skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I only picked up chess in my mid 20's, and fell completely in love with the game. At 32 now I barely ever play, and am far happier for it. Through chess, I came to a number of realisations about myself, and what I want from games/hobbies in general.

I moved to Dubai recently, and started attending local meetups here. I even started my own mini-club. I quickly realised that the guys I was playing with were almost all much better than me. That they put more time in, and they had more history with the game. From this I saw that, just in order to get good enough to have any fun at these meetings, I would have to put in more time and effort than I even had available to me. I found myself having less and less fun. Winning felt okay, and losing felt like dying.

I have since moved on to other board games. Competitively: Magic the Gathering. And many other Euro-style board games that are not based on such zero-sum 1:1 competition (e.g. Caverna). MTG especially has been a god-send for me, as anyone can win a magic game, due in a large part to the randomness that is an essential part of the game. On top of the randomness there is the theme that is built into every card, and every magic colour in the game. This balances out the pure calculation of deck building and sequencing play with a healthy dose of imagination.

I grew up eschewing randomness at all costs, being fiercely competetive and hating the idea of winnin/losing as a result of something as seemingly arbitraty as a die roll, or card draw (heck I even refused to play 30 seconds with a die). But I've come to love randomness. When I sit down to play a game of magic my skill level is highly important in the outcome of the game, but so are the cards which I draw. That means that people of all skill levels can sit down and compete with each other. In chess a 300-500 ratings difference basically means that one player has close to 20% chance of winning. For a game that I would want to pursue as an after work activity those odds really just aren't good enough for me.

1. So I guess I've learnt that I need to keep in mind that I pursue any hobby purely for enjoyment.

2. That it's easy to lose sight of that. That, for me, enjoyment must come from more than just winning.

3. That I can't get this from chess in the long run. That I am not willing to put the time and effort into any game where it is 100% skill vs skill, as this is too competetive.

4. The games I play need some element of randomness to bridge those skill gaps, and add flavour to encounters.

5. Theme is so important, to keep my imagination involved in the game, not just calculation. Why should I just move abstracts around a board when I can play against other people, while imagining a small family of dwarfs, collecting goods, tending their farm in the forest, growing their little family, and building their home in the caves they dig out of the mountain.

I still play the odd game of chess on lichess.com, but every time I do all of the above comes back to me, and I remember why I stopped playing chess.
Openings are the killer for me - I can never remember them, and it feels like a cheat to just remember a particular opening and trot out all the same moves all the time anyway.

But then I lose because I've made an obvious mistake during the opening...
maybe https://cronhooks.io ?
This problem is not confined to the government. I've worked in more than a dozen different enterprises, big and small. I think it wouldn't be an overstatement to say that the majority of computer systems I've come across are pretty useless.

EDIT: Maybe enterprises should embrace systems like coda.io as a reasonable compromise between rigid enterprise systems and spreadsheets.
Freelancing to Seven-Figure Earnings (With Infographic)
Sounds like you're agreeing with the Entropic people: https://twitter.com/bitandbang/status/1134872073896169472

Their approach is to create a different kind of registries, and inevitably they need a new client that supports them.
Can this formatting provide round trip for all double floats? The article don't say it.
The problem is: "Constant—with respect to what?" "Remains constant under what conditions?" The function f(x,y) = x^2 is constant under varying y, and is not constant under varying x. The adjective "constant", by itself, is incomplete—unless it's truly a mathematical constant, like 2 or e, that depends on nothing else—which is what leads people to the "O(1)" interpretation of the phrase "constant time".

So if it's not used to mean "constant (no matter what you vary)", then it means "constant (if you vary certain parameters and I'm not specifying which ones)". When you use a phrase with something left out and implied, then the audience has to fill it in somehow. If the audience shares your background, perhaps has been reading similar papers recently in which "constant with respect to xyz" had the xyz spelled out explicitly, this may go well; if not, it may not. In this case, people's interpretations of "the xyz we're varying" appear to range over "the entire space of integer-tuple inputs", "the size of the integers", "the bits of the integers after the leading 1", "the parts of the inputs that are considered 'secret'", and more.

