skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Basic idea: to verify your robot in a quick and harmless way, disconnect its actuators, feed fake data to its sensors, observe its stream of decisions, and verify that it behaves according to some rules.

If your robot has different parts with their own rules of behavior, then you should be able to detach them to test them on their own, or in a much simpler test harness.

I think the complaints about unit tests often amount to “we’re taking the robot apart into too many parts that actually depend on each other in complex ways, so testing them independently is tedious and gives us little real information.”

Another kind of complaint is “our robot has a huge amount of functions that all interact in very complicated ways and we haven’t specified any overarching principles so our tests are just a lot of arbitrary scripts that we have to change constantly to accomodate the robot’s ever-changing repertoire of fascinating behaviors.”

Or “there is no exhaustive list of our robot’s sensors and actuators, and many of them are complex third party products which we integrate without any adapters, so it’s nearly impossible to take the thing apart and provide a realistic simulated environment.”

I think the underlying complaint is something like “we were told that there was an easy method to make our software correct, and it’s disappointing that it doesn’t work well without considerable investment into domain modeling, architectural work, mathematical analysis, etc.”
Yikes, all that work and expense for a program that flew four missions. Two transferred all the tech to both USSR and China, and the other two suffered mysterious film recovery mishaps that prevented any intelligence gathering. It's no wonder they were so eager to get spy satellites figured out.
This pureview-camera is designed by https://light.co who bagged $121m [0] in Series D funding lead by SoftBank a year back to develop what they call 'software-defined cameras' (SDN/IDN/NFV equivalent of the computer networking world, I guess). We might see more of these.

Here's a talk from co-founder Rajiv Laroia on their first camera, L16: https://spot.light.co/the-l16-under-the-hood/ ( https://youtu.be/vKmC9xWHhM4 )

The fancy camera aside, I'd have tough time recommending a Nokia device after they were caught sending user-data to servers in China: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19449824 but then again almost all major android phone manufacturers are Chinese...

[0] https://angel.co/light
I think you know the answer: think about how you find out whether a human speaks English or not.
No, Chinese provinces don't have flags. The SARs do; municipalities have theoretically not been allowed to have their own flags since 1997, but several are still using flags from before then and others have adopted flags since then.
It's sometimes hard to know in advance whether your situation is unique or going to be of use to someone in the future however.

If it is completely unique and is of no use to anyone else, then it still of use to one person and still worth answering. Maybe SO just needs a flag for questions as 'unique situation' so it doesn't appear by default in future searches.

Also, SO isn't really a wiki. It's not designed that way. It's built around "this is my problem; what is the best solution?" interactions.
Every house has a connection to the water main - what happens after that connection point is not their responsibility to repair.

But they will shut it off if you don’t fix it in, say, 10 days...
And this leads to the question.. OpenBSD is famous for removing unwanted or outdated code. What makes scp a special case? Is it too used to be deprecated and removed?
My shell history is sure to show every use of ‘rsync <whatever>’ to be preceded by ‘rsync -n <whatever>’ to make sure I have the paths correct.
Regulators knew before crashes that 737 MAX trim control was confusing
> Finally, if that doesn't work, manually grasp and hold the trim wheels

You might think of grabbing and holding the wheels is there is a continuous movement there looking like an automated system going haywire. But with MCAS, it's not. It appears that the trim wheels move in short bursts in random movements, which they ALWAYS do. There is simply no reason to suspect that the wheels move in a single direction (pointing the nose down), unless you can visually see them. Which you can't because they're beneath and behind the pilot seat.
The little "web" link under the title of every HN post does that for you :-)
Only the ones that never make anywhere near to a profit.
Technically meaningless outside of the legal process, but not morally. I'm fine with people assuming guilt when spitballing in a bar or something, but when it leads to mob justice, then I think it's very much something people should try to keep in mind. Sure, we no longer do actual lynchings, but innocent people's careers and relationships still get destroyed too often.

