skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Presumably San Francisco’s problem is being an outlier in a nation that does little about its homeless epidemic. More affordable housing, a proper welfare system, and public healthcare seem to have solved this problem in almost all other western countries.

The UK is trying a related experiment. We’re becoming more like the USA - closing hostels, slashing local authority budgets by ~ 60%, privatising healthcare, removing social welfare. The result - a huge rise in homelessness. Most major cities in the UK are now reminiscent of the US. Never thought I’d see it here.

Talking to homeless people in London, the most common reason for being on the street seems to be welfare being withdrawn or problems getting housed.
i think it's less of a myth but rather that knowing how to get yeast from scratch is a rather recent discovery, and before that keeping a starter from one generation to the next was probably the only way to make sure you always had some around
This is correct. Helsinki is full of public, free toilets in very good condition and I never had such issues.
Somebody, please just fix the language. Extend all the free compilers or, better yet, run the changes through the standards committee. People have been dying for this feature for over half a century.

While you're at it, just make the feature generic. Handle arbitrary arrays, structs, unions, and floating-point types.

The ... feature supported by gcc is also a huge usability improvement. Don't allow weird sorting order issues with strings. Don't allow it for structs and unions.
Based on my years of experience in working with a millions-of-locs over decades codebase:

Be aware of the abstraction fallacy: developers are often guided by this insane notion that they can get rid of accidental complexity by wrapping it away behind an abstraction layer. You can't. It's better to suck up to the complexities of the existing system, and prefer explicit, procedural copy-and-pasting than trying to invent your own abstraction layer on top.

The problem with the after-the-fact abstraction layer is that if the original team members are not available, you are likely not in possession of the whole theory of the software. Hence it is not likely you can in the beginning choose the right abstractions.

The correct way - if possible - to simplify existing code is to refactor the code itself.

The specific anti-pattern you will reach by following the false abstraction strategy is the lasagna architecture:
https://herbertograca.com/2017/08/03/layered-architecture/

Two literary works that helped me enormously to grok working with legacy code and programming in particular:

* Peter Naur's paper "Programming as theory building" - this was an amazing eye opener to me. It specifically highlights several problems that may arise when working with legacy code when the original developers have left the building.

* Michael Feathers: Working Effectively With Legacy Code - not to be read necessarily as a "how to" recipe book, but rather as a collection of philosphies and techniques to utilize when faced with a huge in-production codebase. It can be read as a recipe book if the examples match your situation, but that's not the point.
Yep, add in that it’s cross platform and there’s not much competition left in VS from my perspective.
A highly customizable and easy to use modal component for Angular
China has been filing tons of patents because of the national prestige it brings. A large percentage are of dubious quality and they are setting themselves up for a huge patent troll problem 10 years from now, much like the US had as a result of bogus late 1990/early 2000s patents.

The US patent system has become much better (although Europe is still even better). They now reject over 90% of business method patents (i.e., doing business with a computer). Many of those would be granted in China.

The number of granted patents in any given country is not a good indicator of technical progress.
Reasons Foldable Phones Are a Bad Idea
I think it would make the most sense for creators to have accounts on both Patreon and Facebook.
While mice are not humans (who would have known), we could do a lot better by moving away from using inbred mice.

More positively we could make a lot more use of domestic pets in research. If we started to treat more pets as research subjects we could really do a lot of great research.
Property Taxes is the simple two word answer. White School Districts come from proportionally wealthier tax bases.
Additionally, the vast majority of startups I've worked for, and am aware of, will not file the paperwork to let you 83b. AND, if you bring it up, they will probably tell you politely they're not going to bring up your request to the board and go through all that hassle just to hire you.
in austria the whey is flavored with fruit and sold as a drink
A Vancouver BC problem, too. Really, it's a problem with any city that has better support for disadvantaged populations (homeless, drug addicts) than the country it exists within—because those populations will flock to it in order to receive that support, and thus put a far larger support burden on city/NGO resources than you'd expect given the population.
Of course it does, but not if your filter lists aren't adequate.
> who are notorious for their adherence to rules.

That is a meme the Prussians have created to look more scary - to all other Germans.
Synchronizing and Sharing Data Between Microservices
My experience in the US is that Thai restaurants are the best bet for Hainanese chicken rice. It’s not on the usual Thai restaurant menu so any place offering it is probably doing so because they have a passion for the dish and/or their Thai clientele demand it. Greatly missed chicken rice until I figured this out.
Wet houses are something that's been proposed in San Francisco. IMO they would be a good start.
There's a lesson in Public Relations here.

The designers were criticized for their anti-homeless, hostile architecture. If I were the designer, I was thinking to myself as to how I'd respond. My initial thoughts on what I could say:

1. "I was given a set of requirements and this is what meets the requirements."