So, if you say something with an implicit part left unspecified, and people fill it in with something different than what you intended... the first time this happens, I might consider it an unfortunate accident. If it happens repeatedly, it may be worth being more explicit or choosing another term. (Suggested terms: "secret-hiding", "secret-blind". "[something]-oblivious" might be another good word-formation—precedent exists in "cache-oblivious" algorithms.)

This is not the worst terminological mess we have in CS[1].

[1] My (least) favorite example is the term "dynamic programming", whose name appears to have been chosen because it sounded good and was vague enough to cover what the author wanted: "Thus, I thought dynamic programming was a good name. It was something not even a Congressman could object to. So I used it as an umbrella for my activities." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming#History
My god, doesn't that amount of time bother anyone? 3 whole seconds is an eternity on modern hardware.
Magnesium also promotes muscle relaxation and “calms the brain”. Here in Switzerland it’s commonly taken over-the-counter. I had never heard of it as a supplement in the US.
Why on earth would you think that? I don't give one whit about their charter. Neither should you. In all likelihood, neither do they.
One solution to this is modal logic, where you have the modifiers "necessary" (written "[]" or as a box) and "possible" (written "<>" or as a diamond). So instead of "a sea-battle will be fought tomorrow", which is neither true nor false, you can only express "it is necessary that a sea battle be fought tomorrow" (which is false, you cannot know the future) or "it is possible that a sea battle be fought tomorrow" (which is true, unless it is impossible, in which case it is false).
Again this tired strawman argument?

Gold mining produces several orders of magnitude less CO2 pollution than Bitcoin. Besides that, gold mining processes are ever increasingly more efficient, while Bitcoin, by design, is every increasingly less efficient to mine.
Mg deficiency is also implicated in some cardiac arrhythmias and supplementation has been shown to help.
> that could be addressed with a simple 4 or 8 byte memcpy.

This won't account for endianness.
It's a token i.e. a financial derivative. So Facebook is not giving it's users bank accounts. So there is less regulation e.g. Know Your Customer.

A block chain will make it easier to build trust because (some) third parties can audit it.
But chrome deletes your old history.
So could universities embed an entire textbook in their course descriptions?

Could they post full feature films on their websites?
“Something in the middle” could be an option. E. g. (in C)

> printf ("%a\n", M_PI);
0x1.921fb54442d18p+1

> printf ("%a\n", 42.0);
0x1.5p+5
I would guess that in a society where everyone cycles, those that would usually be unable to cycle would gain the most from the exercise etc. I believe cycling in your 70s and 80s is relatively common in the Netherlands.

Isn't a wheelchair a weird single purpose vehicle, isn't a bike, or a car? There's nothing inherently wrong with being weird or single purpose, as long as it gets used.

'Around' 0c isn't that cold, gritting the road and putting on a coat would sort that. You're right there is weather that isn't great for cycling, just as there's terrain that isn't great for it either. I'm sure any global scale transportation solution is going to have its problems, no ones suggesting a one size fits all solution.
That's not so bad considering that it would use the same power even with 100 time the current user base

Also the methodology used to get the miners IP is very questionable
We need to talk about gun violence, and why this can’t be our new normal
They probably thought he was mining cryptos
Most people are average. As defined by the bell curve
Sadly I don't see anything simple there. IMO interface is overcomplicated, like in most of PM applications. :)
I'm quite skeptical on supplements, but I have to say that Magnesium helps me sleep like a baby and feel much more relaxed generally.
You forget that it would use the same energy to produce a 1MB block than a 1GB block
Including the British pound - until decimalisation in 1971, the abbreviations for pounds, shillings and pence were Lsd (with the L often having a single or double cross bar) from the Latin libra, solidus and denarius respectively.
Needs a [2011] and some scepticism: Many people have tried Magnesium because it is cheap and available without prescription. If it were as effective as "success in 220 out of 250 cases" claims, that would show up.

