skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A lot of commentary around recent development on the web kind of falls into a common theme of "Wouldn't it be cool if there was a way to do WWW like it was 1997 again?"

The thing that makes a personal webpage now different from a personal webpage in 1997 is this: Back then you could expect to immediately rank #1 on your own name, and you would even have a decent chance of ranking for some keywords related to content that you put up. Nowadays, if you're unlucky and you have a name that's somewhat common, or even just a single other person exists with a strong online footprint that has the same name as you, then you won't even rank for your own name any more. If you want any of your actual content to rank, then the chances of making that happen are even slimmer.

More eyeballs on the internet means greater incentives to put content online that will get noticed, which means that commercial interests will throw money and resources at making that happen which a personal side project can't compete with. More content online means search engines get to be pickier about what they show to users. The cost/benefit calculation has changed dramatically, especially around how much content you have to put up and how frequently you have to put up content, because search engines heavily penalize content for being old or stale even when content ages well when it's good and even when you actually write on stuff that you are a real authority on and even when the web is desperately in need of less of the "sponsored" kind of content and more of the "independent & authoritative" kind of content.

So in order to truly solve the problem of making it worthwhile again for people to have personal websites, one first needs to solve the discovery problem.

I think somebody should invent a search engine to do that.

I think that when people put up personal webpages now, they should adopt a "fediverse" technology stack to turn their personal webpages into a social-media-like experience that allows for an alternative vector of discovery next to keyword search.

I think that policymakers should reverse the current trend wherein they put liabilities on website owners & operators that a private person doing a personal webpage can't possibly shoulder.

So, in conclusion: Bring back some of the goodness of the WWW of 1997 again. I'm all for it. But the technology community has a loooong way to go, before that can become a reality.
Camping Belgische Ardennen
I don't understand why you got down voted. I use also a blue light filter, and it helps. Of course, if you look up stuff until 2AM...there is no device helping you there, except for a battery off! :)
The author forgets that in the GoT world they also have magic and walking corpses and suspension of disbelief should also cover hair color and heat resistance.
Yeah, evaluating stocks based quarterly reports accuracy always feels like a bit of a fools errand. The heuristic I use for dips in a stock is always “how many days of value did this erase?”. It keeps me sane when looking at large dips.

The most recent time Google was at this value was early April. The earliest time Google was at this value was July 2018. Google’s stock valuation has clearly stagnated a by that second metric, but definitely not by the first. This quarterly report didn’t encode much more than a bust of the pre-earnings run-up.
This was my sentiment while reading the article. Two years ago I went through a process of completely stripping away my online presence. I'm now unsearchable by name, name and company, name and home town.

The author's reasons for having an online presence don't appeal to me personally. I can practise skills that I will find useful and I can learn, all without publishing evidence of it online.
Maybe LinkedIn? There's whiffs of them in the network tab of dev tools. Same with Facebook...
The atmosphere shouldn’t be too much of a problem. It thins out very rapidly over a few km altitude, and the beam is going almost straight up. It’s nowhere near as bad as the same distance through the atmosphere at near ground level.
A Deceptively Simple Way to Find More Happiness at Work
Ironically, Computer Modern is terrible to read on computer displays. It was designed for ink and toner bleed, and looks great when printed on 1970s-era Xerox printers [1], but it's far too thin for digital rendering.

I might suggest Bitstream Charter for a well-designed and readable analogue to CMR for digital use.

[1] https://www.typografie.info/3/topic/22238-ist-die-computer-m... (German language)
Many school gifted programs follow Mensa requirement of top 2 percentile. I'm not sure the % score was mapped directly to the questions answered correctly.
Took me some time (heh), but I've finally "compelted" the game.

I really did enjoy the music.
Ask HN: TDD: What are your thoughts on it? Do you use it?
At my previous job, I fought hard to introduce TDD. Neither me or my team was experienced, so I thought "let's introduce TDD, because it will reduce the possibilities of deploying buggy code".

Unfortunatley, it did not catch that much interest in my colleagues.

Now, I don't expect TDD to save us code completely, but I think that the fact that it forces you to think before doing and provides a test bed that you constantly use to make sure what you do doesn't break what you are sure worked before is a great thing.

Fast forward to today. I was talking to a potential employer (start up) and he told me they don't use TDD becase they don't find it efficient for the team at the moment, although he mentioned he'd like to bring it in the company the future.

Is TDD usually a practice is bigger, more structured companies? Do you use TDD? What are your thoughts on it? Do you work in a startup or a big company?

