skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience, a principal source of "technical debt" is product owners who either impose deadlines regardless of estimates ("we need this by the end of the sprint no matter what") or "negotiate" estimates down with questions like "well could you do it faster if the code was shittier?"

Neither practice is what I'd call "agile".
On just a small side note to remind our selves: Projects that didn't receive well in HN doesn't necessarily mean that HN didn't find it promising/useful or ignored it. It could have been posted at times when participation is low (e.g midnight), for example, so nobody actually saw it. Or people simply just forgot to upvote it, and it went unnoticed in the flood of too many other submissions.

I remember that I posted an article that I wrote to HN someday, and it got only 10 votes. Just a day later, some other guy posted MY article and got around 320 votes. I think it's just luck sometimes.
data source: https://www.interbrand.com/

method: https://www.interbrand.com/best-brands/best-global-brands/me...
I don't understand. I thought the great benefit of privatized healthcare was that it was not rationed - yet she was denied medication? How perplexing. /s
Apologies, my mistake!
Dropbox link
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
It's usually not the LED that fails, it's usually either the control circuitry or drivers that fail.

But even if you follow parent comment's suggestion of putting the smarts in the switch rather than the bulb you'll still have failure prone control circuitry and drivers in the bulbs. Switching to 12V might help.
I can't stand the presumptuous tone of this article. The author really has no idea which books his audience has read, or when they may have read them, so why is he talking down to us?

I happen to agree that some of those books are really good, but the tone of the article is so annoying I won't do more than skim through the list.
At Data Day Texas 2019, Jonathan Mugan of Deep Grammar presented an overview of the history of NLP's steps toward AI.
If you take "what locals eat" literally, the site would just be a big list of burgers from McDonalds. That's missing the point though. It's about local cuisine. Why bother with a German list if all you want to put in it is pizza and Döner.
> Learning isn't hard, but building muscle memory is a tonne of work. It's like learning to touch type all over again.

Muscle memory does take time to build up, but it goes much faster if you don't try to take on too much at the same time. Just focus on small pieces at a time. Spend 30 minutes fully focused on basic semantic navigation (forward/backward by letter, word, paragraph, expression; up/down by line, page). Spend another 30 minutes on navigating via incremental search (an extremely useful trick, it can easily replace half of your navigation). Etc.

(This is my tried&true method I used to master various tricks in Emacs.)

Also relax, and notice that half your frustration comes from the fact that you already know another set of conventions, and it's tempting to just stick to it. But the new one will get easier very quickly :).
Statistics About Remote Work to Make Your Company Better
Honda shows the near-final version of its compact electric car
Surprising amount of support for owning an vague idea. I'm all for copyright and patent protections (to a point) but this is a bit ridiculous.

If you're browsing this website on Chrome or Firefox running on Windows or Linux then you should be pretty happy about these "craven and unfair acts". We stand on the shoulders of giants.
In all seriousness, what are the advantages of stone? It doesn't hold up in an earthquake, it doesn't insulate, and it can't be renovated after the fact. I've encountered this mentality before and am absolutely baffled by it.
Rename a class in Java. This includes renaming the files (including git mv) and fixing up all references to it (not simple text-matching - actual parsed declarations).

In an IDE, I'm done before you can decide whether it's "worth it".
Good question! All of the network attacks have a whitelisting capability, to keep the host accessible. This isn't an issue with state attacks, as the client will come back online once the host reboots. And with resource attacks the client typically remains active, if your application is handling starved resources well.
With urxvt and hassle to install the correct font, it is doable to edit cjk using vim. Though it is less usable than using English, since you have to go back and forth to input cjk for input, and switch back to English for navigation and vim tricks. Some binding like f[some cjk work] becomes pointless since you are effectively typing f + (ctrl + shift) + (cjk word input) + (Ctrl + Space). You would rather use nano for extensive editing cjk. However, one or two words in cjk in some codebase is okay and not that bad.
Ask HN: How can a student make him/herself competitive in your sub-field?
Computer Science bachelor degree programs across the United States are growing at an unprecedented rate. While there is still high demand for new graduates, my impression is that the market for junior/entry-level developers is becoming more competitive. Further, in the world of academia, theoretical knowledge is valued over hard skills/experience that will jump-start a lucrative/satisfying career. Knowledge regarding what specific skills are valued in the workforce/how to get them is scarce.