Maybe not that large of a problem on a world scale, but it does feel very unjust to me.
Common mistakes in Go and when to avoid them by Steve Francia (Docker)(2015)
Sure! The entire source code of TeX has been published as a book called TeX: The Program, which is Volume B of Knuth's Computers and Typesetting series (the TeX and METAFONT manuals and source code, and the definitions of the Computer Modern fonts): https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde.html#abcde The major part of the book (just the program itself, without the book's 1-page preface, 2-page bibliography, 6-page instructions on how to read the program, mini-indices on each two-page spread, 1-page diagram of approximate memory requirements, and hand-tweaked typesetting) are also available in any TeX distribution or online e.g. http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/generic/knuth/tex/tex.pdf

It is written using a system called WEB, and Knuth calls the idea literate programming — see article at http://www.literateprogramming.com/knuthweb.pdf and the WEB manual at http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/generic/knuth/web/webman.pd...

All this is somewhat hard to read for most modern programmers IMO. In my free time I hope to make these more readable, and I've started with simply reading and annotating the simplest of the programs written in WEB: https://shreevatsa.github.io/tex/program/pooltype/ https://shreevatsa.github.io/tex/program/tangle/ — if anyone reading this is interested let me know (create an issue on the GitHub repo or something).
Yes, the whole idea that society as a whole must adhere to "innocent until proven guilty" is ridiculous.

How many people are sticking up for OJ Simpson?
Hmm, let's read this one.

> "March 28, 2019"

> "Fibers: the Most Elegant Windows API"

> "The Windows API — a.k.a. Win32 — is notorious for being clunky, ugly, and lacking good taste. Microsoft has done a pretty commendable job with backwards compatibility, but the trade-off is that the API is filled to the brim with historical cruft. Every hasty, poor design over the decades is carried forward forever, and, in many cases, even built upon, which essentially doubles down on past mistakes. POSIX certainly has its own ugly corners, but those are the exceptions. In the Windows API, elegance is the exception."

I'm glad OP just discovered in mid-2019 an API that has been there since Windows XP (ca. 2001). Why then, does OP start by crapping all over the Windows codebase?

You think the Fibers API is elegant? Have a look at IOCP. IO in Windows in general actually, since the days of Windows 95. Event management. Threading and parallelism. The kernel subsystem. The APIs in Windows have remained stable, consistent, forward and backwards compatible - from pretty much day one.
The word "apposite" is much better than the ones I suggested.
> Although WeChat’s primary user base is in China, an estimated 100 to 200 million people outside the country use the messaging service. Among them are millions of members of the Chinese diaspora in countries like Canada, Australia and the United States, but there is also broader expansion in much of Asia. Malaysia is reportedly home to 20 million WeChat users, out of a population of 31 million. In Thailand, an estimated 17 percent of the population has a WeChat account. In Mongolia, WeChat was the second most downloaded application in 2017. Merchants in Myanmar’s Shan state along the border with China have taken up the app and the number of retailers in Japan that accept WePay (mostly when serving Chinese tourists) increased 35-fold last year. Tencent recently purchased a $150 million stake in the news aggregator Reddit and is eyeing an entrance into the online video market in Taiwan, according to Taiwanese officials.

Edit : Also, remarkably, there's this : ...once an account is registered with a Chinese phone number, it remains subject to Chinese controls even outside the country.

And the article gives some examples about it and how the control is not limited to within China itself.
I actually think 1 41MP is less crazy than 5 8MP cameras.

5 lenses, 5 chips and 5 angles, seems hard to use in unison, so you end up having 4 cameras you don't use.
I was definitely in the same boat. I guess I'll just progressively phase out my use of scp in favor of rsync.
Can What We Eat Affect How We Feel?
I just fell in love with that API. That's seriously the first thing windows has which I really REALLY wish linux would just copy as is. It's simple and to the point, but there's nothing missing either. Perfect.
I think a political force that gets ignored is a contradiction of terms.
There is a big difference between "Innocent" and "not guilty", and there is a reason that courts return a "Not Guilty" verdict, and not an "innocent" one. Plenty of cases fall within a hair's width of "beyond a reasonable doubt", and I very much doubt you are going to be inviting most of the people falling in that category over to meet the family, after all they are innocent until proven guilty, and likely all around great people right?