Last: what is the alternative?
What I mean is that you've failed in principle. You shouldn't ever risk being in a position where access to your data may become contingent upon the skills of a repairer wielding a soldering iron. If maintaining comprehensive backups isn't boneheadedly simple and robust, your vendor is selling junk.

But as a practical matter I don't disagree. If you failed to maintain comprehensive backups (or you have suffered a rare double-disaster) then it's great that these hardware repair experts exist.
Well, the developers have full time jobs programming. Students don’t. At best they get a few CS classes that provide hands on, real world programming (albeit usually outdated). I agree that there are certainly students who have time commitments which prohibit them from doing extracurriculars. But I’m not talking about a huge commitment (heh) here. 50 commits over a year is like a few weekends worth of work. If you worked on a project once a month, you’d easy get to 50 commits.

I don’t expect students to code outside of class. But I also believe students who don’t code outside of class shouldn’t expect to get a job just because they have a CS degree.
It's not really the infrastructure that makes it Silicon Valley. In my 15 years of living here, it's the people. The concentration of tech companies here and talent is astounding! This is the only place where every week there's an interesting meetup with whatever tech of your choosing, be it Rails, Clojure or with management, with how to design/UX, and agile. This is the only place where a cafe is filled with tech people talking about their startups, pitch, their stack, etc.

I have been to many places including different tech metropolitans, like Berlin, but there's still nothing quite like Silicon Valley in terms of what I said above.

Now, my only gripe is that the housing market is crazy. It's funny how only the tech crowd get to afford to live here. I've seen families bunch together just to afford rent.
EV maker Faraday Future says it procured an additional $225M in financing
Exactly what I would expect from a lot of the crowd who flaunts their PhD title as part of their name.
I don't know if a Coleslaw food truck service scales.
TeX is fundamentally not compatible with reflowable text because it's at the lowest level about putting glyphs in positions.
We have some support for concurrency in Java and JavaScript backends, see lib/sys/concurrent.flow.
Operation Flashpoint was one of my favourite games as a kid. It felt ground-breakingly realistic at the time.
>The cult of the amateur first of all built Britain’s empire, and then managed, by its casualness and determination to avoid confrontation and unpleasantness, to lose it.

Well, that would be one way of putting it. If one is a fan of utter bullshit.

For a less varnished take than this article on the attitudes and motivations of Britain's supposed gentlemen of that era, it is a very good idea to read Lawrence's 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom'. It pulls very few punches.
Unicode search in PDF works fine, there are just a few issues that can cripple it for specific files, or specific files using specific PDF implementations. The following is advice for anyone working with the format, it should not be construed as making excuses for how PDF does things. It's a ginormous format with a ginormous spec that's been around for a very long time and has accumulated a lot of baroque qualities over the years. So I don't mean to condemn it, but I'm not exonerating it either. It is what it is, and if you have to work with it this might be useful. Anyhoo:

Regardless of what one thinks of their other qualities, if a PDF can be searched in Adobe Reader or Acrobat, then the file is probably OK but the PDF reader that you were trying to search it with has a bug on its end (or more likely, some unimplemented dark corner of the PDF spec).

On the other hand, if the file isn't searchable via Reader/Acrobat, then the problem is most likely with the authoring of the file itself. The most common thing that breaks searching is when instead of embedding all fonts used, a PDF refers to fonts by name from the local system. This can cause unpredictable issues when reading the PDF from another OS that can't resolve those font names.

Another common breaker of search that seems to be much more common with TeX are workflows which somehow produce PDFs that have embedded Type 3 fonts. Type 3 fonts represent glyphs using PDF drawing instructions. It's less a file format than something that only exists as an embedded font within a PDF, but I've only seen them in the wild when authored by pdflatex or similar. It seems like TrueType or OpenType are the most reliable formats to embed across the most commonly used PDF implementations, but that's an educated guess. Type 3 font support is spotty in non-Adobe implementations.

Finally, font subsetting might screw up search. Most software that knows how to produce PDFs can produce PDFs with embedded but subsetted fonts. This means the software that created the file embedded TrueType fonts (for example), but created a special version of the font for embedding that only contained the glyphs used in the PDF. Depending on the quality of the software used to do the font subsetting, the output PDF might not retain the mapping of glyphs back to Unicode characters. If that happens, text using that font in the PDF becomes unsearchable, but the PDF remains renderable.

None of this is meant to excuse the shortcomings of the format, it's clearly overcomplicated and fragile. But when I've seen problems with searchability of PDFs, it's most often been with the software that was used to create the files, or how that software was configured by the author. And when it is a problem with the authored file itself, it's almost always because of fonts. Either the fonts aren't embedded, or they're embedded in a slightly oddball format that's in spec for PDF but not perfectly, universally supported by all of the various non-Adobe PDF implementations.
You are being measured to derive an acceptable answer based on the framework which you are taught against. Work is usually not taken as it was meant to be perceived. The presumption is naive.

