skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can understand that when it takes a few minutes at most before—if not the reward you’re looking for—at least some kind of reinforcement stimulus (e.g., with a slot machine, seeing two of the three wheels line up, making you feel like you “almost got it.”) That seems “fun”, if just due to a bug in human brain-hardware that you should probably not want-to-want.

But these games don’t work like this. When you’re trying to find a rare drop, there’s nothing giving you the feeling that you’re getting any “closer” to it. You just have to throw days of blind dice rolls for no reward at the game, before it’ll turn around and give you the reward once. Variable-schedule rewards shouldn’t actually work at that sparse a frequency. People who get easily addicted to things don’t usually find themselves grinding for rare drops.

The people who do do this kind of grinding are people with big reserves of determination. And I don’t really get what they get out of it.
I've been using Node Red for a few automation things too, basically as a self-hosted ifttt/zapier, and it's been working well. I would recommend it beyond home automation for the kinds of things that are "too small" to warrant their own code project and deployment setup but are still important enough to be automatic. This includes things like checking a webpage every 10 minutes and sending a text if it changes, or remapping webhooks between random services.
That's why I specifically said "made by a single company", not "made for a single company". Products using the Nest API were "made for".
Otherworldly Java: Gateway to the Moon and Beyond
Only a long term benefit in hindsight. Could have gone any number of ways.
This is why I'm not buying a Google Home. You never know when Google might kill it, so it's basically lost money.
The presentation style is quite funny. It was even funnier at the time, when such a thing was considered almost inconceivable. Now, it seems prescient.
Sounds fair to me. Save time by carrying your luggage at risk of others, spend it in jail, for risking/causing the death of others.
Don't you carry at least an ID card? Most keys are much smaller than an ID card, taking the key out of the keyring and putting it together with the ID card would only make the resulting package a bit thicker.
Change the Spring Session JDBC Serialization Method to Improve Performance
Can be done, yes - but seemingly not by Google. A purchase by Google seems to be a pretty likely death sentence for a product.

Makes me happy I migrated away from them years ago.
Yea I was hoping this was about some new developments on a space elevator cable, but with the base being out in sea or something.

A space elevator would be amazing, but we don't have any materials strong enough yet to withstand the atmospheric sheer ... or a way to grab and pilot an asteroid anchor into orbit .. yet.
They did:

> It’s therefore perhaps not a surprise that the laying of the Marea cable involved not only the latest in fiber optic cable and repeater stations, but also 11,000 meals.

> This too required a variety of supplies – including 632 jars of peanut butter.
Who exactly are you arguing against here, who says that Linux always works? Your Samsung example is instructive here. One-off hardware that was never intended to run under Linux, never did and still doesn't. While you have had some frustrating experiences, the broad consensus, and my own experience, say that Linux tends to extend the useful life of older hardware.

For instance, I have a cheap asus notebook from the Windows 8 era. Windows 8 is EOL, so I upgraded it to Windows 10. Windows 10 takes literally half an hour to boot in the best case, which is after spending a whole day in the update-reboot loop, making sure the system is fully updated. (I do this every quarter or so.) So I dual boot Arch. Arch boots in 30 seconds.

And that's not to mention the stack of Thinkpads going back to 2002, all of which still work flawlessly. (But of course they work, because if Linux ever had a target laptop platform, it was 2000s era Thinkpads.)
Ah, the “digital transformation”, where hardware becomes a service, and you lose control of it, and corporations extract an income stream from you ad infinitum.

While great advances come from availability of technology at a reduced up-front price, at what cost to the basic principles and advantages of ownership, privacy, cost depreciation, long term use of assets, etc. has our new world come?

