off road truly is.

Driving off road is an American cultural thing and roads and deliberately maintained for those enthusiasts. These were not the first Europeans to underestimate driving in USA.
Groundwater systems are much better. My parents house in Ottawa has one, and it works fine through -30 C nights. There's a source well about 30' deep with a pump at the bottom, and a return well some distance away. That provides a constant supply of water around 5-10 C for the heat exchanger.

It is a complicated system -- lots of valves and reservoirs and so on, but very efficient and doesn't need much maintenance.
You are right, it is ZigBee.
A related question: Are there any programming books you wish were written?

My long term side project has been to bootstrap an independent publishing house focused on technical topics. I'm always looking to hear what programming books people think are missing in the market.

Some recurring topics I keep seeing are more books on the soft skills / career development side of things, and more project based books that help you learn how certain technologies work internally by building a database, queue system, web framework, etc. from scratch.
My first job in the late 80s was programming nuclear power plants. It was a good learning experience. I bet that software is still in place too ;)
> So, I’m leaving.

Implied: in the hopes of finding a place/community where her penchant for social and larger scale issues are top of mind.

I understand her complaint, which comes from being a well-off Upper Middle Class person with liberal values, but frustrated by inability to move the needle. Yes, this is Silicon Valley. But this is every liberal city. (minus the high school pressure tho.)

I wish she would tell us where she is moving to. She should move to Sacramento. Close enough to SV, and she can hate on all the weekend Tahoe traffic. But where she can find a group of soulmates that care about and are actually doing something about the social issues she cares about.
This is the bubble we should be talking about.
And guns aren't developed for murders. But that isn't the point I was trying to glibly make.

People contribute to lots of well-intentioned took that contribute some kind of indirectly to evil things.
Someone who can collect and then sell the data of the readers + audience. It's not the authors who are selling.

There is no "free." Someone is paying for this.
I know of an owner of a grocery store in a small town where I used to live, he bought a few lots of land here and there in the surrounding area such that there wasn't any contigous area big enough for a competing store to be.

It was a small town of maybe 500 people, and the nearest city was 6 miles away.
Agreed but Python lazy-loads & parses files as packages are imported. By convention these are all at file scope and at the top of the files, so it's often confined to an initialization phase. But...sometimes developers use clever fallback behavior by catching ImportError.

So the scenario described is possible to escape simple tests, I suppose.
Good lord, this is such a neat design. They managed to make it better looking than the concept car.
I think macOS has the saner default but Windows has the better experience. The default should be to save state and give you the option for a hard reset should you really need it. Apple gets it wrong by not exposing the various types of resets anywhere in the UI and instead requiring users to memorize a series of keyboard incantations on boot.
For anyone interested, Building Sciences Corp is a great resource on different methods to build functional, airtight, well insulated walls. Here's a starting point:

https://www.buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-001-t...
Its possible. I know a guy who isn't put off buy "call us" pricing notices and he seems to get good deals, so its certainly possible. Many of us will never find out though, because "call us" means "close tab". Even if I really want their product and am willing to pay a lot for it, my time is too precious to me to waste on calls.
I expect this to become more common in cities in the Netherlands for existing neighbourhoods built between the 1920s and 1970s. These older houses (of which there are a lot) are difficult, if not economically infeasible, to convert to heat pump heated houses.

Insulation can be done to some extent — I've managed to insulate my 1930s house to a thermal resistance of R⒞ = 4,5 m²K/W in the attic and parts of the level above the ground storey, but this is not realistic for the ground floor — but it is not feasible to reach the R⒞ ≥ 6 m²K/W mandated for newly built houses.

The noise is a serious problem too. In terrace housing you simply can't expect everyone to install these things and maintain a sane level of quiet.

Better to solve this problem by insulating as much as possible, and to provide heat by collective solutions such as geothermal heat on a neighbourhood scale. The current 'let-the-citizens-solve-this-themselves' approach of our government is making homeowners insecure about what to do though.
I build controls for many heatpumps (https://flair.co/pages/mini-splits-and-window-units) and follow the space pretty closely. They are truly magical with respect to pumping heat from the cold outdoors into a warm indoor space.

That said, the efficiency gains on the energy consumption side are admirable. From a global warming standpoint however, heat pumps are actually still pretty bad because of the refrigerants.(https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/materials/refrigerant-man...) This is not an issue with more traditional electric heaters (resistive or otherwise).

