skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi, I created this one-time account to address some comments in this news item

I'm Thorin-Oakenpants, the creator and maintainer of the ghacks user.js. I don't want to get into a long discussion, if you want that then bring it up in the github repo.

---

The FF67+ changes that introduce cryptomining and fingerprinting protection have nothing to with anything in the user.js (except Tracking Protection preferences - which we have not included, and the TP prefs that are there are all inactive and not applied - we're happy to leave the defaults up to Firefox). TP's fingerprinting is about blocking fingerprinting scripts, whereas actual anti-fingerprinting in terms of privacy.resistFingerprinting or disabling WebGL etc are about stopping JS etc leaking too much entropy in the first place.
Yes declarative knowledge is totally overrated. Procedural knowledge is the hard part.

I think the "elites", who are of lower intelligence[1] and only fit for parroting half understood declarative knowledge, have successfully managed to manipulate public opinion that declarative knowledge is superior to actually knowing how something works.

[1] They have high psychological/manipulative intelligence though, which is needed to convince others to do the actual work.
Fair enough.

Its all rusty barbed wire fence by us, so rationally it doesn't make a difference, wouldn't want my kids injuring themselves on something like that in the garden though.
How does this work? All the walled gardens are voluntary.
Some company later released Great Giana Sisters games for the Nintendo DS (and presumably some other platforms, maybe PC) with updated graphics. Roughly the same gameplay but very different look and feel.
Yeah, they could just have replaced the sprites in Giana Sisters to Mario and there you have it :-D
To the extent that might have ever been true, it would have been because of the limitations of very low resolution displays, or to work around limitations in the vector rasterizer.

In any modern context, a vector is always preferable as it will generate the best output for an unlimited number of sizes, resolutions and contexts.
I would prefer a separate app if the only alternative was something that required Chrome.
Better than 1 but still terrible.
Has anything changed? This sort of crass humour is still on TV. Has the percentage of the population that disapproves of this type of humour really changed? Maybe the nature or visibility of "outrage" has changed? even just by social-media + the politicization of us-vs-them moral culture wars?

Our perception of "what is causing outrage, by whom and how much" is being used as a political weapon across basically all media, as far as I can tell. So it's pretty hard to tell in what ways some culture(s) / subcultures might be changing over time.
Memory and Parallelism Analysis Using a Platform-Independent Approach
16 of the world's best coastlines (2018)
Most foreigners who can afford to come to the US for a post graduate education come from a relatively comfortable situation at home.
You're not knowingly consenting to your life's history being sold and traded on a black market that's then used to target you for such speeches when browsing on the internet

I don't think the mechanism matters fundamentally here. I do think it is wise to consider all political speech fraudulent by default, whether it happens on public spaces or on the internet. They're all selling anyway, and if someone approaches you to sell something you know they have more to gain than you do.

Then, we have this internet which is somewhat good at targetting content based on your online activities. This internet is used by virtually everyone to do targetted advertising and promoting of products, ideas, and younameit. I find it weird this would not be OK when it comes to politicians and political parties. They're out selling as much as the next guy, and the way to do targetted advertising is online.

It is another discussion whether online tracking is good or bad, how much of that happens with or without a consent, implicitly or explicitly, but because online tracking is prevalent it would be foolish to assume that nothing you do online will be tracked. Any advertisement, political or otherwise, must be assumed to be targetted at you before interpreting its meaning.

I don't find a single thing that would make a targetted political advertisement inherently worse than any other targetted non-political advertisement or any non-targetted political advertisement.
Giana Sisters was rather simplistic compared to Super Mario Bros, with many fewer elements on screen at once, fewer animations, simpler physics, and smaller stages. Giana Sisters was great at the time but it really isn't comparable to what the developers of this clone have managed.
Austrian government seeks to eliminate internet anonymity, with severe penalties
Caveat: I can only speak for myself and don't know if these are extrapolatable to others. I can't say I'm an über-focus person, probably mediocre, but I use tools to help be better. I know co-workers who would be in a deep focus while the house is burning around them, and I'm not at that level.

TL;DR: Reduce cognitive load.

Rule 1. Make your environment conductive to focus.

If you are in an open office, you have a shit sandwich to start with. So isolate yourself from the cognitive "filth and rabble". Long time ago I worked with a guy who built a cardboard wall and then wired a camo net over his cubicle, but maybe one doesn't have to go to such extremes.

Headphones: Use headphones and music to drown out co-workers talking and other noise. I don't play my absolute all-time favorite tracks on repeat, I play something I merely like: noisy stuff like some desert sludge metal or stoner rock -- I sort of tune out the music and the music drowns out all the noise. You'll need to experiment what music works best for you. I use Spotify and try to improve my playlists with new interesting music.