These are not actionable findings.
I've been blogging for 7 years using Wordpress (hosted, with my name as the domain name). It's been a great experience, and I wish I had started earlier. I don't feel any pressure to blog every week or every month, but over the years the content has built up anyway. At an interview recently, I was asked several questions (e.g. What makes a great programmer, What are the most important lessons you have learnt) for which I could point to blog posts I had written.

I've written about my experience blogging here: https://henrikwarne.com/2017/11/26/6-years-of-thoughts-on-pr...
Desktop Applications in 2019 [video]
If the optimisation problem is “pick a set of kids that can finish the curriculum quicker as measured by standardised tests” then any effective screening test is likely to select for “test taking prodigies” since that is the leading measure.

RE percentage vs percentile: I think you may be wrong here. Take for example, uni exams. 40% is the pass mark here in old Blighty. The exams are standardised and the 40% threshold is not a percentile. In fact, it makes almost no sense at all to stackrank every cohort of test takers. It wouldn’t be fair at all not comparable over time. I think the parent poster is correct. Doubtless the empirical distribution of real scores are used to decide cutoffs for grades, by 99% in the parents posts very likely refers to a percentage.
It is virtually guaranteed that this data will be used adversely against customers. Insurances want to find reasons why not to pay out, and will find those reasons in the data they collect.

Insurance may be "highly regulated" but regulation on what data can be collected is underdeveloped.
Couldn't agree more.

A place on the internet that you own and can write your thoughts down is very valuable. Yes, there are other services that you can leverage (medium, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, stack overflow, to name a few, depending on your content and desired reach) but your content there will alwybe subject to the whims of others. Big companies aren't always going to have your best interest at heart.

It's a bit of a pain to set up, but as the article states, you get your own space. Writing is one of the ways I learn best, and any writing I do is highly leveragable and can be used by folks far into the future. With your own site, you also have, again as the article states, a place to do low risk but still meaningful technical exploration.

I have had my own site for almost 20 years and look forward to having it for 20 more.

Also, see this post from Dion Almaer about bringing content back to his site vs a third party service:

https://blog.almaer.com/almaer-com-reopens-for-business/
The article completely forgets that one of the greatest strengths in video compression is temporal compression (how much a frame is similar to the previous).

Blizzards/snow/rain tend to add randomness to the pictures, greatly reducing compression factor and forcing the codec to decrease codification depth.
98% sounds a lit like overfitting
Sounds like all those HR tech startups would violate GDPR in Europe and they should be fined out of existence.

If you want to hire people, look at their CV and talk to them. Don't go behind their back making judgements based on websites, facebook profiles or reddit accoints that are likely to be wrong.
The domain is irrelevant, provided you own it. Choose whatever you like from the remaining .coms or the hundreds of new TLDs. If your name is in the content and you're smart about meta descriptions and title tags, the domain isn't an issue for a personal site.
The manifesto mentions:

> Evolution of speech-to-text conversion software - more accurate and faster than typing

Last time I tried I wasn't convinced. Anyone here is really using that to program, write emails or write Markdown?
its very simple and very hard

simple you just do it, make a schedule and stick to it, on the hard days just be a robot and follow the schedule
What was your expected outcome?
I'm not sure I buy that argument - according to the article it's a 20/80 split between "take the reigns"/"take the reins" with about the same number of samples. In that case, "take the reigns" seems egregiously wrong, and I question either the statistics or the sampled population.
I vote you do it underground and illegally until the law catches up. "If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so." - Thomas Jefferson
That's an interesting point - sacrificing quality for quantity. You see it in so many fields. Like agriculture. Back in the day, every farm was 100% organic. But just try feeding today's population that way. Now you pay a premium for organic. So in some sense maybe education is no different. Just doing more with less, or rather, doing less, for more people.
“One Weird Trick” Thinking
The sun is pretty small compared to space, something like .0005% of the full sky sphere, and almost half that time it's covered by Earth. Since there's no atmospheric glare in space, I suspect it's not a problem given decent engineering.
Heavily using this. F1-F4 on Gnome now.
Most of the work done on laptop. Workspaces are big productivity plus.

For mac neck twist:
Disable animations and assign key shortcuts.
http://osxdaily.com/2011/09/06/switch-between-desktops-space...

Looks like handy tool is available those days (read without heavy scripting):
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/workspaces/id1219826448?mt=1...
Instagram’s Shadow Ban on Vaguely ‘Inappropriate’ Content Is Plainly Sexist
I started a personal website because the other person with my name was a cannabis legalisation advocate.