This is a good reminder that “all magic, comes with a price”!
Sounds familiar. I have some friends suing their old landlord for essentially walking off with their entire deposit (several thousands of £). They moved out of that place more than a year ago - the case is still working its way through the courts. Nothing is simple.
That is the case - they offer a code you can punch it as well as a key card you can keep in your wallet (according to their website).
My problem is now I have a resume full of failed projects. Not super great track record for getting new clients or getting a full time job.
But is it "google launches" or "google proposes"? I think semantic details matter a lot here. The article is written in a way that it makes it look like W3C does not exist.
keep in mind, healthcare, taxes, and retirement costs are going to skyrocket. Uncle Sam hates it when you're not under the thumb of an employer. Only about a third of your hourly rate may actually make it to your checking account.
A helpful thing to remember is that large companies spend thousands of dollars a day just on printer paper.
Not if you don't start at zero, and no one knows where you started. Heck, add a multiplier for use in URL's even. It's not hard to come up with reversible obfuscation functions that would hide your number of users for 99.99% of cases. If you have a competitor that set on knowing your count of whatever objects then maybe you have a case. But let's say this is number of posts, clearly viewable on the website anyways. Who cares? If that sort of info is exploitable, you have to have much bigger security holes present.
Penis Extensions don’t work, study finds
Philosophically it takes a certain kind of person to want to live in a environment designed to cater to ones needs, independent of whether these needs stay the same or not.

What convinience in that sense does, is reducing the users agency. If your coffee is ready every morning, independent on your desire to drink it, it influences you into not deciding yourself. It would be a waste to throw it away.

This is not at all dramatic, but I can imagine better ways of starting a day than not deciding yourself, if the rest of the day you wanna be a person who does.

Purely symbolical of course, but I learned that the person who enjoys brewing a coffee by hand every morning might have more energy for the day than the one who gets it catered to them automatically. And the time the latter person wins, is usually not used in any meaningful way (quite the opposite usually).
I'm talking about buying a single brand of product. Not buying things that are compatible with that brand, buying specifically just that brand.
>Google engineers hope that their new Portals technology will take over the web and become the standard way in which websites transition between links.

This is marketed as being similar to the iframe tag, but it's really an attack on the a tag.
> Everybody hates subscriptions

There is no evidence that suggests that or even hints at that. You´d be ecstatic to pay $5 for something that nets you multiple X of that in value. The issue is, most applications AND sites do not even offer enough value to justify a measly $5 price tag so they have to rely on other business models in order to compensate for their lack of product-market fit.

> SaaS companies use subscriptions and explain it by saying they have servers to run.

SaaS companies don´t need to explain "it" or justify "it". The user isn´t paying you so that you can cover your cost. They are paying you because you are offering them good value in return for that cash. If your costs are covered or not, the user is mostly indifferent to that as long as he gets what is promised. If better options are presented to the user that are cheaper or better (read better product-market fit) then the user will most likely move in that direction.

> Desktop software that tries the same gets lambasted, even though the big cost is continuous development and not servers.

This is mostly a misunderstanding on the part of desktop app developers and I can say that with authority considering that I have built multiple desktop software products/companies that have successfully generated great revenue and exited.

> How do you charge for a desktop application in 2019?

Ask for money in return for your product offering. There is no magic sauce. If your product is of value people will pay, if it is not, no one will.

That said, if you have a good product developed that you need help figuring out how to monetize, feel free to reach out to me and I´ll try my best to help you out (email in profile)
Amazon is a lazy man's AliExpress in 2019.
The beauty of Calculus can only be revealed to young recruits by Herb Gross' videos and Spivak's Calculus. If those don't tickle your brain, nothing will.
Very good advice. I recently had a friend with a strong background in sales and business development join me. He recommended higher amounts by estimating the value we were delivering rather than just the hours we were spending and things got so much better.
Entirely legal in EU, btw
Thank you for starting out with props to Doug Engelbart. He doesn't get enough credit for inventing the GUI.
That’s a consideration. But if you phrase it correctly, your part actually succeeded. You are not responsible for the whole company, only for your own part.
I've occasionally pondered screwing around with various wifi-embedded things like the Arduino, but then I think about how long the light switches have been in my house already, and I find myself wondering, will even Wifi last long enough? Will today's Wifi still be going in 40 years?