The 220 of 250 claim also doesn't fit with "as effective as the tricyclic antidepressant imipramine". No antidepressant is 90% effective.
>Sure, competition is good - but wouldn't pooling resources be better?

Welcome to Linux.
I'm not sure, but generally speaking converting doubles to strings will fail to round trip at least the NaNs

If round tripping is important, my recommendation would be to output something that directly corresponds to the binary representation of the float. For example, printf %a
Auto save your dockers regularly
The Perfect Tech Stack
Is this a brutal, final, swing at the Winklevoss twins?
You need communication redundancy at work
Map of the World's Nuclear Power Plants
I think the "no-protocol" in the post message suggests the http(s) part is unnecessary. Makes sense - it's a pretty easy problem when the scheme is there
I think you would find willing collaborators! <3

Cool thesis. Pretty significant job :)
I know life sciences and I know enterprise

What’s an example of life sciences enterprises
Show HN: Slim – Build and run tiny VMs from Dockerfiles
In the UK, before the police were founded, public-order policing was done by soldiers, who were exactly the sort of repression force that kartan mentions. The Peterloo Massacre was perhaps the apogee of that kind of policing. The establishment of our modern warm and cuddly Peelers was a step in exactly this movement from repression force to citizens service.
Addon-operator to simplify managing additional components in Kubernetes clusters
That’s a great paper! Recommended if only for how much fun it is :)

(Maybe that’s just me of course :) Only one way to find out ...)
Turbocharging Solr Index Replication with BitTorrent (2012)
Communication table is helpful.
I think this is a cultural difference between Europe (minus the UK & Ireland maybe?) and the USA.

As an European, I do everything with my debit card. Only when I buy something on an American site do I 'need' a credit card. So I think it's weird you use the word 'need' for debit.

I feel unsafe every time I have to use the credit card: I'll have to make sure I get a statement at the end of the month and check it, maybe contest something. I have little idea about what my rights are. It is insecure, anyone who has access to a few numbers on it can make payments. Besides, why do I have to take a loan just to pay something, and make sure it all balances out? Not to say the whole credit score thing is alien to me.

The debit card feels much better. They are secured by a OTP, requiring both the card and a PIN. When it's paid, it's paid. No loans, no chargebacks, no credit score, no paperwork. And I know the governement has my back if something goes wrong.
Totally fair point, thank you for bringing it up. Given the numerous build types (source, pip, debian packages, etc), what would you suggest to do in this case? Give the git commit hash maybe?
It also creates a lot of misconceptions of how accurate floating point math is.

An interesting aspect of decimal formatting is how it frequently masks representation error (i.e encoding of 0.1 etc), because the error is symmetrical in the formatter/parser it makes such non-representable fractions appear to be stored perfectly to unsuspecting users.

This can be quite deceptive, if more users were aware of just how many of the simple rational decimals they input were converted into imprecise representations they probably wouldn't trust computers as much as they do. To confuse things more, when operating upon periodic representations the result often matches the representation error of the the equivalent accurate decimal value encoded directly (i.e there were errors, but everything canceled out through formatting) - when they occasionally do not (e.g 0.1 + 0.2) it makes the problem appear all the more elusive.

I think this detail is often lost in explanations of 0.1 + 0.2, that is: representation error is extremely common, 0.1 + 0.2 is merely one of the cases where it both persists through the formatter AND you notice it because the inputs were short decimals, and it's so obvious that the output should be a non-periodic decimal..