The real calculus for those concerned with global warming (I understand this was not the topic of the writeup) is the net effect of these systems over their lifetime - aka, Energy Saved and its GHG effect via leveraging a heat pump vs the GHG effect from the release of the refrigerant. Perhaps the real win would be a refrigerant recovery business that is...air tight :)
FWIW, I was able to buy a domain through Google Domains, but it took several hours for the purchase / registration process to complete. That said, they are obviously having issues, and YMMV.
unfortunately, it's still Medium. If they improved their accessibility it wouldn't be as bad, but they're more pro design than pro accessible design.
More details on the shutdown here, with some good insights: https://medium.com/@gabriel_20625/technical-lessons-from-bui...
> My first real experience with depression occurred when I was 25. I had recently separated from my ex-wife, and our divorce was pending.

> My ex-wife had a tumultuous upbringing — her mother walked out on the family when she was eight, and her father died when she was 19, leaving her effectively the head of her household which included two younger brothers. She was at a time of great need, and we decided to get married because we were deeply in love, and I wanted to contribute to her stability.

Incredible amount of red flags here for a working marriage. I'm sorry this happened to OP, but I'm really surprised his parents didn't try to stop this way before it happened.
From what I read you invite people to comment, so you would only invite people who would speak to your strengths. This still leaves positive bias but that's inherent in reference checks because you choose the reference.
Black is not non-PC.
Though unlike an Incredible Journey, this is the right way to shut down: Open up your code and contribute what you did to society.
I have bought quite a few ebooks from LeanPub.

It was a great experience, they email you when there is an update to a ebook you have purchased.

Take a look their site and how they work with authors.

https://leanpub.com/bookstore/type/book?search=vue
I agree about the lack of culture, but I'm not sure it's much better anywhere else in the US. I used to love NYC for its out-there, underground cultural options, but now it just feels like a mall geared for tourists.
The lisp interpreter can operate on s-expressions, but it cannot operate on arbitrary text. The specialization of encoding as s-expressions allows the development of the lisp interpreter.

Similarly, a C compiler operates on well-formed C programs.

Neither one can do its work on arbitrary text or on the other's text.

You can argue whether one is better than the other, but while each is a subset of "text" the limitations of the subset enable the expressiveness.

"I work on matter" vs "I sculpt" or "I paint" or "I cook".
Why would you WiFi connect a disposable lightbulb when it makes far more sense to connect the switch?
It insulates sound very well, which is important to some people.
Googling is invasive? Interesting...

pot/kettle/black again
Yes, that is an unfortunate side-effect of opening up to each and everyone no matter their tastes. Not all is lost though, if they manage to implement a functioning moderation system which allows individual users to limit their exposure to 'shit' they might just pull it off. It should be possible for users to choose a level of exposure, something ranging from 'cesspit' to 'spring water' and everything in between. The default should be just above 'cesspit' so that the most odious comments are 'greyed-out' by default but can easily be seen by those who want to. This should make the system less sensitive to the various forms of group think which moderation systems often stimulate. I had a look around and saw it was possible to 'Block' and 'Report' comments or commenters, this is a start but it probably needs to be fleshed out for the site to have appeal to a larger public.
How would you solve it? I think it's a really tough problem and a significant fraction of the homeless population has serious mental health problems. I live in a city (Salt Lake City) that did a great job fixing its homelessness problem... for a couple of years. Now it's worse than it has ever been. Partly this is because more homeless people are coming to the area because they've heard about how great the resources here are. The problem with trying to solve homelessness is that most things that work to solve it incentivize more homeless people to move to the area that is solving the problem. At least that's what it seems like to me.
But why does the README say

> Use JIT compilation

then?
> I needed to find pure ice.

No you didn't. You could have done this with warm distilled water, then frozen, at home and had better results. But I suppose it's a good excuse to go to Iceland :) (If there was ever a need for an excuse!)
For many people, writing out the command text is faster. Fantastically faster, when you take advantage of the efficiency improvements like tab completion, readline hotkeys, aliases, scripts, etc.

And you don't lose time from whatever you do before and after, by taking your fingers off the keyboard.
> SV isn't that nice, and it's not worth the price premium.

For lifestyle, yes. For the opportunities in tech, there's no place like it. Before you name the other not quite as good tech hubs, yes there is opportunity but not like there is here.
Thanks for the question (and visiting our landing page)! You're right that opinions always carry the perspective of the person giving them. We try to minimize the bias by:

1) Gathering a larger number of perspectives

2) Asking gold-standard questions that get to the specifics and contextualized examples

3) Every referencer is tied to a specific work experience and provides their contact information, which helps hold referencers accountable to their feedback.
It doesn't burn.
Did you mean "experimentally ruled out"?

From the paper: "gravitational waves propagate in D=3+1 spacetime dimensions, as expected in general relativity."
Ok, your app rocks. Mapped out all my standard routes quickly and I didn't need to create an account.