Tune your programming environment to have a look-and-feel that fades to the background. Nicer and duller colors. Learn all the shortcuts to be effective, and learn a powerful editor which gives you macros and regular expressions and whatnot. The less mouse you need the less mini context switch which is better.

Turn off audio notices, turn off all blinking "hey you have mail".

Rule 2. Coffee/tea in moderation.

Too much of too strong coffee within too short time makes my focus become scattered. My mind starts to get racy. The best thing is to dose coffee such that one doesn't go over the limit. A tea in the morning a few hours after waking up works quite well.

Rule 3. Notes and checklists.

It helps to be a compulsive note-taker. Before I start anything, I make sure to have a vague idea of what to do, then I make a checklist. I write down notes and think of next things to do while waiting for something. I do "self-retrospectives": when I'm done with a few hours work, I go through it and make notes and checklists of next things.

The checklist lives all the time, new things get added and old points get marked as red cross (not done, bad idea, didn't work, etc.) or green tick (done, clear, good idea, etc.). I use a program called Zim but you can do it with any editor.

Rule 4. Train your memory.

I've noticed it becomes easier to suppress problems from tiny context switches that way. One is less likely to forget the context prior to the interruption, and the notes help a lot with this, too.

Rule 5. Rest to recover.

When you're not at work, you're not at work and you should not be thinking about work either. Exercise, read, do something else you like.
In my experience, most are relatively rich compared to other people in their country. I am under the impression they have to pay full price (which the schools love) and they pay cash since loans are not available.
Assumption? It was mainly to compete with the Silk Road, India was known.
Kinda related: It seems clipart died with Google image search and the only alternatives I can find are things like the noun project[1] or fontawesome[2] both of which require a subscription, rather than a purchase, and neither really fills that clip art use-case.

I'd love to purchase a clipart set like in the old 90's days of power point.

[1] https://thenounproject.com/accounts/pricing/

[2] https://fontawesome.com/pro
And then he tested it on 59 different computers, just to make sure it works?
I understand why PHP started to add support for type annotations as the hype around type annotations (Dart, Flow and Typescript) still was quite strong a few years ago.

By now I think it is quite obvious that type annotations aren’t as helpful as initially expected and that a library approach seems more pragmatic and more powerful. See Clojure + Spec.

The thing is dynamically typed languages with type annotations tend to no longer feel like dynamically typed languages as the annotations and the tooling spreads and spreads and spreads. Not easy to put up boundaries.
>Beowulf just isn't that significant or relevant in popular culture - it just isn't. I don't even know why this is controversial.

I dunno, all those superhero films are doing pretty well.
How exactly is that "eating up global market share"?
I programmed C back in my high school years 14+ years ago. Today I am mostly using JS because it is the cash crop of the industry, and it made me quite some money when I was away from electronics business (my main occupation) for a year after getting troubles with Canadian visas.

To me, it feels that there is a very thick wall in between high level languages and something with raw data access like C, C++, and D. You either completely throw out every convenience feature, or go all in on them.

In C, a lot of data access turns into single digit number of load/store or register access instructions. It is easy to see that it is close to impossible to add fancy data access functionality on top of that without going from single cycles to kilocycles.

I was once told "when your try improving a programming language performance, it eventually turns into C"

P.S. on JIT - it is not given that a JIT language be automatically faster than a well written interpreter on a modern CPU. One of early tricks of making fast interpreters was to keep as much of interpreter in cache and data in registers as possible to benefit from more or less linear execution flow of unoptimised code in comparison to unpredictable flow of JIT made executable code. Today, with 16MB caches, I think the benefit of that will be even bigger.
Neurofeedback isn't quite the same thing as neuro-stimulation. Neurofeedback just encourages (through positive feedback) the brain to stimulate itself :)

I've been practicing meditation for a few years and it has slowly but steadily improved my ability to concentrate. (Also worth mentioning that witnessing emotions as a field of sensation allows them to "dissolve" instead of getting stuck, and has helped me overcome various addictions and roadblocks.)

Meditation was shown to develop the prefrontal cortex (involved in decision-making, working memory, inhibition, emotional regulation..), which is (are) underdeveloped in people with ADHD.

I'm wondering how this kind of independent, willpower based practice compares with the constant external feedback of neurofeedback training, seeing as one of the main deficits in ADHD is self-motivation. My guess is that a combination might be most effective: train the concentrated state itself to make it more accessible, and then train the will (habit) to access it.

Or put another way, make use of both internal and external technology :)
Have you ever actually tried moving to a different country? Its exponentially harder than moving a few miles down the road.

Plus this argument is losing the point that the government is already spending the money trying to temporarily fix the problem instead of using that money to buy up the properties at a price point that would allow the residents to move.