Legal process fails plenty of times, saying that you are morally obligated to believe in its judgements is insane. The only obligations legal judgements place are upon the people being tried and the apparatus of the state, nothing else.
How Does a Mutual Fund Work
My wife is a physician. Four weeks ago she was in severe pain and could hardly walk. She drove herself to the ER at the hospital system that is also her employer. After getting admitted at the ER, the first person she saw was a lady to collect her $150 copay... While in severe pain and before seeing a care provider. That's the current US healthcare system.

She ended up having emergency spine surgery. Fused L5-S1 vertebrae and replaced disk in between.
I have used Bitcoin to buy various things and used it as a savings instrument, I see that it has solved problems for me. Of course I could use other tools for that, but if you think Linux is superior that doesn't invalidate someones experience who is using Windows.

Generally there seems to be lots of people who don't use cryptocurrencies and think that they don't solve any problems - OK whatever, don't use them, but there are loads of people using cryptocurrencies for whatever and your opinions are not objective measure on their value.
Why don't you delete them all automatically as soon as you've finished processing them?
I’m not worried about Tencent because the government can’t force me to use it.

If Huawei is in telco infra, I must use it.
This isn’t to say I wouldn’t worry about other, Western brands.
Actually you can be compelled whether you are a citizen or not, you just have to be in the country. So unless you have to give up your prior citizenship there is no reason not to proceed.

So please apply, and then maybe one day you can vote against those who support it.
> The thing is, we don't know what we need to hide tomorrow.

Or what others, such as journalists and whistle-blowers, need to hide today.
In France a 1 day stand in hospital is billed around 1000€, of course it is almost entirely covered by insurance. You have to pay a fee of 17€ a day if you have some standard insurance package. If you 'stay' at the hospital then all costs are bundled in this price, if you only follow exams they can actually get more expensive in total (usually they offer you to stay the night if you have exams that would cost more than a "full-pension")

This was a few years ago so the prices may have changed.
Again, that's all true, and all interesting, but it's not answering the question. I'm starting to wonder if this is a difference/distinction that people don't see, and perhaps can't understand[0]. People don't seem to understand the question I'm asking, and I genuinely don't know how to ask it differently.

Try to answer the question without referring to how the photocopier/scanner works, and only refer to what it does.

If anyone can see the difference, I'd welcome suggestions as to how better to ask the question.

[0] Experiments have been done with infants and adults, native French speaking and native English speaking[1]. There are vowel sounds which when played to the infants or the French-speaking adults cause different parts of the brain to light up, but when played to the English speaking adults cause the same place to respond. Not learning French seems to have resulted in the loss of ability to hear the difference between the sounds. Perhaps that ability can be trained and thus regained, but this is an example where not doing something (hearing and recognising the sounds) results in a physiological reason why an ability is lost.

Perhaps this distinction between "how" and "why" is an analogous one.

[1] For the infants this distinction is moot.
I found it to be a really big issue. But i guess it is about expectations. I bought iPhone XS expecting it to be a none-issue, but it also doesn't come with a converter.
Already hugged to death it seems: Error 502 Bad gateway

edit: working again. So far I haven't been faked ;)
Yeah, I remember the bad old days. The most spectacular P.O.S. from those days, for me, was SOAP. It makes me clench just thinking about it and it's wildly ironic name "SIMPLE object access protocol." What, like there are even more complicated protocols to transfer data? FML!

