skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I completely agree with every single word you’ve posted there. From the history recap to the modern era problems.

These days the only thing my Echo does which is remotely useful is setting named timers while cooking. So I can have my hands dirty with raw meat and ask Alexa to set various timers for each step of the meal. I found that particularly good when cooking meals that have large gaps in time between stages (like Sunday roasts when there can be 5 minutes or more between the cooking times of different vegetables). However even there it sometimes becomes more trouble than its worth when it starts mishearing names of vegetables or duration numbers when spoken.

The most disappointing thing is that I spent a few days working with Alexa’s - frankly terrible - SDK to integrate it into my existing home automation (all stuff I’ve built myself and powered by a FreeBSD server). Not only was the development progress of Alexa skills amongst the most frustrating I’ve had in my ~30 years of experience writing software; but it turned out to be a complete waste of my time because Alexa is so piss poor at any interactions more complex than the very basic (as you described). It’s also very laggy at such interactions so even when it does work it feels slow. So slow, in fact, that it ends up taking longer and being more painful using the voice control than it would have been to wake my laptop from sleep and trigger the same HTTP API endpoints Alexa would used but instead doing so manually from the command line using curl. So needless to say I very quickly gave up using Alexa for home automation.
Privilege Impacts Empathy
As someone who does a lot of political canvassing this isn’t a good use of the city’s resources. From personal experience I’d estimate that less than 5% of residents open their doors. Of the amount that do open maybe about half just want to tell you not to solicit. Further it’s almost impossible to canvass most apartment buildings that have access control.
Sometimes I do kinda wish to get back into consulting because of situations like these. In almost all cases the work is never used, but instead of bailing the company out, it's really just bailing some situation out. It's all internal politics.

Back when I was in my 20s during my walks from the light rail to the office I would have constant thoughts about how idiotic programming and office work is. The ONLY reason it all exists is because people can't trust each other. And that maybe trust isn't really necessary in a society that lessens personal ownership and has more of a share-all-but-do-your-part approach.

It's literally so unfair the way we've segmented people into knowledge zones. Bankers know how easy it is to double money without taking risk. Programmers know how to pretend something will take 3 weeks when it will only take 2 days.

Recently I've learned how easy it is to set up solar. I cry every time I hear someone get trapped in some solar contract when they sell their house. It's literally mind warping how fucked up every aspect of this economy is.
I've been through two acquisitions and part of the deal terms if the valuation of the acquiree's shares (which the cap table and liquidation preferences have a huge effect on).

First time my options were converted to options in the acquirer's company.

Second time they turned into RSU's.
I would never bid a fixed amount with a client like this. The only way to do a fixed-bid is if a) the requirements are 100% defined, b) appropriate controls are in place to account for scope changes and roadblocks, and c) the price of the overage risk were priced into the bid.
It amuses me that this passed the editor and the peer review process:

"So, from De Rosa’s manuscript we understand just why manuscript MS408 is so dominated by female issues, activities and adventures and why so few images of men appear. The only males in the citadel were the abbot, celibate monks and young boys, leaving the women and girls sexually and emotionally frustrated, so they amused and distracted themselves whilst they waited and yearned for male attention to return. They must have jumped at the chance of an adventure when the volcano erupted in 1444, as the citadel would have felt like a gilded cage by then."
Twitter becoming https://sub.cafe any day now.
For anyone else who has to go through the process:

Go to the replacement page: https://myaccount.google.com/replacemykey

If you qualify for the return, there will be a box displaying the key you purchased (in my case it says "Titan Security Key Bundle"). If you do not see this box and you have multiple Google accounts, make sure you've selected the one in which you placed the order (and is paired to your account—thanks programd) by clicking on your avatar in the top right. If you're not simply in the wrong account, Google doesn't think you qualify.

At that point, you'll end up on the shopping page. Add the replacement key (it will tell you the full price of the item but don't worry). Proceed to checkout. On the final checkout screen, you should find a promo applied which brings your total down to $0. If you don't, you're probably buying another one so don't confirm.
My off the cuff guess: Someone saw a young person in casual clothing in an environment that made it obvious they were non-local (i.e. a white dude in a Chinese airport or something) in an off-season for tourism, and thought "well they're either here for business or pleasure, and one of the few people that can afford a pleasure trip in the middle of the year like this (money + time off) is a developer."

Kinda fun to think about all the subtle clues we're giving off without even realizing it. Of course any of these observations could lead to a totally wrong conclusion, which makes me start to think of all the fun ways you could "disguise" yourself in modern society.
When I used to work at body-shopping consulting firm, we had one client (one the largest bank in country) that would argue over 15 minutes over estimates...
There's more computational power and storage than that in the pockets of the passengers of a city bus.
My solution is to completely ignore Twitter and social media overall.
In my experience, it's rarely about flagrantly wasting money for the sake of running up expenses to a budget level. Rather, it's usually more about pulling in expenses, doing something you had wanted to do anyway but didn't think you had enough money for, etc.