Dunno. Maybe. But for me to be interested in something it still has to be something that is going to pay back my fiddling in probably ten years, where I can expect to have to replace it, and I'm still not impressed by any of the the demos I've seen. I'm just not that inconvenienced by having to turn on lights.
I think there are positives and negatives to both. Fixed fee projects can come back to bite you if you underestimate.
Old article...please add (2017) to title

>Today, September 22, 2017, ...
> I can't think of a single compelling use-case for home automation systems.

I can't think of a single compelling use-case for home automation systems that communicate with someone else's servers.

But, having lights and temp auto controlled would be nice. But getting a system up and running that only runs on MY server is a little more tinkery than I have time for what with all the LeetCode I have to do to switch jobs.
Why isn't this a case for civil damages? Find toys that are dangerous and file a class action suit against Amazon for selling them? This would circumvent the whole "Giant corp bought the regulators so they won't fine them for poisoning kids" thing.
Probably not it, but this looks interesting: https://archive.org/details/calculus00marciala/page/n5
Ugh, go is fine but is seems like a regressive design with guardrails all over the place to prevent programmers from hurting themselves.

I use it, but feel its design insults my intelligence.
I love the book of What If?

Also this situation occurs in similar form but smaller scale in RAMA I.
All the dot-com bubble era business ideas are new again.

- digital currencies

- smartwatches

- smart homes (Bill gates had his house 'smart homed' to the wazoo with tens of NT servers taking care of everything, like switching lights on and off)

- food delivery startups Webvan, Kozmo,

- livestreaming (JenniCam)
Mine still looks pretty sad and despondent after a couple of years. I hope it's beautiful someday, but for now it's pretty dull next to its glamorous Japanese maple neighbor.
SO is Ruby, and who uses Ruby still ?

I love ruby I would like to work with Ruby 100% of the time but yeah... too many downsides.
Leslie Carhart, a relatively well known infosec community person posted about this: https://tisiphone.net/2019/01/28/security-things-to-consider...

Turns out she was right...

https://twitter.com/CharlesDardaman/status/11016265103336734...
India is investigating Google over alleged Android abuse
Why is best not a good example? If you buy exclusively Google made products you're still fine.

Reread my original comment. I say you'd be safe if you buy products made BY a single company. This API effects those who bought things that are made by other manufacturers.
I recommend the Wayco coworking there, really charming and well-managed space in the city centre.
Yep. I did one for my BsCpE a dozen years ago.
No, you can't run GC at all. The minimum size of WASM heap is 64KiB by its spec. Otherwise it should run in stack-only mode. So running GC for microcontroller with less than that size doesn't make much sense.
I have Thomas' Calculus from the 1960s, the same book that Knuth promotes in interviews as being responsible for him choosing a math degree. Very high signal to noise ratio without being as terse as Apostol https://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Analytic-Geometry-Supplement...

However I really enjoy algebraic calculus and wish somebody had taught me this in highschool https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIljB45xT85CSlgGh3681...
The lines between desktop/server/mobile are going away. At the end of the day, the user doesn't know or care where the app runs, only that it runs and is supported.

The future of desktop software is the same as the future of enterprise hosted software and open source: It's all about taking care of your customer. If you focus on providing the bug fixes, documentation, upgrades, customization, and support that your customers want, it doesn't matter if it runs on the desktop or elsewhere.
Lead and cadmium are used in paints - lead for white, cadmium for yellow. The west has discontinued them for toxicity reasons, but they're still prevalent in China.
FWIW, my experience is closer to 55%, in a fairly high-tax state to boot.

It can be difficult, but it's not that bad.
If you ever get stuck with another terrible landlord, it might even give you some ideas. :)
I was an early user of "unnamed" popular Kickstarter door lock and I took my dog out at 9pm and came back to find that the batteries were dead.