You've got me half way to believing you can hold out.
I recommend using mypy for python, type safe python has came a long way. The type annotation syntax has been in the language spec for years
Brooklyn, Miami (wynwood), Chicago, Austin, Portland (WEIRD!), Seattle, LA (creative as all hell) - it is better elsewhere. Even midwestern cities (Pittsburg, Cleveland, etc - really great!)
Just did some research - those two do look like an excellent fit
I tried to register my name in Google Domains and the site was just hammered. I then ended up registering with Namecheap even though it was a bit more expensive.
As someone not in the valley (Michigan resident here), do other jobs not exist? I'm sure nurses, financial analysts, and auto mechanics love to go to Lake Tahoe and talk about their professions.

It sounds to me like the OP doesn't like spending 100% of her time in the tech sphere. And that's fine. Find people who are in completely unrelated fields, and become friends with them. Spend 50% of your time at work, in the tech world. Then leave work and spend the other 50% talking to different people about more diverse problems.
Couldn't you just make distilled water clear ice at home, or does it need high pressure to remove aberrations?
founded Blogger, Twitter, odeo (vine before vine) and Medium.
Article seems to suggest SV does not work well for families and children.
I think I can see why the teenagers are so angsty.

The problem when you grow up surrounded by an elite is you really want to join the elite. This is what everyone mentions about the bay area: there's lots of 6 figure jobs, but everything is expensive even if you have one.

And how do you get these jobs? The standard path, and that's just about all you'll hear as a kid, is get good grades, get into a good school, do internships, interview well and then you're on the ladder.

If you fall off the ladder, you'll know just enough friends to go green with envy, and you won't be able to afford anything.

The thing is teenagers who are going to be part of the elite tend to be clumped together in their affluent schools. They see disproportionately many other success stories, and they see other kids pushing themselves as well.

All I can say is when you get a little older, your circles widen. Or they CAN widen, it's up to you who you hang out with. Also, you tend to get a bit less intense, nothing really bothers you as much as when you were young.
> It's more that the information is "material but not non-public", end of sentence.

Even there, I think that's covered by "Written Communications that contain, or reasonably could contain, information material to Tesla or its stockholders must, prior to posting or other publication, be submitted to Tesla’s General Counsel and Disclosure Counsel for pre‐approval."
I mean, that's fine, but you also kinda gotta understand that that is exactly what the industry rewards. If somebody's there longer than two years, there is a very real chance that they have passed up at least one significant salary bump (up to a point, of course, it doesn't continue forever).

If you're offering 10%-a-year raises, etc., what you're saying makes sense to me, but otherwise people are going to leave because it's stupid and self-harming not to.

How do you square that circle?
Is "black" really not considered PC?
C# has both semantic refactoring and REPL. It might look like Java, but it's a much better designed language. They are even fixing all the horrible crap that was dragging it down with .NET Core.
The problem with heat pumps in cold temperatures is that the compressor (outside) unit has to go below the air temperature in order to absorb heat. I'm not sure the difference, but I'd expect it to have to go to -30, -40, -50, at those temperatures its difficult to build mechanical devices that are going to work reliably for 10+ years.
"It’s where everyone wants something from you, and you never know when someone will betray you because they want something from someone else more."

This is the part I really hated about SV and the bay area.
Telephone Operator
Hm, I don't see anything besides the blue spheres and some kind of trapezoidal overlay. That said, if I needed some extra warmth and nothing else was available, I could just open this and scoot closer to my workstation...
this is so true

and has been my experience with unwrap

they dont want people to use it but the alternative is so verbose and clunky
Agreed with you on this, but I'm in Marketing so I can go anywhere I'd like for similar opportunities. But 100% agreed that if you're an engineer or programmer, you need to be here.
Was that the internet equivalent of a "come at me bro"? My point wasn't that mice aren't useful, it was that UIs shouldn't _only_ use mice. Further, touch screens are in trouble because they are just like mice, but they aren't paired with a fixed controller.
People that enjoy living in Silicon Valley are either delusional, have never lived anywhere else in their life, or moved here from the middle of nowhere. The only thing this soul-less valley is good for is tech and money. If that's not what you base your life on (most normal people with a life), then you're not going to like it. Most people I've talked with (excluding new college grads and people in their 1-2 year Valley honeymoon phase) don't plan on staying here permanently.
Why is this surprising at all? Any transparent material having a refractive index larger than air can be made to work as a lens. Pinhole cameras are much more interesting than this -- there the phenomena isn't refraction. An even more interesting lens is the Frensel lens [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fresnel_lens
Is that happening? I used "white" as a stereotype to make a point, but maybe that was a bad choice.
Which is why the Red Hat and friends crowd is pushing for true offline updates for desktop systems. I'm using it on Fedora right now and it works surprisingly well. The UI is quite ugly since it's basically just PackageKit fighting with systemd over the tty output but it works.
Thanks, I went and found an EOS M for sale after reading your comment and bought it. Turns out there’s a shutter bug and to get around that I need a specific brand and model of SD card. But I am enjoying the camera so far. Looking forward to capture raw video with magic lantern after I buy that SD card.
Once again, the engadget article is terrible, and moatly borrowed.