Budgets are a pretty powerful and widely used tool for managing organizations. And there are other checks and balances. It's not like a manager can necessarily just decide to have a team off-site in Hawaii because there's room left in the budget.
Not evidence. Just anecdotal. Half my extended family lives in rural areas.

Cities arent perfect. I'm absolutely stressed over the hectic pace of a large city. But I'm not depressed and hopeless like those I know in rural areas.

Maybe we each have to pick our poison.
If parent only speaks English, I don't see the problem.

As a proposal for wider implementation, you could just select the languages you speak to be valid languages for the captcha. Seems like a feature rather than a problem.
Fraud, harassment, and robot. You can call all your want.

I do not give robots rights. You - or your representative -can personally call anyone you want to. You can have a robot dial the phone even - but you need to be personally on the line when the call connects, not a millisecond latter.

Harassment is illegal so you won't be calling me more than once. Even without a do not call, you won't call more than once unless you can show the call is different from the last time in a significant way. You won't get out of this by starting a different "shell company" to call me again either.

Fraud is also illegal. This stops most instances right there. Note that it is also fraud to take up excessive time, if I've "won a car" I better get a car with not much more than the legal paperwork.
It doesn't matter if you've learned git's data model or not; its use of terminology is inconsistent and confusing, and its command interface is disorganized and asymmetrical. In that way, I suppose it is very much like a "natural language", and not like the sorts of languages we are more accustomed to using when getting things done. Even if I know exactly what I want to do to the data structure git is managing, that doesn't help me find the commands I need to type to accomplish it. I have been using git for ten years now and I still have to rely on rote memorization of specific recipes in order to get anything done, which sucks because I am terrible at rote memorization.
People will do all sorts of things that aren't good for their mental and/or physical health in order to make a decent living.

I would wager that the overwhelming majority of people moving from rural to urban areas are doing it to better their bank accounts.
The best thing you can do for your career is learn things that don't apply to your career. After all, it's impossible to predict unknown unknowns, which makes accidentally having already learned something nobody else valued enough to pick up the most valuable skill.
The author basically just had a job for a while. They aren't charging 18K for a web page, they're charging 18K to commute/be there for 7 weeks.

A lot of big companies aren't paying for output, they're paying for butts in seats. Why they do this has been discussed somewhat already in these comments.
After buying LEDs by diode type online, instead of just whatever generic shit they sell at the hardware store for light fixtures, it really became apparent how trash most hardware store lights were. Not to mention many of the replacement LED socket lights are flickering from the mains frequency. The efficiency in random socket versions are crap compared to the high efficiency diodes you can buy if you look in the right places, often the store versions are around 60-100 lumens per watt, when you can get closer to 180-200 lumens per watt.
I think the disconnect is that you are describing it as a system, when in reality it's just a bunch of misaligned incentives and plain old human nature. It's unfixable.
Don't forget coverage issues. IPhones have been worldphones (i.e. works on every carrier) for the past 6+ years. Contracts and termination fees have been phased out for most people for 4 and all people for 2 years. Yet in my case despite paying full price for the latest IPhone I'm stuck with Verizon. Why? Because in one key location where I live it's the only carrier with data coverage.
Maybe I just put too much stock in that one episode of The Office.
who says that businesses are any guarantee to be any more than large government bureaucracies?
Put your site behind a CDN like Cloudflare and cache it aggressively.

It's really not rocket science.
It's the largest line item for most companies, so apply pressure there and get the most dramatic result in the shortest time. Do that to every project and it takes too much mental overhead.
The Price of the Hallway Track
Following languages also looking weird.

Lolcode http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOLCODE

Glass http://esolangs.org/wiki/Glass

Chicken http://esolangs.org/wiki/Chicken

Whitespace http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_languag...

~English http://esolangs.org/wiki/~English
I don't think your link is relevant to this discussion
How likely is that if you have cards from different vendors?
Repl.it Q&A
I used to live on the Avenida Paulista in São Paulo, Brazil and one of the interesting quirks about that location is the number of high power TV and Radio antennas in the immediate vicinity. At the time I had a hi-fi system that had previously sounded great, but in this particular location was impacted by the high electromagnetic interference in the area. Most of the noise got in between the RCA cables between the pre-amp and the power amps.