I called the customer support and they told me the low battery alert message was sent after I had locked the door and left, which was about a 20 minute trip.

They ended up paying for my locksmith, but I haven't felt comfortable using the lock since so it just sits on my door.
I've been playing around with RHEL 8 a bit at work. I like the direction. Definitely looking forward to CentOS 8.

Work on eradicating old stuff continues. The "system python" setup also feels like an inspired choice which should make it easier to deploy python stuff on top of RHEL 8

With RHEL 7, trying to install newer versions of software via SCLs (in cases where it's advisable) never felt like they were well-integrated. The new module system seems extremely promising; fewer people will have a reason to use eg. Ubuntu if RHEL provides the new stuff via modules.

Other than that, it doesn't seem like there's much that would surprise people who are already familiar with RHEL 7.
It used to be "Embrace, extend, extinguish"- Microsoft would promote a technology, then extend in their own way, then use that extension to kill off the competitors also using the same tech.

Now it's more like "Acquire, Advocate, Assassinate". Big companies buy small tech startups doing neat things for customers. They fund it, highly promote it, integrate it with their stack. Then they kill off the critical pieces that made the original company loved by their users.

They buy the devs, the tech, and the customers but kill the soul of whatever it was they acquired.
Not all people who voted remain want to exploit immigrants to keep wages down. But all people who want to exploit immigrants to keep wages down voted for remain.
I disagree with this, the client will always try to maximize value, your costs are hourly, I like the other poster who said never do a fixed bid. Clients benevolently keep asking for more and you benevolently keep saying yes and then that niceness on your part becomes a liability after a few days or weeks because now it all blurs into being "in scope". I would also always put the concept of scope discussion process into every contract.
I understood that part. However, there is no guarantee that Germany will still accept dual citizenship in 50 years. There is no guarantee that Germany will not (again) become a dictatorship where people are interned in camps if the ruling class finds it politically useful. There is no guarantee that Germany will even allow you to leave the country in 50 years, even if you have dual citizenship.

This is all seems improbable, of course, even ridiculous. But I don't think anyone in Germany could've seriously imagined the situation of 1939-45 30 years earlier.
I'm just getting started with Home Assistant and been busy with $10 wifi energy meters: https://blog.quindorian.org/2019/02/home-assistant-10-wifi-e...
It took me a few months to realize that when I browse google with my iPhone and click a link, it's not actually taking me to that site, just loading it in an iframe. Weird and unnecessary, except in the eyes of Google's margins.
This whole situation is the result of countries like China that most of those products are made in lack a real justice system. Anyone who has ever tried to sue a Chinese company in a Chinese court knows it is impossible for a foreigner to win. Ever. No matter the evidence. If China had a just justice system as exists in many other countries developing and developed this problem wouldn't exist. Unfortunately in today's China you can still be sure you will keep your money you made conning people as long as those people are foreigners.
Is the human genome degrading over time and devolving?
If Amazon doesn't get a handle on quality control, and product misrepresentation/swapping scams they will start to be perceived as Ebay/AliExpress/Wish.com where "anything goes".

I realize Ebay has controls to protect consumers, but the perception for everyday people is that it's risky, but you might find a deal.

I rarely use Ebay anymore, and in fact just purchased some sneakers there after probably 6+ years of not purchasing anything. I crossed my fingers, fully expected to be ripped off and lucked out, the product was exactly as advertised. I would not have purchased them if the discount wasn't so dramatic. This is all anecdotal based on my experience and the exp of my peer group.
This works because of generating functions: You can check that

1/(1 - x - x^2) = 1 + x + 2x^2 + 3x^3 + 5x^4 + 8x^5 + 13x^6 + 21x^7 + ...

To check this (not totally rigorously), multiply both sides by 1 - x - x^2 and multiply everything out. On the right side the recurrence relation implies that everything but the first term will cancel out.

So you can also get, for example,

1/9899 = 0.0001010203050813213455...