2. "No comment. Please address your complaints to the city council who commissioned the benches."

3. "You don't want to sit on a urine-soaked bench, do you?"

4. "I'm sorry but I can't solve the homelessness problem."

They all sound defensive. What the designers actually said is excellent. It could be a lesson in Public Relations:

The designers said that: "Homelessness should never be tolerated in any society and if we start designing in to accommodate homeless then we have totally failed as a society. Close proximity to homelessness unfortunately makes us uncomfortable so perhaps it is good that we feel that and recognise homelessness as a problem rather than design to accommodate it."
Good luck getting people to allow their pets being used for research!
Why our ancestors drilled holes in each other's skulls (2016)
Today you can buy yeast anywhere. But many hobbyist bakers take pride in their yeast and keep and maintain them in their fridge like pets. It may not be entirely logical, but I do understand the attraction, it's like having your own little buddy hanging around that helps you cook, personalizing all of your baked goods.
> That's already been tried.

Sure, and the shelters are full with long wait lists. It's almost as if there's widespread interest in getting off the street.

> SF spends more on homeless per capita than anywhere else.

Source?
Tree rings are absolutely used as a proxy to infer the past, the science is called dendrochronology, and the application of it is called

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

The limitations of it are known, and you won't find that the results of it are used for false claims by the real scientists:

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_Chapt...

What I'm posting above is the real report by the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. If you look in the context, tree rings are just one piece of the big and complex picture. See my other comment for an example how those who just try to confuse simply ignore (and don't even care for) geological facts when they try to push their agenda. The same happens with those who try to sell you the doubt and false claims about the state of climate research. The scientifically known uncertainties in using the tree rings as proxies aren't changing any facts about the reality of global warming.

It's undeniable basic physics. CO2 makes the Earth surface warmer because it blocks the part of the spectrum that would otherwise allow it to cool off. The part of the spectrum of the Sun that warms the surface up is however not blocked by the CO2. So the Earth gets the same effect that you have when you cover yourself with a blanket. It's warmer under it. It's undeniable and we are observing the effects every day:

https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/publications/techrpt83_Glo...

If we don't do anything the expected sea rise on US shores is estimated up to 2.5 m higher (8 feet) in 2100. The non-red lines in the graphs are for the scenarios if the humanity actually stops pushing CO2 in the atmosphere very soon. We're already not following the "blue" strategies.
Not disagreeing with the rest of your post, but...

> No one else had this at the time, and it was a big deal because Flash was still widespread so sites were even less stable than they are today.

I never saw a site crash my browser/tab until I used chrome.

To me it seemed like a workaround to a immature code-vase, because Firefox never had issues like this.

Either way: not really a selling point to me, at least.

WRT crashing stuff: I’ve used mostly Windows and Linux. Is unstable web browsers just a Mac thing?
Reporting in from Germany where the software situation is still pretty bad in many companies. Red flags are "UML", "Enterprise Architect" (actual name of a software package), and "model-driven development". I can handle legacy code just fine - you have to when doing C++.
Macro-based, non-intrusive data structures: https://gitlab.com/oliver117/ucds/tree/master/src
Sure, the risk is higher. But so is the potential reward. And that shouldn't go unnoticed.
kefir takes more maintenance though to keep healthy.

i described the process here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19269804
Make up to 6386 sales and 11,643 subscribers in7days, using single line code
Counterpoint: jaywalking is virtually nonexistent in Germany.
I've been using flamebearer to get flame graphs from node. It was silly how easy it was to use. Highly recommend it.

https://github.com/mapbox/flamebearer
Hainanese chicken rice in a thai place may be serviceable, but I've yet to have a good one. I live in NYC, and even here, with thousands of asian fusion restaurants, there are only 3 or 4 that serve chicken rice that compares well to Singapore.
as i memtioned elsewhere, i found that freezing keeps my starter fresh.
I think one could open yet another port and output a JSON entry per line with much more information, and just don't care about the old standards.
I too am a superior unix-like OS user. I had a long comment written up about how M$ sux and how dumb Windoze users had to constantly save their work. I lost it though because the power went out and I didn't save a copy.
that's interesting. i wonder how that tastes compared to milk yoghurt.
Show HN: Golang Pixel Game (Open Source)
> Maybe I installed chrome because I saw an ad

Or maybe you did because it was drive-by installed with other software, like common malware, something Google paid millions for.

Imagine if MS did anything similar with any of their products. There would be no end to the outrage.
Beagles are already commonly used in medical research.
People are actually very motivated to contribute to science, here's an example of research involving pets and extending their healthspan across aging: http://dogagingproject.com

Phase I clinical trial: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmid/28374166/

Phase II is in progress.