Thus, my questions for you: What is your subfield, and what can a current undergraduate CS student do while still in school to become a competitive candidate for an entry-level position in your subfield? Examples of personal projects would be extremely helpful. Thanks!
Not at all. Less is more.

By using specific constraints (rules for sexprs), one creates a wider array of possibilities.

By having no rules (text), one has to provide a rubric on how to parse the text. And when you have to parse, you have to write a parser, and define the parsed format.
Astronomers Now Think They Can Explain Fast Radio Bursts
I certainly don’t speak for HN, but if there’s one case to made for software patents, IMO it’s narrowly focused claims for an innovation that is highly visible on the front-end of your product, or is the defining feature of your product. The type of thing that your competitors never even thought to do until they saw you doing it, and then can cheaply copy in a weekend hackathon.

Drawing a line on a map and having it snap to a route is probably not in itself novel. There may be things that Footpath is doing that turn a “cool idea in practice which doesn’t really work” into a exciting user experience that delivers a lot of value to their customers. Perhaps Footpath has even spent a large share of their limited engineering resources refining the feature to this point. That hypothetical situation to me is exactly when you at least file the provisional.

Even if you never file the utility patent, you can claim “Patent Pending” and [US] competitors would be more likely to hold off on cloning your UX straight away, or could maybe tilt the scales toward an acquisition.

A generic “snap drawing to route” should not be patentable due to I’m sure copious prior art. The question is if there’s something unique Footpath is doing to make it work particularly well for their users (TFA hunted that there was) that breaks new ground.
hey, some of us still read /.
United Airlines sued me last year for creating Skiplagged (2015)
Sorry there is a huge causal relationship if not the only reason. Wealth is not relative dollars but purchasing power. In a system where a hat maker and a shoe maker double their production, they respectively see no "wage increase" but they are both twice as rich.

Productivity -> more goods/services -> richer society, wages be damned.
I wonder if anything changed since then. Any experiences?
I think you're missing the point I'm making, they're different tools that serve different purposes:

IntelliJ is really great at managing large, statically typed, Java/Scala/Enterprisey frameworks. I have never seen a vim setup that effectively generates and manages javabeans. I have never seen a vim setup that manages an xml spring configuration file correctly (or even understands how to resolve xml namespaces and validate them.)

But vim is very lightweight, it's incredibly customizable, it's adaptable. It is faster for editing text. If you're writing a new language that doesn't have integration with IntelliJ's language protocol, it's probably better. If you need to jump into the source code of other libraries to understand what's going on, Vim tends not to be good at that sort of thing.

Regardless of which you think is the chisel and which is the chainsaw, there are some software engineers trying to cut down trees and some trying to make marble statues. The "all software engineers who don't use my tools are fools!" mentality doesn't make sense.
Never too late to upvote it, I suppose
I was quoting parent, but the worst tricks have mostly been enabled by tech - the sixties through the millennium seem quite benign compared to today.
I feel like there are easier ways to get someone's wifi credentials, particularly with the weak passwords folks tend to use (I am guilty of this as well).
It's true that not everyone has absolute faith in it, but there are quite a lot of people who have quite a lot of faith in it.
"still don't have"? For many years we did. "no longer have" is more correct.

* http://xahlee.info/kbd/i/kb/sun_keyboard_left.jpg
IIUC, iTerm2 has uniquely good integration with tmux.