I know not everyone would want to move, so I'm personally a fan of mandatory flood insurance in those flood prone areas. When there inevitably is a flood the resident can rebuild from their own pocket or use the insurance to move.
No, types can be at compile level. They can also be checked without compiling any time you like. Or automatically. By an IDE, for example.
Why is the tallest skyscraper in western europe being built in rural denmark?
A failed OS is being paired with a failing Mobile manufacturer. Good riddance.
It's already a thing, see how the FBI caught Silkroad admin. Although not in the automated fashion that you suggest, I am pretty sure the algos are already in use.
I would argue there would still be value in offering simple to use APIs/hard to misuse APIs and separate advanced APIs. If the calls to RNG are becoming a bottle-neck, you can still switch to the advanced API.

To me that seems like premature optimization.
there's like a thousand services like this in Europe.

The US is lagging the UK (for example) by at least 2-3 years when it comes to banking.

To understand how far behind the US is, take this example: the London Tube (subway) started accepting contactless payments at all of their stations years ago. All they did was turn it on; all the functionalities were already built into the normal card readers years before that.
Here's another example: all banks in the EU are required to offer APIs for consumption.
I agree with the general sentiment of your statement. Isn’t it ironic that the strongest defenders of capitalism are the ones which are trying the hardest (and often succeeding) to monopolize (a niche of) the market?

While I would not argue that there are never arrangements in which centralization and support of monopolies may make some sense (e.g., to speed up coordination or make it easier to enforce regulations), there should probably be more consideration about the societal down sides of “economic moats”.

One interesting example for the economic and societal benefits of this “collaborative” kind of thinking could probabaly be the dutch health care provider buurtzog, which has been scaling like crazy but also seems to have been engaging with a variety of partners to actually help other people understand and replicate what makes buurtzog work. I bet that exchange was fruitful and interesting to both sides (there is always more to learn) but also premised on the idea that the primary goal of any business should be to help solve a problem and not to (primarily) defend its own existance. Encouragingly, both things generally correlate if done in the “right” order but it’s also hard work.

https://www.buurtzorg.com/collaboration/our-partners/

P.S. I know I am somewhat simplyfing here as there are certainly different phases in a businesses lifecycle where different trade-offs may be applicable. I am just commenting on a general mindset which seems to be pretty prevalent.
Can add this https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/tiny-danish-town-p... and
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/apr/01/like-the-eye-... which leads off with 'Like the Eye of Sauron'
And if Mozilla keeps making the same mistakes it will go nowhere.
Excellent! Using the title "Show HN: about:blank"...

hncynic 1 minute ago

I really like what you do! It works great for me on Chrome though, so please make it work.

hncynic 1 minute ago

I really like the idea of a simple "blank page" that could be easily scaled up and then added to an existing page as a new tab rather than clicking on links at some point.

That way you don't have to have to manually edit pages to get the information you want to see, just click through to it.

You could also get something like this with the extension "Remove Blank page", which was my only use of it and made by others.

hncynic 1 minute ago

This is really cool. I think this would allow the user to change color of the site (I think there should be a visual indicator of how much time was spent doing this). This is an especially usable tool, I think
Do note that I was talking about 'migration', not about 'asylum seekers'. Also, when discussing migration (of any sort) to Sweden it is best to keep to verified sources - SCB being a prime example of such - as the discussion around this subject is so polarised that anything less than pristine data is suspect. Random spreadsheets don't count as verified data.
My point is you cant blindly rely on labels to decide whether food is safe, you have to use common sense.

In most cases that extends to using my senses, but if I'd left a bottle of milk outside for a week in summer, I wouldn't sniff it to 'check'.

Also the original comment mentioned best before, not use by. But use by dates are a useful tool, I'm saying you shouldn't just blindly rely on that.
Also, the uses of preservatives, refrigeration and antibacterial agents means that the way food goes bad today is very different than the way food went bad when our noses evolved.

For example, flies circling round meat would make most people instinctively think twice before eating it. In most environments, they will appear within a few hours of the creature dying. In your fridge, the flies won't hatch, taking away a vital signal marking the age of the food.
Yes it is optional until it gets hard to find a job with typeless Ruby. And indeed split Ruby communities just as with Javascript. The bad thing is that static typing in dynamic languages is HOT, which means if you don't move over to the typed camp you will look old and stupid.
Yeah. I follow you on twitter. Can you write a blog post about your workflow? That would be an interesting read.
Random story/world/society generator, targeted at authors, game developers, and DMs.

There's a lot of very inaccurate ones. There's a few very accurate ones, like DF and Civ, but these require too much effort. I'd like to have something where someone can just bash buttons for inspiration, mostly pulling content off TV Tropes.

Some content might be crowdsourced, e.g. we could have a random clothing generator, where all the clothing is custom written by humans. Or say, a random village generator.

The crowdsourced and TV Tropes sourced content would be free.