Interview with Matt Kaeberlein from the project: https://www.leafscience.org/dr-matt-kaeberlein-the-dog-aging...
I wouldn't call MSVC a C compiler until more recently.
So the question becomes - will China respect the USA's patents, will the USA respect Chinese patents?
It's not exactly a guiding principle, just more of an analysis & learning technique: Get ahold of a big piece of drafting paper, or a whiteboard, or one of those big-ass pads of paper they're always putting on an easel for silly brainstorming sessions. Something physical, big, writable, and not a computer. Set it up or pin it up or tape it up, semi-permanently, and use it daily to diagram and map out each new thing you learn about the system and its interrelationships. I'm assuming here that you have the space to set something like that up. If you don't, you're in a 3rd world programming situation and you have my sympathies, but you can always do something graphical within the computer, too, especially if you have a big screen or multiple screens. I just have always found it quicker to do it in a physical medium.
How to prevent the Visual Studio window arrangement from changing every time you breathe?
A bit of a sidenote but FSM for UI is a reason why algebraic data types systems like swift with its powerful enum is so valuable.
Not the author, but I regularly leave my computer with a debugging session open (because it's 7pm and it's time to go home). If Windows reboots, it sometimes takes hours to reproduce the bug and reach the same breakpoints again.
The Roland MT-80S Music Tutor: A Floppy Disk MIDI Boombox [video]
OpenAPI but for JSON RPC
Ask HN: Entreprise KeyStore management for android development
I want to manage the app signing without letting the developer team touch access the keys in the Keystore, is there any enterprise Key Management solution for App development?
Keep the goals of the code in mind: providing its users value.
It's a tool, even if you think code should be art. The code's purpose is not to look pretty or to get best marks in static analysis. It's this code that earned the company the money they are spending now on you. Clean code pays off in the long run, but might make you go bust in the short term. In the beginning of a project, it's usually a prototype and it needs to prove itself. Once it has generated some value, you can consider either spending time for quality improvements to negate the tech debt, or you re-write it with everything you have learnt from the previous version.
I’d guess adtech, market research and investment companies would be interested.
... which is a form of questioning why it's present. "Attempting to change it" in this situation is more like "submitting the pull request[1]" than "editing the code". The PR tends to only come together after one or more rounds of "git stash, try again".

[1]: or merging your branch, if you're solo.
People are really keen to allow their pets to be used in research as long as they understand the importance. Pets are a massive resource that is just being wasted.
On a practical level, getting really familiar with grep/similar for searching the codebase and using a debugger (I like the one built into VS Code for working with Node) will help you when trying to work out how it all fits together.

Depending on time and other constraints, upgrading the codebase to typescript would be a great way to both familiarise yourself with it and to make working with it more productive, but obviously you’d need client buy in.
I'd suggest the book [Working Effectively with Legacy Code](https://www.amazon.com/Working-Effectively-Legacy-Michael-Fe...).
yeah and then the UN would bloat up the browser with non browser concerns like blocking loli cartoons or whatever their current excuse is to waste time
> Now, I don't think we should necessarily try to compare or convert every place to one like Delft

Why not? I think we absolutely should.
> To this day Firefox is still lagging behind in its isolation.

That is being worked on though:

> The first batch of changes to not run extensions in private browsing mode by default landed, this is still behind a preference.

https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2019/01/31/these-weeks-in-f...
I always dreamed with a standardized, cross-platform, cross-arch, (sort of) automatic, non-blocking, DMA-based memory copying functions (like a special memcpy) for duplicating or passing big chunks of memory (like for example, H.264 frames or network packets, from a driver to user space).
SNCF has been closing local/rural train stations? The exact same thing has been happening in Germany for decades.

It's just bad federal policy, both in terms of allocation of funds for transportation as well as in terms of how they lead these publically owned train operators. And it's even possible to argue it's fine (I don't think it is), which is why it happened in the first place. Also: cars.

France, if anything, has always been even more enamored with fast trains to the detriment of anything else - iirc the TGV has a much more exclusive network than the ICE. That's money not spent on rural networks.

Anyway, I think the EU has very little to do with it. I've been following the debate for a long time and it's basically never come up.
Maybe people transition from A->B->C or other way over the course of a career.
Public means it is a service all citizen (aka the public) should benifit from. That doesn’t mean it is free of some sort of fee (see public libraries), but it also means it must be available to everyone (see public school).

A good public train network returns a lot of money indirectly, because it keeps all sorts of people mobile and therefore makes it easier for them to fill free positions. And in some areas (e.g. in the Alps) a good rail service is a huge multiplicator for tourism which means a whole industry profits from a cheap and well working train network.

The most important aspect of a public transport system is that it works well, is affordable and without disruptive changes can be so in 20 years time. The goal should be to reach these targets with efficiency.