I spent the better part of a year building cables and trying out different designs to isolate the noise, such as having a floating woven metal shield with a small capacitor at one end to ground the shield. I don't remember all the different things I tried, but they definitely had varying levels of material impact. That said, with RCA cables I never got the noise completely out of the system and eventually switched everything out for something with balanced XLR connectors, which eliminated the problem.

tl:dr; expensive cables don't really matter. cable design does to a point, but if you really want great sound without interference, you need to switch to a system with a balanced design. Unfortunately, this requires changing all components, not just the cables.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_audio
What does "it" mean in "no one considered it possible"?
It's okay to be a value-based consultant or contractor. There is no ethical requirement that your work be priced by the hour. You've potentially spent thousands of hours (25k in my case) honing your skills, and those skills could help your client make a lot of money. If a static site can make a company millions (they can!) then it's not unreasonable, nor unwelcome from the client, to charge a couple hundred thousand dollars, regardless of the time spent!
I have to agree with this but if Google's goal is to make the web faster then the AMP mission can still be done almost exactly as they are doing it today. Just publish a profiling tool (expanding Lighthouse maybe) that reports the numbers back to Google and then you either get to use their cache and edge servers and get ranked higher or not based on whatever metric that Google wants us to care about. Maybe I'm missing something but that really seems like a much more obvious approach to solving the problem without going through this weird extra webcomponents library, different URL schemes and all that.
Or I could just click a dislike button and move on with my life, as is happening with my own posts
This would be a nice addition to kubecfg.

Eg `kubecfg show --web` to bring up an HTTP server that hosts this and lets you inspect the k8s resources that your jsonnet describes.
Urban laboratories: What we can learn from airports
You have to spend X anyway, because the money is pre-tax or non-taxable, you can spend 1.5X-2X, so the extra money is 'free'.
Get this one all the time. I did have a car warranty that expired (a while ago), so I always wondered if its just a stock message, or if someone actually sold the data of my car warranty.
Were you an employee? I think the situation being described here is almost always with contractors and freelancers.
Having a single contact list that is segmented by tags and other criteria is more standard in marketing platforms. I think you're right that this is part of their migration to being a more full featured marketing solution.
From the looks of things you'll probably get the Go you want first. The only thing missing from the roadmap are enums and there are a few Go2 proposals for them.
The fastest way to find your new job in Blockchain
The radio navigation planes use to land safely is insecure and can be hacked
That's great, but somebody somewhere wrote some code.
I build https://freepage.io, so you can create a free markdown one-page website. And I had to write code. :(
Which is literally irrelevant to my point.
> $15k of contracted work in a single day, which was sold as a fixed-fee in return for a legal report. The type of work that should cost maybe $200 in total.

This sounds like a SaaS waiting to happen.
> It's better if we don't make CEOs responsible for fixing our social problems. We have to do that ourselves. They will follow along ("give the people what they want")

CEOs are a subset of "we," and are in positions where their decisions have impact disproportional to their numbers.
The point is that these few useful things can be all achieved much cheaper with much greater ergonomics.

> the weather, setting alarms, (...) and asking what time it is.

You can do that on your phone. Even assuming you wanted it hands-free, it doesn't justify an always-on microphone sending data to the cloud. We had the tech to do this level of voice recognition reliably in the 2000s.

> It allows me to turn off the light when reading in bed without having to get up and walk to the light switch.

Kids from my generation used to solder clap detectors for like $5-$10, and they're already more reliable and faster to use.

Voice is cool, it's like being in Star Trek. I get it, I built my own system to control music in the 2000s, complete with audio responses snipped from Star Trek shows. But the feeling of "living in the future" wears off pretty quick, and you're left with a ridiculously expensive and user-hostile gimmick.
GK, I remember your presence on that thread. For those who were not there, it's under comment history. You spoke to the point of people needing your help (and not just anybody), which is kind of ridiculous in this case and the case from last week. You're opining value-driven fixed rate wisdom on a thread about a simple HTML page. If you dictate the pace of a specialty, of course you can charge whatever you want and call it "value-driven." For the other 99% of consultants out there, supply and demand bring pricing to an equilibrium. Retainers need not apply here nor in 90% of first-time client engagements.

Consultants who win the job will always leave money on the table. That's how you get the gig to begin with. Value is relative, and it takes at least two to tango come contract time until cost (what the client sees) and value (what you see) intersect.

Billing hourly brings pricing transparency clients want while protecting you from true under-utilization. If you're not being utilized because of red tape that was unassumed at contract time, a change order is the logical next step to account for scope remaining/additional scope.
MTN Lists on Nigerian Stock Exchange
interested to know how much amazon is spending to store hundreds of recordings of me saying, "HDMI1"
What Would a “Green New Deal” Look Like for Architecture?
I'm not so sure.

