skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Best zoom feature is the magic screen share. Just being in the physical room I can hit share screen and it will find the right meeting. I think it uses inaudible sound to identify them right room.
This is gorgeous, particularly the shadow chases across the disk of Jupiter. But I can’t help wondering what the xkcd What If? version would look like...
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Most programming languages change the meaning of one of the most common mathematical symbols. There are at least 3 meanings of "X = Y".

Pascal: Is X equal to Y?

C: Change X, making it equal to Y.

Mathematics: X is equal to Y.

Those are all valuable in programming. Normally programmers get the mathematical meaning via a feature such as __assume or __builtin_expect or assert. It can be used for optimization. When the constraint is violated, various bad things can happen. The code can run slower, halt with an error message, or behave in an undefined way.

Every new generation of programmers starts off expecting the mathematical meaning. I don't know of any programming language which uses it. Ideally that would be fixed, but the change might be difficult for the current generation of programmers.

Note that the Pascal meaning can be fairly compatible with the other meanings. The solution is simply to be aware of context. On a line by itself, X=Y makes no sense as an equality test. Within the controlling part of an "if" or loop, assignment need not be supported. That does the job. Alternately, the meaning could change by having a keyword in front for assignment ("let" is popular) and/or for the assertion. So we could distinguish all three meanings with syntax like "if X=Y", "let X=Y", and "assume X=Y".
Works for me on Uber Conference, Gentoo/Xfce
Slack? At least my colleague shares his screen with me weekly and he uses Linux mint
I do that, and I agree: I wish people would spend as much time complaining about other people as they do helping them. Yet, 40% of my paycheck is still taken against my will anyway.
> we're talking about one of the few things that is examined in almost every high school English class.

I don't think this comes close to being true. Maybe in Britain.

Ancient epics and ancient languages are a primary interest for me, but no school class ever covered Beowulf.
I’m just hearing all these nice things about Zoom today - after the fact.

What other companies have dedicated, hard working founders, who are focused on the customer?
USB killer would not be an appropriate way to do that, it'd just give a false sense of security.
>"moving a whole city" feels even harder

Could do it for Chicago around the 1850's; 'Raising of Chicago' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
What the story on fraud? I was surprised to discover that business bank accounts aren't governed by the same protections that consumer accounts are (Reg E).

What happens if a criminal commits ACH fraud and is successful? Are Mercury's customers protected by some sort of guarantee, other than FDIC which only seems to cover bank insolvency?
How macOS can be proprietary, while Darwin is open source?

By being mostly proprietary in new and important parts, built on top of an open foundation which itself is not the most valuable part for customers.

I suspect that key parts of Kai OS are proprietary, and the foundation left from Firefox OS is very basic. Important, but totally insufficient.
A social program for able bodied men and women willing to work for a living. It's how my father escaped poverty.
POOKMarklet
Instagram Memers Are Unionizing
From your link:

> The cheaters relied on a superuser account named “Auditmonster2,” that would observe tables and was able to see everyone player’s hole cards.

So.. the game was played exactly by the rules, and the full visibility would not have helped. After all, it was purely info exposure.

But you may say: in blockchain, we'd design special cryptosystem that will ensure other players do know know cards too early, as well as a verify that game is played according to the rules

My answer would be that if you have designed such a cryptosystem, you don't need blockchain anymore! Keep existing infrastructure, but apply encryption and verification at each client. After all, you do not care about world consensus for your poker game -- you just care about consensus between players. You will get all the advantages of centralized solution (high speed, very scaleable, low device requirements, easy upgrades), and server won't be able to rig the games.
Keep in mind that career fairs are attended by people looking for a very specific kind of hire and/or they're just looking to get you to visit their careers website. A Google engineering recruiter at a Stanford career fair isn't there to chat an English major who is excited about the computer science for liberal arts majors course they took. They're basically not interested in talking to anyone, as because standing there all day saying "tell me about yourself" and answer "what does you company do?" is mind numbingly boring once you've done it a few times. If you're working at a career fair, the only thing you're looking forward to is an after hours happy hour.
William S. Burroughs satirized that approach in several of his novels. What I find is this, however: https://books.google.de/books?id=rbJvbXXvYUgC&pg=PT94&lpg=PT...

> Horn mentions The Club of Rome as a big player in the global conspiracy game. They are heavy into cutting down population.