TL;DR formatting floats to decimals makes us trust floating point math far more than we should - it's healthy to remember that the formatting process is necessarily imprecise and that you are merely looking at a proxy for the underlying value. Remember that next time you look at _seemingly_ non-periodic decimal output.
Getting more replies from your initial users via personalized demos
In Saas everyone says you should make everything automatic, but in the early days — the more you get down and dirty, the better.

Let me know, what you think, in the comments below.
> Its a totally voluntary activity that primarly benefits yourself and your own family and most people do it because they just want to.

I don't think the main beneficiary of raising children is their family. That child will one day grow into adult who will contribute to society with ideas and labour.

> Outside of nationalist 'we need to have a strong population' or basic evolutionary 'human survival' concerns I really don't see how it is a necessity for the actual people living in the country, specially all of those that don't have or want children.

Well, I don't think people who don't have or don't want children should have them. But within a society, someone needs to have them. Because someone needs to be your waiter, your janitor, your doctor, lawyer, grocer, plumber – I mean, every activity that is provided to us is provided by someone who once was a child. Everyone we work for and with was also once a child.

Given that both people who want and don't want children benefit of there being a society at all, and this society is made out of grown-up children, it's in society's interest to make it easier.

Raising a family is great but is also a burden. The benefits however are shared with the society at large. Also for people who don't want children to be able to not have them and still enjoy the benefits, it makes sense to try to spread the burden widely among society.
Here's one way to do it: https://medium.com/@val.sopi/how-i-am-getting-more-replies-f...
I rolled my eyes on that one too.
The big difference is that Flatpak is largely an open system while Snap is Canonical's personal playground they've deigned to invite you to if you follow the rules that don't necessarily apply to them.

That said, they're both still package managers as far as I'm concerned and don't really offer any significant advantages over those over-engineered abominations.
I’ve found that tools like Xamarin or frameworks like React Native are convenient, and quick but in the “quality” department are lacking. I put quality in quotes because it’s not that you can’t build great apps with them, but that you’re definitely missing things users expect from native SDK offerings.

For example, if we’re talking about the design department we know that iOS apps typically have a certain look and feel. Tools like Xamarin and frameworks like React Native let you build great apps, but when you have markets of users that have different expectations of user experience based on their device, often times these tools/frameworks can’t deliver.

In addition to that, it can be harder to leverage cutting edge features in new releases of mobile OSes, using a tool/framework that builds one size fits all applications.

While I think Xamarin is an amazing tool and has loads of valid use cases, I don’t believe it’s the future. I think it will have a place in years to come, but it’s not going to replace true native SDKs.
Most cheap magnesium is magnesium carbonate which is least effective and causes diarrhoea (should be taken with calcium to prevent that). Magnesium aspartate is sometimes prescribed as "working one", but can be neurotoxic (according to this paper).
Your bank lied to you, get another bank
> There was no electric grid to speak of - even now there is concern the grid can't support all EV's, once you were outside the cities (and there weren't many back then) the grid was spotty. The miracle of being able to pour some cheap liquid in an engine and drive for miles is a considerable achievement.

Not true- Pearl street switched on in 1882, the first overhead wires went up in 1883, and by 1899 there were hundreds of generating stations. Until around 1905-1910 there was no real standardization, leading to a mix of DC, polyphase, and split-phase systems since light bulbs don't care what they run on. Roughly standard split-phase pretty quickly won out and the first electrical washing machine was sold in 1907, before the first model T.

The problem is much more fundamental: you can't charge a battery on AC. Getting DC power at home was NOT easy. You needed a phase converter (an AC motor connected to a DC motor) or a mercury rectifier[1], both FAR from affordable.

> Lead acid batteries weren't very good and were expensive (and still are) and don't last long compared to petrol engines.

That's just goofy. Research doesn't just happen, there has to be real interest and funding. There was no significant interest in batteries for half a century.

> Electric motors were big then - it was only rare earth magnets that made them small enough to consider using in cars at high speed/ranges.

