skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How to give a “Web 101”-type presentation to non-technical people?
Me and my colleagues have been asked to give a "Web 101" / "Demystifying the Web" presentation to a field of non-technical people.

These are folks who generally work in marketing or advertising, and want to build up their knowledge base so they can better understand technology topics when working with various agencies.

What topics would you cover if you were giving this presentation? What are some things that are OK to skim because it may get too technical and isn't relevant to their area of expertise? Any key points to avoid?

We are thinking we don't want to get into any specific programming fundamentals (variables, functions, loops), or libraries (React, MongoDB, Git), and try and stay as general as possible while still plugging in any gaps they may have.

One strategy we had was the use one of those "polling" apps where people can anonymously text a question they've had but have been too afraid to ask about, and we can try and answer those questions.

Besides trying to answer people's specific questions, some general ideas that we had include:

* History of Computers, the Internet, and HTML

* Building Blocks: HTML, CSS, JS (Content, Style, and Functionality)

* The Browser

* Web 2.0 and the rise of user-generated content

* Web 3.0? (Ubiquitous Connectivity, "The Cloud," "The Intelligent Web")

* Emerging Technologies (AI/ML/NLP, AR/VR/MR/"XR")

* Nitty gritty (high level, but these may be too specific): SPA, PWA, CMS, PaaS

Has anyone here had to do something like this before? Any material you'd recommend to draw inspiration from?
Did you enjoy making repairs though? In my experience that’s what makes people either love or hate owning their place.

Personally I loathe doing any kind of maintenance work. I hate dealing with drywall, paint, wiring, pipes, and whatever else you have to deal with when maintaining a home.
Safety is important. Forcing a design of a product to your objectively high standards is not.
That's an interesting way of looking at it.

Got an opinion on what the next great leap in social networking might be? Is it private chat groups, as others have mentioned too?

I'm asking because for the first time in a long time, I don't have any sense of where we're heading, of what shows great promise.

Feels more like we're seeing small refinements rather than truly big ideas for the future.

Is it just me?
People who think tax breaks will mean increased hiring just don't understand how business works.

A company doesn't hire people because they have extra money. They hire people because they believe those people will generate them more money than they cost (and enough more money to be worth the opportunity cost). Sure, tax breaks might change the math a little bit if the math is close, but this is pretty rare.
If the full story is death by a thousand cuts, do you want a thousand-paragraph comment?
The Amiga was able to create a "Recoverable RAM Disk" that survived reboots, back in the early 80s: https://grimore.org/amiga/rad
I said "you should rely on the team expertise". Sadly, you're reading it wrong: if the criteria acceptance says feature X must output Y, then if we see that it outputs P just because someone didn't liked the initial agreement, then it is not teamwork, it is what you want to do.

Sadly again, this kind of free will leads to poor products.

The production thinng is imporant: you must be aware what you launch, do the internal communication, external, making sure things goes well. If you push to production features without approval you're basically creating a problem.

I think you want to be in a place where you can rule, meaning, being the CEO of the product and the one who make it. Maybe I'm wrong asserting this, but the product manager has to be accountable.
Tried it out and the convo went like this:

Me: hi

Bot: I do not understand your request

Me: what is your name

Bot: my name is Olivia

Me: can you help me?

Bot: goodbye
At first glance of this post's title, I thought it was a list of unpopular users' reading. Which would be more interesting, even if the books themselves weren't.
Home Depot is targeting day laborers, I would imagine. I live in the southeast where there are lots of migrant workers, and it's like described in the article, with entire aisles of gas stations dedicated to these kinds of snacks.
Do you know of or could list which databases support raw block devices?
Honestly the worst thing about it is that you have to manually check to see if your battery is affected. A proactive email might be better than telling people to enter their serial on a site to check.
Could you give some examples of what you consider "anti-Chinese"? As a Westerner I'm somewhat confused by this. I have a Chinese friend who moved to the west in his early teens. We were discussing an article that was critical of Chinese trade practices and I was surprised that he perceived the article as "anti-Chinese". He seemed to take personal offense. I was kind of perplexed by this reaction. I mean, in any sense that the author of the article was "anti-Chinese", they would presumably be "pro-Hong Kongese" or "pro-Taiwanese". So it's clearly not an ethnic/racial thing. Or is it not that clear?

I think the conventional Western stance is that the citizens of China are being oppressed by their authoritarian government and that they, as a whole, would prefer to live in an open democracy like we do. You say you "don't care" about criticism of the Chinese government. As a Westerner, I don't understand why you're (only) indifferent about it. I mean, there were a couple million people on the streets of Hong Kong this weekend that are presumably more than indifferent about the Chinese government.