This was the early 2000s, and I was easily able to knock him from the top spot on the major search engines.
> I can practise skills that I will find useful and I can learn, all without publishing evidence of it online.

So can and do I. This nickname belongs to a "fake identity" I use online for services where I don't want to be connected with my real name. I got an fitting email address and thought about a first (Martin, obviously) and a family name, too, so I can pass most registrations. Took me about half an hour to set it all up, you should try that too.
> In that case, "take the reigns" seems egregiously wrong

But still understandable with the kind of context - "take the reins" and "take the reigns" would be imply "take control", no? (Sure, it's clunky, but that's English for you.)
> It's just a type of dead store elimination

It's not just any, typical kind of dead store elimination. It also would require other optimization passes that I can assure you no mainstream compiler actually does. You can disagree with me if you want, but you're simply wrong.
Amiga, Atari and other 8/16 bit platforms also did just work, it wasn't Apple selling the idea.

The IBM PC was the exception here, and it only grew thanks to the mistake of IBM not protecting their BIOS as they thought.
I found the challenge by chance. It was so long ago I don't exactly remember when. Thought it was 2015 but an old comment of mine on HN seems to indicate I may have started looking into this back in 2014, when I was still using a core-i5 CPU : )

> Can you tell us a bit more about your self-taught background?

Sure... I started programming in BASIC at 11 years old on the most inconceivable setup ever: an Atari 2600, which was a gaming console (the infamous one which lead to the video industry crash of 1983 with a landfill filled with E.T. cartdridges). So how do you write BASIC on that at 11 years old? Well your mom offers you a "BASIC cartridge" which comes with a keyboard in two parts you plug in the joystick ports! (horrible experience but I do remember writing tiny programs drawing colored lines using that).

Then the Commodore C-64: more BASIC, some assembly using a "power cartrigde", mainly to modify (hack?) games. Then the Commodore Amiga: learning to write intros and demos. Then the PC (386, 486, and so on): writing a video game (finished but never published but it landed me my first job: long way too long story), writing more intros and demos (won a PC demo compo in Sweden). I'll blog one day (when I'll have a blog) about that PC / DOS video game which was running at 60 Hz on a 386 because it used a cool collision detection method I came up with (which as far as I know is unique and was pixel perfect even back then and was and still is particularly efficient). I still do have both the source and the binary for that game.

For the languages I mainly did BASIC then assembly (680x0 and 80x86), C with inline assembly, C++, Java... Then I stuck with Java for a very long time. Got a Sun Certified Java Programmer certification around 2000 (which makes me an oldtimer): only cert I ever got.

I cannot say I didn't do boring Java consultancy for even more boring companies/organizations. And thankfully once in a while a fun professional project ; )

Nowadays I'm still programming in Java as for my own projects I like to write proof of concepts using Clojure (and ClojureScript). And as I'm an Emacs (IntelliJ for Java though) user if of course waste a lot of time with elisp, hacking my Emacs config!

I hope you still love HN ; )
A valid concern, but also humans are guaranteed to make mistakes and I'm sure a high percentage of them, so anything that lowers that error rate is an improvement even if it's not perfect. My thoughts anyway
I was in the gifted program when I was in elementary school and I don’t recommend it. It took a kid like me who was already prone to social isolation and isolated him further. I voluntarily left the program after 2 years and was playing catch up socially and I wasn’t any better off academically. Don’t put your kids in that program.
Google shut down their product search because of antitrust issues. It took a while before they realized that they were about to get into real trouble. Hence the “half-assed” replacement.
How to stop lurking and create content?
I became social media lurker and I am consuming tons of information from HN, Reddit, Twitter, etc but I'm almost not publishing or commenting stuff on the Internet. I stopped asking or publishing on the internet years ago when I realized that everything is already there and because people are able to publish things from the smartphone when sitting on the toilet everything now is the noise.

My goal is to create more and consume less so my question is what habits are helping you with this?
biased, since I know the author. Think it's a rather mediocre piece, but I liked this quip a lot:

"It's easy to say silicon valley is full of 'tech bros' if that's the cohort you surround yourself with"
In this specific case, the supreme Court ruled that the removal of the Cherokee was unconstitutional in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia [0].

Andrew Jackson said "John Marshall has made its decision, now let them enforce it" [1], violating the Court's decision and ordering the Trail of Tears.

He committed treason, this country was founded in genocide, and Jackson's portrait is proudly hung in the Oval Office. This is why I'm ashamed to be an American.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_Nation_v._Georgia

1. https://sustainatlanta.com/2015/04/02/remembering-the-time-a...