Totally wrong. Electric motors have always and will always be far more compact than combustion motors. In fact induction motors -the kind used in the Tesla Model S- have been essentially unchanged since 1889, when the first squirrel-cage motor was invented.

> Its always been possible to make a small electric commuter car to drive round at 30mph for short distances but even today there are none like this, because people want to take their cars on the road on the weekend without having to worry. In the 1900's it was the call of the open road and cheap travel (petrol was very cheap then) that made petrol win.

No it wasn't. The Model T had a maximum range of 250-300 miles, and as the article says the Detroit Electric could do 240 miles. The Model T did over double the top speed and cost a fourth as much, but the speed wasn't due to technical limitations and the cost was because electric vehicles were a luxury item (the battery was a low-ish premium). Electricity and gas cost roughly the same at the time. It was all about the charging.

Efficient electricity transmission requires high voltage. High voltage requires transformers. Transformers require AC. Batteries require DC. Until it was cheap to convert AC to DC, electric cars had no chance.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q89SV_UwykQ
It's pretty cool how the hexagonal harbour has survived. It's a lake now, Lago Traiano, about 2km inland.
> Tabs on the left and right edges of the windows work much better, because text is wider than it is tall, so you can fit a lot more tabs, and actually read their labels.

Yes, I find that more than a handful of tabs at the top of the page are hard to use.

The wonderful "Tree Style Tab" add-on for Firefox puts your tabs in a tree at the side of the page:

https://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treestyletab.html.en

The hierarchy represents parent-child relationships between pages: if you open a page from another page, it becomes that page's child in the tree. You can drag tabs around to rearrange them, collapse/expand/close subtrees, etc.

It's one of the very few add-ons I can't live without (the others being uBlock Origin and uMatrix).
> This is not a world that operates on JSON or XML. Expect binary blobs with flags (bits) that change the meaning of other flags in fun and exotic ways.

That bring back memories... As a government contractor I've had to work with sensor data (seismic, radar, etc) in various formats that were developed well before the rise of XML and JSON :(

My favorite was a mixed ASCII and binary format, where each data record in a file had an ASCII header that described the format of the following block of binary, and pretty much anything could be different between records, even within the same data file (Time units? Integers? Floats? 16 bit integers? 64 bit? Big/Little Endian?).

I had to write a parser for that :'(
Emacs Org-Mode (Google Tech Talk 2008)
> No grocer is insane enough...

Dirk (the supermarket) accepts credit cards. A few others as well
> In classic logic the statement could be either true or false. But the statement "a sea-battle will be fought tomorrow" is neither.

I'm not buying it. The statement "a sea-battle will be fought tomorrow" is either true or false. Either it will be fought or it won't. You just don't know which one. It won't "maybe be fought".

Similarly, you don't know whether "a sea-battle was fought 3000 * 365 days ago". You don't have enough information to evaluate the truthfulness of either statement, and can only say what confidence you have the sea battle was/will be fought on the given day.
> I typically use throw away email addresses instead since they're free. If I actually want to use the service/account some day I'll sign up properly.

The example above is about giving a direct line to be contacted through email on a personal site or blog, heck even a professional one.

> I expect someday the primary email providers will generate aliases on demand.

I know at least ProtonMail does it. But also theres the email#tag@gmail.com trick that works nicely enough.
Ubuntu to transition Chromium browser to snap
> For my ideal work desktop, I want to have tools assigned per task that I can easily assemble until that task is achieved.

Funny you should say that – I'm currently working on an application that does just this (on macOS).
Beta/MVP should hopefully be out this summer.
If you're curious to learn more, here's an interesting research paper that goes into more detail: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~illah/CLASSDOCS/Clark91.pdf
> I think the opposable thumbs are what really come in handy.

they literally come in handy :-)
Any such unintended consequences would simply be their own fault, people did not agree they could use that wavelength.
Nasa estimates it will need $20B to $30B for moon landing
Women call ambulance for husbands with heart attacks but not for themselves