Monetization might be subscribing to premium content. Content is written by higher quality reviewers, and payment goes to them, either as a Spotify-like "pool" or direct purchasing of bundles. So if you wanted a desert themed world, you can buy a desert-themed bundle.

Another monetization route would be picking a target market and focusing on tools for that market. Say, a DM-themed tool which generates dungeons or pickpocketing results.
Yes and no. You need to basically fork the compiler and invent a new type of ruby that sacrifices certain things in favor of performance.
Dutch person here. This is not a technical problem but a mentality problem. Louisiana has been under Republican leadership for some time. Part of the Republican agenda seems to be downplaying the notion of climate change and the associated side effects like e.g. more hurricanes and sea level rises. Well, if nature proves politicians wrong, things get ugly. Put bluntly, Louisiana needs to own that problem and stop relying on federal money and the army to fix things while they pretend this is not an issue and cut taxes and corners on keeping themselves safe.

Simple solution, acknowledge the changes that are coming, start planning accordingly and get shit done. I'm pretty sure neither Republicans nor Democrats believe in wet feet as a long term sustainable political agenda. This shouldn't be a political debate. Either you do something about it or you don't. The next time these levies break, there will be a public outrage: heads will roll.

So, the pragmatic thing to do would be to come up with a better plan than hoping that won't happen, which seems to be the current plan. And yes, that's going to cost money. Lots of it. The alternative is accepting the likely disasters and then mopping up the damage at much greater cost. Katrina cost well over a hundred billion. The budget for preventing the next such disasters (plural) should be of a similar scale.

The good news is that that actually is an investment that can give birth to an industry that is likely to have its work cut out in the next decades as world + dog will be facing the same issues. Also, as I understand it, Louisiana could use some employment opportunities. Big projects like this always have positive side effects.

The Netherlands had their wake-up call in the 1953 when a severe winter storm + spring tide flooded a large part of it. The subsequent decades we fixed our infrastructure with some massive projects at the cost of many more billions than are on the table for this in the US. The companies that helped do that still exist today and are involved in very lucrative projects across the globe (e.g. building islands off the coast of Dubai, off shore airports, etc.). I believe there was a fair bit of consulting after Hurricane Katrina as well. Business is booming for these companies. Great return on investment for Dutch tax payers and we got to keep our feet dry.
As an accessibility advocate, I always highly appreciate accessibility-first libraries. Thank you :)

I agree with Nadya. Wrong or false labels do in fact cause more harm than good. I understand that you want to provide sane default, but I would rather encourage people to edit the labels themselves (maybe add a message box somewhere).

I've also tested an example icon with Firefox + NVDA (inline SVG), which leads to the following screen reader announcement:

Add Icon of a plus sign enclosed in a circle graphic

This has multiple issues from the accessibility perspective:

1. IF you are using a title + description, use aria-labelledby for the main label (= title) and aria-describedby for the description. Right now there is no separation and both labels will be read without a pause, making no sense (what is an "add icon of a plus sign .."?).

2. I would advice against using a description altogether. A screen reader user does not care about how the icon looks. He/she cares about the action it performs. So here, "Add" (depending on the context) is more than enough. As a general tip: Screen reader users should have access to the same information as sighted users. That's why we don't describe decorative images for example (alt=""), because there is no information behind it.

3. "Icon of" is unnecessary. As you can see in the NVDA output, when using "role=img" the user already knows it's an graphic. Hence, "Icon of" or "Image of" should not be used in image descriptions.

4. Keep in mind, there are still some issues with SVGs and screen readers to think about [1]. Therefore I also prefer to use the labels on the enclosing elements (buttons, links) instead.

I hope, you find my tips helpful. Keep up the good work!

[1] https://haltersweb.github.io/Accessibility/svg.html
And how much money do you donate to Mozilla to fund their abandonware habbit?
But wasn't this explained in the article, already. Dynamically stable plane doesn't aggressively rotate along any of its axis, for example, when you increase or decrease throttle. The location of MAX engines generates additional forces to increase pitch when engine power is increased, and even more so when the plane is already pitched high. Earlier 737's could do without MCAS because they were designed with smaller engines in lower locations in order to be dynamically stable.
Too bad i'm starting to be too old

I am rather thankful that I'm starting to be too old for this bs.
One benefit of the "old" way is that if the prosecution omits evidence, it can be grounds for an appeal. If the defense skips something, there's no grounds and they're just out of luck.
The lack of capitalization and the random bold words and links make the text really hard to decipher.

Since this is a design blog, it is probably on purpose, but still, this looks bad and probably limit user engagement (I did not even finish the extremely short article).
People do, though; There is a thriving market for (heavy and expensive) stuff built to last a really long time. Obviously, if you want your product to be light and/or cheap, especially if (as in my case) your light product is supporting something very heavy, some sacrifices will have to be made.