An "honest cryptolocker" helps support more cryptolocker use, as people trust that if they pay the criminal they'll get their stuff

If dishonest ones were the norm, than maybe cryptolocking would cannibalize itself as nobody would pay since they know its useless. So in a sense the dishonest one while having less ethical intention has more ethical results. But only at scale. Hmmm.
When I was out of the vendor side of the business doing consulting for a number of years, I always had to shake my head a bit when clients wouldn't use paid-for time with us or would apparently never make use of some materials like a whitepaper we did at their request.

But it's exactly like you say. People wouldn't get their act together sufficiently to have a team meet with us on some topic for a day or some marketing campaign would be canceled or changed so they no longer specifically needed what we had created for them. Easier to just forget about the whole thing and move on.
That's not a trade-off. You have the exact same substance abuse in suburbs and cities. It's a universal problem.
a nicer stack overflow!?
Falsehoods programmers believe about Unix time
Do you keep those packages reasonable? Have you ever found yourself with too many retainers being called in at once?
I think the issue is management unwilling to trust other levels of management to make the call when they need money / a strong desire some folks have to filter / make decisions for others.

I don't know what the fix is for that except to take a chance and trust folks but ... it doesn't seem to be a thing and instead they come up with easy systems to just make arbitrary decisions and there ya go.

It boggles my mind sometimes that "Like if you don't trust that guy to make decisions... why is he a director here?"

Sadly it filters down, I've been places where it was clear the director of my department couldn't do much at all... at that point why should I be there, it doesn't matter if he and I talk, agree, or anything then ....

Steve Jobs said something about it making no sense to hire people in decision making roles and not let them make decisions. Granted, Steve was also able to hire some fine people.
Competition is definitely good. But the trademark issue is much more complicated than just the exact words/phrasing. It could be argued that they're using $FRUIT Pi to appear to be associated with the original Raspberry Pi (and I'd say that argument is correct, there's very little other reason to pick that same naming scheme). That doesn't mean that it's certainly a trademark infringement issue either though. In the US at least (no idea about the UK where the RPi is from), there's also a requirement that they're trying to confuse the market at the same time, which isn't so obvious.

Trademarks are complicated things mostly created by lawyers who have spent centuries building through loopholes and attempting to fix them. I'd say they serve a real useful purpose and are relatively well balanced against the interests of the populous (once you stop using one, you usually lose it). But they're by no means simple.
https://www.ftsafe.com/replacement/
Cyber security expert Bruce Schneier on relationship between tech and democracy
The hardware is from Feitian but Google did write all the software for their security keys.
My takeaway is “Twitter’s plan is to stop showing integer counts to users, no matter what they say they want”. Good.
Ernestine strikes again.
> To say I can lead a team in a Java environment would be a lie, because of all the minor details.

Minor details shouldn't stop you from leading a team. If putting you in a slightly different context means you can't lead anymore, you probably weren't actually leading in your preferred context.
I used to live with this guy when we were studying. He got himself a job with the largest DIY retailer in the country.It was an office job with a relatively good salary. Eventually I moved out nad only saw him again after half a year or so. I asked how's the job to whoch he replied thst he quit after 3 month.I asked why..He said he used come to the office every day and ask around if he could help with anything.. Everyone was nice but kept saying no help is required.He got bored after 3 month of doing nothing and quit. He now runs his own business...
I'll be using this one (or similar). Thank you
Not all of them, and the ones supported are not always very stable.

Otherwise gamers would all be switching from win10 to Steam OS.
It's all big orgs, everywhere. Seen a lot of it even at hip modern BigCorps. Leave your axe and grinder at home :)
There was a time during the golden dotcom era when my manager scheduled a monthly management meeting across the Atlantic, which required me and 2 colleagues flying all the way over for a meeting that lasted about 4 hours.

Business class plane tickets, 2 nights in a nice hotel, rental car, dinner at very fancy restaurant.

Meanwhile, that same 100k+ employee company wasn't able to set up email fast enough for new employees, so some new hires had to use hotmail(!) for weeks before they were in the system.
I mean they were pretty clear they didn't care about the money. Emailing daily to check in on progress is good enough. I've been in a similar situation. The manager isn't really concerned about the money. They just need someone to justify their expenses.

> We need your full undivided attention to complete this project. For the duration of the contract, you will work exclusively with us to deliver result in a timely manner. We plan to compensate you for the trouble.
It's pretty clear that he meant mixing HTML, code, and database queries into a single file was what didn't scale, not PHP itself.
Did you mean GB?

$100 seems like a high ceiling for 0.5 GB in 2019.
It's the peace and serenity of nature, which is often more alive than we are. How many songwriters over the past century have written about being lonely in the midst of constant but worthless interactions?