> Me too, before they breed their peasant assholes into the sea.
I tend to think online programs, even from great schools like Georgia Tech or John Hopkins, are definitely easier than on campus. Typically on campus will attract students that did very well in undergrad and are on their way to a PhD, where as online has no option to continue for a PhD.
It's possible. Go has been replaying the entire history of GC research at about 2.5x forward speed. They should intercept the state of the art eventually.
Not that surprising, given the CPU in the NES is a second sourced near-6502 (Ricoh 2A03) though running a bit faster apparently. But there's nothing in there that's hard to do on a C64 (and in fact before this there was The Great Giana Sisters, released in '87, that was so similar - including a near identical first level - that Nintendo threatened to sue and it was taken out of the stores; but of course "everyone" had copies soon enough anyway)

EDIT: Here's a video of the C64 version of Giana Sisters:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8teXm6723-g&t=1309s
Then you're extremely surprised.

"Currently, the NFIP’s debt totals $24.6 billion, nearly six times the program’s total annual receipts of $4.3 billion"

https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/115th-congress-2017-2018/re...

And Planet Money, as always, has a great take:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/09/29/554603161/epis...
It's still seeing a net population decline though, both in the Metropolitan and suburban areas. A recent post on the Columbus subreddit showed Cleveland has one of the lowest average internet speeds in the country, and this story from Ars [0] shows actual redlining in how new cable was (not) being laid down. The apartment I lived in growing up was using dial-up until my freshman year of high school a decade or so ago.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/att-a...
Why try so hard to learn something for which you have no aptitude, when you have other valuable skills? A 5 foot 100 pound guy shouldn’t be trying to learn football at the pro level no matter how high the NFL salaries are. Focus on what you’re good at. There will still be sysadmins by the time you are dead. Get better at your skill set so that you’ll be one of the ones standing.
This is bonkers. Nobody anywhere in the world should expect that one buys an airplane which is unsafe by design. Also, the idea that there are two versions of a plane, one that kills people and one that doesn't, and if you buy the wrong one that's completely your fault is just insane.
I have been talking to some chinese researchers working on facial recognition who claim that 3d infrared video is already more accurate than eyewitness identification, for chinese people, in china.
Robot Wedding Photographer Can Recognize Guests
TIL facebook hires average devs.
Announcing Framer Bridge
MBA ideas of an economic moat - lock-in, stickiness, etc - are "dark patterns".

But there are "light patterns": you can stay ahead in a technological race if you keep running; sales are easier if you are known as better; you get more informative feedback if you have more users, etc.
It's just a piece of plastic. Very intricate, relatively expensive silly plastic.

You are demanding blood and to trade off a huge chunk of human life for the silly piece of machinery (which he gonna pay fore anyway), are you feeling well, my friend?
A Better Way to Die?
I hope the title is not too fatalistic. For sometime, I’ve been thinking about what to do with what’s left of my failed startup company while I pursue “other interests”. So I’ve built a tool to try and manage the whole process of winding down my startup. I’d appreciate some feedback about its front end user experience and maybe also it’s overall utility to this community.

I’ve taught myself to do a few technical things (lite coding and using the better development tools) but clearly I have a long way to go with respect to my development skills so please bear with me.

The tool I built is on: www.saybearhug.com

Having just gone through a long company failure, I’m not thinking too many steps ahead but the direction I’ve taken it came out of my own direct experience of what I could have used so I hope I’m not too far off.

What do you guys think?
As someone who owns a Zoom H2 recorder this thread was initially confusing. Apparently there are two major companies called Zoom.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoom_Corporation
It was my impression (not based on a lot) that Beowulf was sort of forced into the status of "great literature" by the fact that it is the only major work of Anglic literature at all, and English elites wanted something from their own native tradition (which, again, didn't really exist) to compete with the classical epics.
That's the fault of (A) Electron and (B) developers who use Electron who (B.A) erroneously think that because Windows users don't mind having no menu bar then everybody else feels the same and (B.B) don't reimplement what Cocoa/Carbon give developers for free.

It's not macOS' problem if people seem to prefer writing mediocre cross-platform apps than proper, native apps with full support for macOS-specific features like system-wide automation, proper integration with the system pasteboard, Quick Look, accessibility features, etc.
‘FYGPA is ...

somewhat associated with

partially explained by the combination of

... HSGPA And SAT’

‘
thing is not optimized for another thing and tradeoffs exist, more news at 11.
Love+&+Sleep+Coupon+Awesome+Night+Sleep
I'm curious, why would a Chinese citizen feel compelled to apply for a Visa 8 times, to start a business? Surely it is far easier and faster for a Chinese citizen to start a company in China? I would imagine that capital would be almost as easily available, as would labor. As for market access, surely just opening branch office in Silicon Valley would have served the purpose? If high quality American engineers, were needed, that too could be achieved by opening a branch office. Why go to all the trouble of emigrating from China? Am I missing significant context here, was the visa granted the 8th time an investor visa?
On surplus food distribution -- do efforts like this already exist?

I don't know anything about the area.