1/998999 = 0.000001002003005008013021034055089144233...

and so on.
Are you sure you didn't mean

"Ah that explains :("

?
I really like my automated curtains, get some benefits from being able to switch some lights on and off (make movement sensors work or not depending on the time the sun goes down/up and whether it's weekend or not, turn on outdoor lights at certain times depending on whether the sun is already up), and integrating the air conditioning controls with other devices is convenient and somewhat spiffy. Furthermore I like the advanced programability that having a powerful central system gives you, like having a house-wide 'nobody home/up/everybody asleep/on holiday' mode and having all components react to that, and how you can set advanced rule sets in code like 'if it's a weekday and the average temperature the last 5 days was < some threshold, turn the heater on a bit earlier in the morning'.

That said, I would never advise it for someone who doesn't like tinkering, or at least know how to tinker.
Hahaha that's never a good thing :)
Ask HN: How do you manage required and optional maintenance?
Fairly simple question, but probably completely unique to every situation and level. How does your team/company manage the required and optional maintenance of your code bases? Things like the S3 blog post announcement comes to mind where it doesn't have to be done now but at some point.
Remember Ping? :).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes_Ping

Edit: on a more serious note, what if you loved PPC development? Apple went x86 and now you can’t develop there. It’s my main fear whenever there’s talk of them using their ARM cores for a new laptop and macOS.

To be clear, I think they pulled that transition off really well, and suspect they could do x86 => ARM better than anyone (closed ecosystem, tons of LLVM people). It would still mean they were deprecating and cancelling x86 though (presumably with a Rosetta-like translator for a while).
I used to do print debugging a lot. And then I tried using the `breakpoint()` call available since Python 3.7[1], and now I can't imagine doing any serious debugging without PDB (or any other debugger).

(I mentioned Python, since this is linking to the Python-flavor of Icecream).

Sure, there are still times when just calling print() is sufficient. But they are becoming less frequent. `print()` is only shorter than `breakpoint()` by just 5 - len(variable_name_to_print) characters after all.

I know `import pdb; pdb.set_trace()` was available before, though `breakpoint()` is just a lot simpler, among others for the reasons they mentioned in the PEP.

There is also the `--pdb` flag in pytest[2], that lets me jump into a PDB session upon test failure.

All of this makes me think, what are the cases where print-level debugging is the better option in Python, compared to using an actual debugger?

[1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0553/

[2] https://docs.pytest.org/en/latest/usage.html#using-the-built...
Why do I feel like this is totally not necessary? If I am doing print() debugging, it is because I am lazy. If I want real debugging, there are better tools.

Also, print() works just fine.
How exactly does this much lead get into these products? Are they on shared assembly lines with bullet manufacturing?!
Worth noting - if you want cloud access, it's a paid subscription (reasonably priced) add on for Home Assistant, and it's free for OpenHAB.

I personally prefer OpenHAB over HomeAssistant, but the thing that annoys me about OpenHAB2 is that it doesn't have even rudimentary built in user management with authentication. The docs basically tell you to use something like Nginx to do that for you.
In Iceland, if the owner of a rented apartment would request key access to his tenants apartment, well… That would be considered "batshit crazy". But it probably comes down to cultural differences, America is very authoritarian.
All You Need to Know About Stoicism in One Table
I'm always interested in running WASM in microcontrollers, but AFAIK there is a severe limitation of WASM spec: the minimum size of heap (WASM memory page) is 64KiB, which is too big for many of microcontrollers. Otherwise a WASM module must run in stack-only mode.

Unless this problem is resolved I don't think WASM can be adopt widely in the world of microcontrollers.
You sir would be incorrect.
Sometimes the transportation issues work in our (US) favor though. I felt kind of bad about doing meetings early my time, which was kind of on the late side in Bangalore, until I realized that practically everyone there worked on a late schedule to avoid traffic. Without that factor, there would have been no time convenient for everyone.
Leaving Apple&Google: first 100% ungoogled Android phones go live on refurb HW