If I knew I'd always have Mac as a client, I'd probably switch to using Tmux instead of Gnu Screen just for that reason.
you can use vi and vim, but I'll just use nano.
My local hydroelectric dam still runs on OS/2. And I don't think it's the modern eComStation 2.1 or anything. I mean old OS/2.
Yes, all six of us who prefer to read news a day late
Ha I blame the poor title for that post. Who wants to sleep under a kitchen table. :)
I have 64GB in my laptop... which might be taking it too far.
And we don't even know if those numbers have been released to the public yet. (they probably haven't since expenses take a while to compile, whereas deposits into a bank account are easy to count)

Eevenue is a useful measurement of how large the operation was.

There is some information about profit in the article:

>The rent for one apartment was $3,225, but it was on Airbnb for $250 a night. Hypothetically, Mr. Beckman could cover a month’s rent by filling it with tourists for about two weeks. In just a few months, Mr. Beckman had booked more than 500 guests and generated about $84,000 from the building at 78 East 119th Street, according to the city’s lawsuit.
Wow... that is embarrassing. Fixed.

I recently change the domain from nimblapps.com to nimblehq.com which I think is much better (but didn't get Recaptcha updated.

Would love any feedback you have. It is early but some cool ideas are in there.
The problem is the speed of non-sequential writes and reads. Writes can fall down to Kb/s in some cases, due to the way flash storage works and onboard controllers, that are optimised for sequential loads.
So can't use them as a cheap HDD upgrade options.
$165,000 for a chair, a table, wifi, and insurance... is a really outlandish assumption about per-employee costs.

An high quality chair is, say, $500 amortized over 5 years. A table, $100 amortized over 5 years. Open office space (at 65 square feet per employee and $100 per square foot per year) is about $6,500. Insurance is about $7,000 a year per employee - total.

So, under 10% of that extra per-employeee revenue is what the actual costs for those "bonuses".
MBTA – Software Engineer
Here's a real opportunity for one with the appropriate skills. It's very likely that the copy for this article has been run through a spell-checker (although that's not certain) and yet we have this:

If you think about people
who have lived through that
pace of chance ...

Clearly that should be "change" and not "chance". So there's a place for a "spell-checker" that would catch this kind of error.

Or does it already exist, and I've not seen it ...
But the parent's point remains: a Java NPE and a panic because of unwrap are really equivalent. Not really unsafe in the C sense, but equally bad as unhandled crashes.
I agree "any mice trial" is too strong a statement, and also 4 groups is kind of infeasible. But I do think there is not enough research on how these particular inbred mouse strains might bias research. Even the same strain sourced from different companies have produced different results, due to microbiome differences [1]. It's possible that we are way "overfitting" to these particular academic mice

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5870873/
I largely agree with your post, but disagree with the idea that intuitiveness and power are often opposing.

I believe that intuitiveness always helps with power. It’s just that the audience when defining intuitiveness shouldn’t only be limited to newbies. Unfortunately, we seem to conflate “intuitiveness” with “intuitiveness for newbies”. However, if you’re creating new power features, those features will always be better served if they are more intuitive for the intended users, I.e. power users. (conversely, they will be worse off for power users if they are designed to be intuitive to newbies).
> FORTAN

I have not thought of FORTAN as legacy because whenever I need to look at very old FORTRAN code I am looking at mathematical structures such as matrices and vectors. At that point I am not thinking of FORTRAN anymore but another language (such as linear algebra) which is few hundred years old but still so crisp in a world of numerical computing.

HOWEVER: I cannot say the same about ABAP or Java that initially began to take shape in an enterprise system 20 years back. Then I have to go through reams of code that is truly legacy, hard to navigate through years of modifications, dependent heavily on local contexts, personal perferences, etc.
To be honest, these days it's harder to justify those 30%, as what you get from Steam marketing-wise today is just a poor shadow of what you were getting five years ago.
I think most writers at this point realize no one reads the intro paragraphs at all, and just skips to the bolded/underlined bullet points. If you're getting paid per word or article, there's little reason to focus hard on writing a good intro paragraph for these kinds of articles.
Self reply with more questions/thoughts. based on what I know, it seems like the problem could break down as:

1. we have a lot of training data for the voices of white men reading stuff.
2. We have good models that already exist for removing background noise.
3. We might be able to build good models that could identify accents, gender, age variation.
4. we have good models for style transfer that work in the audio domain.