If not, it does seem like an area for impact using tech..
Mayor Pete, Mike Pence, and the Nature of Reality
That's not good stewardship. You have a better API? Great, convince us it's worth investing in soon, you can even deprecate the known-good version.

There's always a window where both will be in use, because we can't synchronously replace every running process everywhere (not that it's even a good idea without a canary). The shorter you try to make that window, the more needless pain is created and plans disrupted. While we could use prod to beta test every single version of everything, that shouldn't be our priority.
This seems like an overly personal take from someone who cannot possibly claim to represent all Linux users.

There are plenty of Linux users with gripes about the UI and various aspects of the environment, hence why there are so many bloody Linux apps that basically do the same thing, so many desktop environments, and more being made every day.

An idea about the user experience is worth paying attention to even if they can't implement it themselves. To brush off the idea with a "well, if you like it so much, make it yourself" is churlish and dismissive. It's not an attitude that helps advance beyond the status quo.

It seems like closed-mindedness to constructive criticism, alarmingly similar to the mindset GNOME's developers have towards basically everybody, stubbornly refusing to accept that other peoples' points of view can have merit and value.

Ironically, it's a very closed, Microsoftian value for a Linux user to hold: Not Invented Here.
I'm on a remote team as well that primarily uses Webex. It has kinda been the gold standard for me. Lately the audio has been declining and we started to use the Slack calls more often, which have been fantastic especially with the drawing tool. Other than drawing, voice, or screenshare is there something Zoom does that has made remote work easier? Or are you referring to better in terms of reliability and usability?
Linear: Fast Issue Tracking
Okay, first off, being a sysadmin or an ops person is important! You are the first line of defense, and many times, companies just need eyes on systems (all the time). It's your ability to analyze a problem that makes you useful. There are ALWAYS boring repetitive service tasks that aren't rewarded but someone needs to do (this is true for devs too). Most of this probably doesn't seem hard or new to you, but I just want to say that even non-programmers are very important to any org.

Okay, now to the coding part.

"Has anyone had a similar experience and managed to push through the mental blocks associated with learning to program while having your own mind constantly working against you?"

All the time. I have the depression, and a few other mental problems most likely, and I have to say, for as much as my brain helps me it hurts me a lot too. Especially with programming and engineering, I feel like things are impossible right up until there's some breakthrough, and then things are fine. It happens really quickly, and soon you're just onto the next problem - many times I feel I don't relish the victory of whatever I have solved enough before moving onto the next thing. You might be doing the same thing too - I can't tell how much or little progress you've made, but learning is hard, and it makes everyone feel dumb, not just you.

"I can manage to throw together bash scripts and other glue that's necessary to make automation tasks function at my work, but these are largely cargo culted from various stack overflow posts or other online resources" This is more of the job than you'd think. I honestly think you're on the right track here.

As a sysadmin, are you good at debugging other people's code when something breaks (do you try? sometimes there's org boundaries that prevent this)? That is also a hugely valuable skill. I know some people who are frightened of writing code fresh, but are great at finding and fixing bugs.

I'm not sure this will be of much help, but I also think as a society we're all about fixing our problems rather than leveraging our strengths. If coding just doesn't click with you, that's fine, obviously other tech things do click with you. Keep working on finding what works for you.
Cities had indoor plumbing, electricity, and teliphones fairly early.

Isolated rural houses often much later.
Actively using it to harm others is different than just creating it.
Because I vouched for it
New Orleans only has about 300,000 people. There's high ground a few miles north. Relocation, not levees.

Florida is worse off. Florida doesn't have much high ground.
Mapbox actually fired the majority of the people they were paying to work on OSM a few months ago [1]. I don't really know why, and it seems like a really odd decision (unless maybe they're developing their own non OSM-based map), but if anyone knows why I'd love to find out.

[1] Compare https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Mapbox&diff... to the current list: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mapbox#Mapbox_Data_Team
What about learning devops. Take your bash skills and apply them to cloud architecture, containers etc. that stuff will be in demand for a few years. Cloud Architect might be something to aim for.
Nice work. Completely ignore the most relevant part of the comment.

Great job contributing a negative amount of value to the discussion then following up with a childish "sue me."
Unless you live in Paris and Yellow Vests are burning your street.
I didn't mean to understate the value of "just" executing better. That's exactly why I think Zoom is interesting. In tech I think people often overestimate the value of a novel idea and underestimate the value of consistently good execution. I don't think Zoom has succeeded through feature innovation but by implementing features better than the competition and making something that "just works". That doesn't mean I think their achievement is somehow less impressive or that they don't have a great product. Quite the opposite in fact.
First off, I think you should give yourself more credit as what you do has importance and you are valued.

> "Be a developer, or get out of the tech industry."