That said, sometimes you need/want to pick up some skills. I think it's good to do these on tractable problems that one can imagine scaling up smoothly, like this one. It's better than overly simple "hello world" and also better than trying to learn from a project where the technology is appropriately scaled and it would take weeks just to figure out what's going on.
I've been building websites since the mid-90s, and I'm not convinced the past was any better than the present.
“Innocent until proven guilty” is an example of cargo-culting in personal ethics. Or if you prefer, following a process while forgetting the principle that drove the creation of the process in the first place.

The principle is that for most people accused of a crime by the state, the state has much, much more power than the accused. To act as one check against abuse of that power, we establish a higher bar for conviction of a crime than for innocence.

But if Frank’s lunch is missing from the fridge, and he thinks Homer ate it, there is no massive power imbalance, so Frank doesn’t have the same burden of proof to decide to dislike Homer, or to accuse Homer.

Of course, if the state listens to Frank and decides to charge Homer with theft, then the state has a higher burden of proof to impose criminal consequences.

If homer is declared innocent under law because the state couldn’t prove its case, we don't go back to Frank and harass him for making a false claim. His standard for accusing Homer is lower than the state’s standard for laying charges.

After all, the state has investigators and attorney generals and grand juries and congressional panels and other apparatus for deciding whether to pursue a case in court.

We only go after Frank is he was truly reckless, not just on the basis of whether the state can meet the very high bar of proving the case in court.

People get this very badly wrong when it comes to accusations of sexual misconduct or rape from long ago. The standard for a person accusing another person is much lower than the standard for the state obtaining a conviction in court, and that is as it should be.
Aren't there more third party libraries for java than for go?
Then that is no reason to go from java.

Performance wise they seem to be pretty similar too. Of course not for startup time in serverless environments but for most server applications.

It sounds like we are down to productivity (and developer happiness) which are a bit unclear and probably different for different teams and organizations. I would guess that large organizations will get into problems if they switch everything to go and then have to re-train all developers, or hire new ones.
Ask HN: Resources for parents of special needs children?
My amazing, beautiful daughter just happened to bless this world with Down Syndrome last Fall. It’s been an absolute gift and has turned my world in an amazing direction.

Anyone else out there have children with special needs? Where do you turn to for answers and guidance from other families?
Ocaml with Ocsigen or Bucklescript/ReasonML
Chinese Wikipedia is blocked. I thought parts of English Wikipedia was blocked somehow as well, but seems like that's outdated information (after they started enforcing https in June 2015[0]). You'll find a list of the blocking methods on the Great Firewall wiki article[1].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Wikipedia#China
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall#Blocking_method...
Commando, Infantry or Police – what kind of software developer are you?
> All of those sweet Fortnite hours-played are going to do well for your social credit score.

On the contrary, Chinese regulators have been forcing gaming companies - including Tencent - to impose playtime limits.
It varies from adapter to adapter. The one that came with my Pixel works on my 2018 MBP.
yeah, pretty much. If someone implemented scp's command-line with sftp underneath then we could start the (slow) deprecation process.
Connection Between Lord Ganesha and the Swastik Symbol by Life Guru Dr. Chawla
not yet....but... :)
yep needs some tuning // added some more resources to it
For those that are into maps and for one reason or another haven’t learned about it yet I highly recommend the Mapire.eu website, which is basically comprised of old Habsburg and Austrian-Hungarian maps. This late 1700s Habsburg map [1] of almost half of Europe is a thing a beauty once you zoom into the details.

[1] https://mapire.eu/en/map/europe-18century-firstsurvey/?layer...
Map of the Internet from 1973
This deserves a link to a great article from The Onion. =)
https://www.theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-bla...
>More seriously, I feel rails is still excellent and I'm happy to work with it every day. I'd be interested to hear more about what makes rails not modern?

The whole thing he explains in the post: he wants an all-rounder like Rails but which covers the SPA/JS side.
Oh didn't know that one - thanks!
earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13157090
> All the pics and their vectors stay on this small server.

This should be mentioned on the website.

> if you want to be deleted please drop me a letter wastemaster@gmail.com

There should be an easier mechanism to request a deletion of our photo. Better still, request permission from the user to store the photo in your servers before actually storing them.