Could we take an audiobook read by a white guy, and use a style transfer model to give him a german accent, and then use the german accented version as training data back into the speech recognition model? Could you use a reverse style transfer model to turn accented audio into non-accented audio (i.e. normalize it all to the place where we have the most training data) Could we use a combination of style transfer models to vastly expand the training data set, and then train the conversational systems?

Or, are the style transfer models not good enough? Or do we not have training data for style transfers to turn the voices of white men into the voices of white men with german accents?

I don't want to trivialize, but I'm genuinely curious how professionals are actually trying to solve this now?
Ask HN: How long does it take for you to complete an MVP?
Just for comparison, how long did you take writing an app ready for launch?

Please include time (hours or timeframe) / tech stack (optional)/ previous experience in similar app.

In my case, an app technically similar to Appointment Reminder has taken over a year to complete. I work full time with family. Previous experience only in a simple app with no user data, and my job is in engineering but not software.
Wait, there's six of us?

eyes the room suspiciously
I know this can be a little controversial, but I do wish I had read TAOCP earlier, too.
i”d love to understand this as well. it seems to boil down to how to secure the (un)encryption key, since unencrypted secrets in (volatile) storage should disappear when the bulb is removed from power, and other secrets in long-term storage should all be encrypted by the one primary (un)encryption key. how do you secure this key? secure enclave seems to make it harder but not impossible (as kevin_nisbet points out).
Question to other engineers here. We were designing a "smart wine chiller" recently. Ran into a problem - small size sealed compressors are very, very, hard to come by, and if you want one that is also quiet, prepare your arm and a leg.

We ended up having the compressor custom made by local fridge factory. Engineers there told us that designing such a small piston compressor and hoping it to be reliable and efficient is a futile effort, but they still did their best.

Is between piston driven compressors, and peltier coolers, is there just anything on the market? More quiet and robust than small piston compressors, and more efficient than peltier?
I think all of things you mention have value, but all of that information is (and in my setup, displayed inline) located in git. We keep ticketing, author, rational, and version changes, and you can walk through the changes with the tracked intentionality by stepping back through the version control.
Exactly my thoughts. If I were this class of criminal, I'd be searching dumpsters or trash cans with the assumption that the network would probably be within 500 feet of that location.

It wouldn't be super helpful if I was trying to target a singular person but if I was just going to look for a bulb to use this exploit on, similar to how ATM hackers look for the models they know how to crack, I'd probably be able to find one eventually SOMEWHERE.
That's a feature that might work well with some plausible ways of guaranteeing memory safety in a type system because object reachability is a form of taintedness.
I agree with you, it is just a call to reality to those "lets rewrite everything in language X", without consideration that there is more to it than just grammar and semantics.

Also there are plenty of domains where Java or C++ aren't even taken into consideration, in spite of decades of effort.