I don't agree with this. There are plenty of jobs in operations that require the skills you have (e.g. standing up servers and automating the heck out of things)

Writing code and creating software was one of the few things that really clicked for me, so I can't share advice on that. One thing I can say is that all of the operations work is where I feel myself spinning and getting nowhere, I push through when I have to, but I don't always have hours to spend debugging an environment--i leave that to someone who can solve the same issue in minutes.
Ask HN: Fastest way to tranfer large files?
It's 2019 and I have fiber in two locations with computers that I need to transfer large files between quickly. What's the fastest way to do that?

G-Drive has always capped me around 15mb/s and then it still has to be downloaded. Bittorrent Sync / Resilio doesn't want to go above 500kbps.
It’s not about the computers. This individual has demonstrated he has no regard or respect for others property, and may very well go on to commit other more serious crimes if he gets away easily with this one. Others may also feel encouraged to imitate what he did if there are no serious repercussions.
My friend is a cop in an area that deals with a lot of meth and opioid issues. I asked him this and his answer was that it's usually in easy multiples. $15, $20, $25 etc. I suppose this makes sense, given it's an all cash business.
For a time, macbooks had opto-isolated USB ports[0]. I think they don’t anymore though.

[0] https://github.com/usbkill/community/wiki/Consumer-Laptop-Ha...
>> some people who I found were really knowledgeable don't code at home

How old/what phase of life were they in?

I find that, in general (anecdotally), this tends to slow down for most people as they age or advance in their careers.

In the beginning, we have time/energy, desire to learn/advance our skills. As these tendencies reduce over time, only the more hard-core/passionate remain.

So if say it's depends on this spectrum when asking knowledgeable programmers if they code at home. They might have already gone through that phase.
They don't sue, but they aggressively take down and demonetize any Nintendo related content on YouTube (even if only extremely tangential)
I winter hiked the Appalachian trail, starting in Amicalola Falls on January 1st. I ran out of money near Harpers Ferry, so I made it about 1100 miles.

I highly recommend doing this type of thing at least once in your life. I dreamed about using computers at night for about the first 3 weeks, and then my brain reverted to a more primitive state and I never missed tech again or felt bored for the entire time I was out there. It's very freeing.

Although if you're going to winter thru hike, winter hiking experience and good equipment is essential. A few sections ended up borderline mountaineering, which in retrospect was very foolish to attempt alone and with no experience. I did not know what I was getting into, and I got extraordinarily lucky a few times while learning how to survive outside during the winter through trial and error. Also had to spend most of the money I saved on better equipment, which is why I had to cut my hike short.
You're giving them far too much credit.
For a while, macbooks were built this way: https://github.com/usbkill/community/wiki/Consumer-Laptop-Ha...
It was on Valentine's day. I wonder if that has anything to do with it.
Great story! My favorite class in uni was a class called "Software Testing and QA" where it was primarily focused on TDD. We went from simple unit tests to a full deployment pipeline.
I asked myself that question last November. Big project was finished and finances were good. I applied to YC Startup School to get into the "scene" and they accepted everyone by accident that year.

I ended up doing a startup for backup hosting[1] and a new open source GUI[2] to go with it. Not as grand as the ideas here, but I seems to solve a problem for some people.

If I had to do it again, I would start with a niche problem I know well and that other people are willing to pay for. Then learn new things on the way and expand where it makes sense.

1: https://www.borgbase.com/

2: https://github.com/borgbase/vorta
I can't think of any other company that has a history of downplaying breeches and then revising the numbers upwards. If you don't know how many people are impacted, you aren't supposed to just make up a number. At a bare minimum you'd say something like "We know 10k users are definitely impacted, and we estimate this could be as high as 5M" or whatever the appropriate ballpark is.
You are not alone.

I'd guess at least over 50% of folks here would have gone through a similar phase at some point in their lives (learning block wise).

Based on my experience, especially over the past couple of years, I've realised that even if I can power through some of the subjects/topics which I find arcane (e.g. linear algebra, tensor calculus), I quickly lose what I've learnt if I don't get to apply the learning on a real project, not a toy one.

In your case, I think once you've familiarised yourself with the absolute basic syntax structure if python, go find couple of real world projects and just try to get them done, without worrying too much about code elegance. That would give you the necessary confidence and understanding for moving up the next step.

You can find small volunteer projects it participate in competitions (on platforms like kaggle) which may require you to use at least a portion of python.

But most importantly, don't lose heart.
Learning takes time. It's just as important to take a step back from it for a while as it is to keep at it.

I strongly recommend a series of 4-5 video lectures on Coursera by a MIT prof I think. Course was called "Learning how to learn". You don't have to take everything in it but I still believe the overall approach may help you.

Cheers and all the best!