I am not convinced that privatized railways offer any benefit for the public — they tend to grab all sorts of public money while closing lines that leave part of the public isolated, because there is not much profit to be made. In practise this can be observed in multiple nations. And public train networks have competition: busses.

In nations where people don’t rely as much on public transport (e.g. the US) it is only natural to come the conclusion that railways should be lead like private companies. People have cars anyways, gas is cheap, there is no real public transport network you need to compete with.
As the original poster points out, if you're not in the first few employees, the potential reward is smaller than what you'd make at a big company.
This reminds me of the mobile game Euclidea, which is a puzzle game where one must build geometric figures with as few operations/tools as possible:
https://www.euclidea.xyz/

It's really well designed, give it a try !
Show HN: Expensive Chat – Pay one cent per letter
There are no teams. I have to say even the statement "I believe in global warming" is kind of problematic, because your faith isn't required for it to be real. It is a thing that is, not a thing that only exists in your head.
exactly. i think once you are in the process of making it, keeping a starter around is also more convenient than buying a fresh one every time.

it's like why even bother going to the store...

the point was that a myth is something that hasn't been true for ages if it was true ever.

but keeping starters alive was certainly true for a very long time until very recently.
Counteproint: in my town, jaywalking is the norm because there are only 2 traffic lights. I regularly see people jaywalk in the city as well.

Usually the reasons for jaywalking are either 1) the road is empty or 2) late for a train/tram/bus.

edit: It should also be noted that jaywalking is not illegal in germany IF 1) you're not crossing the road at an intersection with traffic lights for pedestrians AND it is red or 2) you're crossing the road in the shortest and fastest manner without impeding, endangering or otherwise causing trouble in traffic.

So if you walked over the road, a police officer could at worst give you a stern talking to. If you crossed a road with a red light for pedestrians, you'd get a 5€ fine.
only true in american markets
You wouldn't choose a top-tier React & AWS dev if your veteran Cobol dev had just died of old age and your business-critical Cobol & SAP monstrosity needs urgent changes to handle this years's tax compliance updates. In that situation, you'll pay the $20000/week or whatever oaiey quotes you.

All right, so maybe you feel bad now about not listening to the engineering team and maintaining a continuous migration of your business-critical code to modern platforms over the last 30 years. But that's all in the past and your million-dollar business will be shuttered by the tax authorities in three months if you don't get this sorted out right now.

Maybe we'll have a world one day where everyone knows the "obvious" fact of technology leadership that everything should be continuously migrated to the state of the art. But maybe we won't, and maybe this fact isn't obvious at all, or even correct. Who knows?

In the meantime, people with skills that have an extreme demand/supply factor can command the highest rates, even if they won't be hired at tomorrow's startup. That's not to say it's a bad idea to learn current skills (for diversification), and definitely say no to working with legacy tech for small money, but that's really an orthogonal point to the one oaiey was making.
The idea that data is remotely as valuable as one of the highest energy density power sources known to man (at least that can be safely handled and conveniently used) is utterly bizarre and shows how much of a bubble the tech world has become.

Without oil we have a Mad Max style dystopia, without data perhaps your ads won't be so personalised.
> Do you know why platforms nowadays take 30%? Because it's well worth the 30%, that's why.

That is not the way things work.

Why does Apple take 30% of sales? Because Apple prices at the profit-maximizing percentage and because Apple figures that the profit-maximizing percentage is 30%.

Lower, and they leave money on the table. Higher, and sales volume goes down.

Ever hear of something called "consumer surplus"? A gallon of gasoline would well be worth $10 to me, but I pay a lot less then that! Why? Because of competition.
Google turbo-charging the back button with Chrome’s new “back/forward cache”
There are well established treaties for this. No country's patent office is forced to grant a patent filed in another country. For example, if you get a patent granted in the U.S., there's no guarantee it'll be granted in Britain. If you want a patent in both countries, you'll need to file a separate patent application in both countries.

The same goes for the U.S. and China. If a U.S. company only has U.S. patents, companies operating in China can make a product that directly infringes it. That said, the second that product is imported into the U.S., the U.S. patent will kick in, and you can get a judge to block it at the border.

Going back to the AI space, the fact that China has a ton of AI patents in their country won't stop Google from developing the same in the U.S. However, if Google tried to offer those infringing services to Chinese residents, they could be sued/stopped in China.
Some niches are of course different from the mainstream, but spending five years maintaining a VB6 application is unlikely to further your career a lot.
Locomotive hauled trains are quieter, as the passengers aren't near motors or the vibrations they cause.

As a passenger, I prefer them.
i'm a developer and i find it hard to give a shit about any of that, container tabs are cute but they end up breaking a lot of websites, the rest is not even a blip on my radar

as for addons changing how my browser works - no thanks, i'd rather have a consistently nice browser experience than have to re-install addons everywhere