Just to cite Microsoft's recent security recommendation out of Blue Hat conference, regarding their own software, "use a mix of C#, Rust and constrained C++".
This is most likely because of the function serotonin has on neurons and neural networks. 5ht is a g protein coupled receptor, and in the case of serotonin what happens when you hit one with an agonist is you set a cascade of second messengers intracellular that modify how the cell responds, such as adjusting the protein expression of different ion channels and/or receptors. This can lead to a greatly increased sensitivity to stimuli that already exists.
However, Stripe is still a US payment processor, and will be subject to the same legal concerns as other US payment processors (such as those raised by FOSTA-SESTA for anyone involved in any sex work). While you might avoid Visa/MasterCard's rules that come from such a legislative environment, you won't avoid Stripe's.
Spectre by Halide, Computational, Long Exposure camera for iOS
What is it about "parametric types" that wreak such havoc on error messages being intuitive? Is is it just the levels of indirection involved? If so is this also the reason for the slower/modular compilation? Thanks.
Yes that's also key for network admins - ironically I found when doing my CCNA that my experience years ago on PDP's cli came in handy on ios (the Cisco os).
It seems to be both, when I look at the discussion he gave as an example.
Intel unveils tool to speed up development of quantum computers – TechSpot
Text is a subset of binary, it surely doesn't hold that a CLI interface that only took protocol buffer based binary input would be more expressive then a text oriented input?
For my next car, I want something small & electric like this. Any recommendations?
> Sure if you have this insane VI/EMACS setup that you have tuned for years. Good for you, you probably are a fucking wiz.

To share a glimpse of the mindset of us on the editors side: that insane Emacs setup I've been tuning for years enables me to be "a fucking wiz" not just with Lisp. The very same setup lets me work efficiently with Python, Shell, configs, SQL databases, HTML+CSS+JS, running a personal Wiki, organizing tasks, tracking time spent on those tasks, billing customers for that time, reading/writing mail, and a bunch of other things. We love our editors because of compound interest - we get to reapply the same tricks to almost every task done on a computer (and we complain loudly when we can't shoehorn a task into editor-oriented workflow :)).

That said, I'll still grant you're better off with IntelliJ IDEA for Java. For the time being, at least. I'm having high hopes for language servers trend - they're the bridge that could enable vim and Emacs to reach feature parity in all the places they're currently deficient compared to IDEs.
To be honest C++-like templates are probably the worst way to do generics.

C++ templates can provide you with the joy of debugging exceptions for which no source code exists! Been there. Done it for my job.
Anti-cheat software causing big problems for Windows 10 previews
I use a showerhead shutoff valve -- when I'm shaving in the shower or doing anything that doesn't require a steady shower of water, I turn off the water at the showerhead, then I can flip it back on when I want water, and it continues at the same temperature/pressure it was before.

I also use a 1.5gpm low-flow showerhead (many "low-flow" heads are 2.5gpm).
Sometimes just title rephrasing does wonders.
Note that Liberapay had to change payment processors, and in the process they changed how the payments work (https://medium.com/liberapay-blog/liberapay-status-update-a7...).

I get the impression that they're getting into a state now where there's probably an "expectations mismatch" between what people expect to be doing when they set up a recurring donation compared to how Liberapay actually works.

As the blog post mentions, now you can say "I want to donate $5/month" and you put in $60 to cover a year, but you have to pay that full $60 immediately, and the recipient also receives the whole $60 (minus fees) right away as well. After that point, there's not really any way for the donator to change their mind and stop donating after a few months, so it's more like a one-time donation with a reminder but still being presented as a smaller recurring one.

I think the problem is that overall it will end up encouraging people to make smaller donations for shorter time periods because they won't necessarily want to commit for many months or years' worth up-front. Then that means that they have to be sent reminders to re-donate more often, which feels more annoying and will probably result in people just letting their donations lapse more often than repeatedly renewing them.
Thanks, appreciate it. If this one goes well, we may do a traveling version.
> You know, I'm not a big fan of Facebook, but this site should use it for vetting. You don't know much from a name, picture, and some attributes, but in all honesty I'd be more inclined to trust someone (at least to not be a psycho killer) after looking at their drunk pictures and wall posts than anything any central authority could issue.

Quite a prophetic reply, I gotta say.
But if they -- at least "quality" brand LEDs -- don't have really long (useful) lives, the cost premium over other types of light bulbs looks much less justifiable.

(For reference, according to http://www.lighting.philips.com/main/support/support/faqs/li..., "The normal convention is to measure the life from when the output has reduced by 30%, i.e. when there is 70% light output remaining.")