I think this is the bare minimum of transparency that should required before letting people upload personal data, especially in this day and age.
Can this same algorithm be used to find doppelgängers?
These are fabulous - they take serious work to follow through, but are clear, and give a great sense of structure.

Great work - props to Jon Worth!
If you want to feel young, have a baby at 40 JOANNA GAINES
> Tencent certainly complies with Chinese laws in china, but can you blame it? Wouldn't you comply with the law of your country?

Since you've put yourself out here as CTO of a Tencent owned company... I've heard that in China, Fortnite requires a Chinese "real ID" to play. Aka China knows exactly who you are at all times.

They also "punish" you for playing more than 3 hours at a time if you're under 18.

And I can't prove, but assume they also record all conversations (otherwise... What is point of using real id??)

This doesn't sound like something Epic games would want to be associated with if Tencent wasn't a major shareholder. Are you saying you've had no pressure at all to implement similar features and make your games "more friendly to the Chinese market"?

To me it feels just like China buying up slivers of hollywood so nothing critical of the regime makes the big screen
I've found that Elixir & Phoenix are the right abstraction of Rails-like productivity but "enterprise" reliability and scalabiliy. You get real-time functionality out of the box (dosen't feel cobbled together like Rails channels and blows anything Node out of the water). And with LiveWiew coming soon, it's going to be even quicker to build modern interactive experiences.
150 cows (plus the ~75 bull calves she's fattening every year) on 12 acres? That's not a farm, that's a feedlot. I don't see anything about her manure arrangements? Somehow I suspect a different article would have been written had this farm been located in USA.
> I'm glad OP just discovered in mid-2019 an API that has been there since Windows XP

Can I bring to your attention the second para:

"That’s why, when I recently revisited the Fibers API, I was pleasantly surprised."

I don't think it's the author's first rodeo. The article reads like a retrospective look at the fibers API and how well it's aged.
Some phones support audio accessory mode, which is a way to reserve some pins for analog audio signals. In this case, you only need a passive adapter. There's no reason why desktop or laptops computers couldn't support it, too, but if they do, it's rare. So such an adapter is unlikely to work with a computer, and may not work with all phones.

The alternative is an active device, with its own DAC and amplifier. This is more likely to work with all your devices; I'm pretty sure I could connect my desktop computer's external USB headphone amp to my android phone and it'd just work.

Details: https://www.soundguys.com/usb-audio-explained-18563/ https://www.androidcentral.com/usb-c-audio
Oh man, that is not OK.
I completely disagree on point 2 and 3:

The trackpad is by far the biggest sell of the macbook series. If PCs came with just as well working trackpads, I would consider switching.

The keyboard is wonderful to use when it works. Mine hasn't failed, but it is a fear I have, and a fear I shouldn't have. But a working butterfly keyboard is a great keyboard.

> Does anyone really use the full size of that thing?

Yes, all the time.

> Do people really find gestures to be all that important that you need as big a touchpad as this?

You obviously don't need it. It is better than a smaller touchpad.
actually, sftp is a bit more scriptable than scp. You can pass sftp a "batchfile" of commands and control per-command whether their success should terminate the batch.

scp wins on brevity of commandline syntax
The New Sion EV Electric Car Uses Solar Panels to Charge
I had a Nokia 3650 for 4 years that had a 640x480 resolution, and it took amazing photos.

I also recently had a Nokia with a 12MP camera that was essentially garbage.

You can't really compare megapixels to megapixels, as the lens is more important.

You could have a 200MP camera, but if you're using a pinhole lens, you're just going to have 200 megapixels of crap.
I may be mis-remembering, but I thought Martin Gardiner or one of the other bogus science writers did a take-down on how truly awful the science was, going into and coming out of Biosphere 2. is there really a lot of new information here?

I don't think retrospectively, you can fix opening the airlock and bringing things in and out, without fundamentally questioning the "sealed world experiment" problem