https://electrek.co/2019/02/27/honda-e-prototype/

Is the real link.
Doesn’t the print raise a SyntaxError not ImportError?
If someone does something on Tuesday, and I comment on it on Wednesday, they don't get to claim their actions on Tuesday are caused by my comment on Wednesday.
I'll add that to my must watch list - I live in an old (1930's) home that leaks heat like crazy, so I'm interested in possible retrofits, though I'm a bit concerned that it'll be a monstrous task.
> Please provide an example of an s-expression that provides more information than can be encoded though a text string that is the same length, and in fact identical to said s-string.

We're talking about a class of strings, not a single individual string. S-expressions are more constrained than arbitrary text, and therefore contain more structure than arbitrary text. Constraints are information.

You can't simply impose a tree structure on any arbitrary piece of text.
>A lot of junk and spaghetti code gets written (or copied/pasted together) today because there are few hardware-based constraints in much of modern app and system dev

Maybe in the general case, but there are so many exceptions they're almost the rule. Apps like JIRA and Electron constantly have slowdown from bloat that pretty clearly is swamping the hardware constraints and would be avoided with better coding.

Also, I see classic games that are emulated or transformed on "fast" hardware that nevertheless have input lag. I've seen this one the Wii console for SNES games, and on inflight emulator that ran Pac-Man. Plus, TVs that upscale make Dance Dance Revolution have too much lag to be playable.
Incidents: Trends from the Trenches
Sure. Look at fridges built for RVs and the like. The ones that can run off of propane as well as electricity. They use the absorption cycle, so while they have worse efficiency than a compressor-based system, they will easily beat thermoelectrics from a cost/BTU standpoint. Many have no moving parts, so noise and vibration are minimal.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_refrigerator
> I don't understand this comment. If someone wants to buy a train ticket and the system doesn't even support their language

I think we're talking about different things there. I was focusing more on the language-agnostic interface design (e.g. hand-holding but slow vs fast after a learning curve), but you seem to be focusing more on internationalization and language issues.
It seems a lot of people commenting here basically just see money == happiness.

Basically, these commenters are proving the article’s point. Why be depressed when you have money? Who needs empathy for the homeless when you live in a gated community away from them?
Whats the cutoff for you?
It's simple.

We need more fucking housing. Period. End of story. We need condo towers. We need townhomes. We need mid-rises.

And secondly, we need free and low cost mental health services.

That's it. Problem solved. The problem is we're 20 years behind.
They an energy label here in the Netherlands, its required for all sales.

https://www.energielabel.nl

I'd love to install a ground heat pump but the installation requires digging up our fairly newly made garden. We'll move in a few years and buy something which has an A label with a pump and panels.
Slightly OT, but..

I live in a temperate climate. I've sometimes wondered if it would be worthwhile to adjust house construction so that:

- In the summer, the kitchen refrigerator's heating coils touch outdoors air instead of indoors air.

- In the winter, the refrigerator's cooling is provided, at least partially, by the outside air.

- In the summer (only), the kitchen oven vents into the outdoors rather than into the kitchen.

- In the winter (only), a heat exchanger recovers some of the heat from our electric clothes dryer.
s/text/unstructured text/ in the OP. S-expressions are serialized by text, but the Lisp approach is more powerful than UNIX approach because Lisp approach works with structured text by default, while UNIX approach assumes unstructured text. UNIX approach forces every program to write its own arbitrary parsing and unparsing, and makes almost every shell one-liner to be half about converting output ad-hoc shapes of text to input ad-hoc shapes of text.

The only popular modern incarnation of Lisp philosophy in shells is... PowerShell - where instead of s-expressions, the tools exchange objects. That's AFAIK binary blobs, but if you wanted to retain a text-serializable form, then the most obvious way to do it would be... S-expressions.
iOS apps developed in Iran no longer accessible to users: Reports
Chromatic aberrations cannot be removed using a material of just one refractive index. And as the video shows this lens has chromatic aberrations.
Does that mean there's nothing promising anymore in AdS/CFT correspondence?
And it was perfectly normal to do stuff like this.