So help me understand your point of view. Like for example, how do you feel about the U.S. actions against Huawei (in terms of being "anti-Chinese")?
> When you rent, if you secure a 12 month lease, you know exactly how much you’re spending in housing over the next year.

Only for exactly 12 months though. After that, your rent could double for all you know, and there’d be nothing you could do. You can move, of course, but now you’ve been forced to upend your life.

I live in a rent stablized apartment, and I feel lucky not just because my current price is lower than market rate overall. But of course, that’s not a scalable economic solution.
Curiously, Blizzard had hardware tokens (and later phone authenticator apps) 10+ years ago, before most banks and I kind of want to say 'before most consumer online services in general'. And they had the exact same account recovery hellflow problems everyone else has, just earlier.
What a disappointment...
I like this post a lot!
Much better than "The Quarrymen".
Interesting given the kudos Monzo is getting for the clarity of their bank transfer postmortem:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20231845

The tone of voice guide is written in such a way that any team could adopt it. It's excellent.
They used more computer power than BERT and much more data for training.
Also they still under-perform comparing to the best BERT-base model in SQuaD 2.0 benchmark.

The big value of BERT is that it is publicly available, and can be modified and improved.
I'm betting on insider access. Microsoft had to lock down internal access to their security bugs when some employees were selling the bugs on the black market.
Thanks for your input, and for Authy. I was a long-time user until I recently switched to an open-source alternative.

> Third, U2F Hardware tokens. Its finally possible to do U2F to the iphone via Bluetooth and Feitan now has a key that supports it (Google sells one for project Titan).

Would you still recommend a Bluetooth key given the recently found vulnerability[0] in the Feitian/Titan? The initial criticism from Yubico[1] seems to suggest it's an inherent limitation of the BLE protocol.

[0]: https://security.googleblog.com/2019/05/titan-keys-update.ht...

[1]: https://www.yubico.com/2018/07/the-key-to-trust/
> Approach this as a UX problem. Is the name negatively affecting people's ability to approach or remember the brand? Do people actually need to know the exact spelling of your company name in order to discover your product?

Reminds me of the STIHL commercial from a couple of years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWSynIB68rE

tl;dw people are interviewed and each person says the company name differently. The video starts the sales pitch with "No matter how you say STIHL..."
One more "cons" can be hyphens, for a comfortable reading a book is normally justified text with hyphenation. Not sure if wkhtmltopdf will respect that
While I tend to agree that the past decade has seen some arguably unnecessary increases in complexity, the latest safety technology is significantly more advanced than even 10 years ago.

Your list includes "Air Bags, ABS and Traction Control" - this list was fine in the early 90s, but you've missed one of the most life saving innovations in recent modern car history - Electronic/Dynamic Stability Control.

Multiple studies have shown ESC has potential to reduce fatal accidents by a third - this is largely why it was made mandatory on all cars sold in the EU and US since 2011/12. If you own a powerful vehicle, especially a rear wheel drive one, the kind of driver input mess (accidental or intentional) ESC systems can clean up that otherwise has you spinning off the road is pretty amazing.
> If it was the problem you claim, we would expect female engineers to make much higher salaries than their male counterparts.

Or it just means one of the other stated assumptions is wrong, e.g., that companies don't really want 50% women. Every company I've worked for has been happy to hire women for any job, but none has ever made it a quota.
Check out the Apollo Core. FPGA soft core for an out of order 68k that they call a 68080. Even in an FPGA it's faster than any released 68k.

http://www.apollo-core.com/
The Beast of Gévaudan
Visualization of Sea Level Rise on San Francisco
Nonetheless all counties there were dirt poor at some point in the last hundred years. North Korea still is.

IQ is largely a measure of education, which itself is largely related to how developed your country is. Large groups of relatively uneducated rural dwellers will drag the average down.

It's well known Asians are smarter, whether for cultural or genetic reasons, but the devil is in the details. If you look at average populations I would expect the inverse for counties like China that only developed recently.
I remember a dialogue from The Cleveland show (yeah, that spin off which lasted few seasons" )

Cleveland as Japanese: " I am going to work 12 hours overtime, on top of the 10 hour daily work so that i can bring honor to my family"

Laughed really hard wondering who works like that, but guess the joke is on me :(
From the consumer perspective, Google+ failed because it sucked.
Maybe 'requires' is too strong a word. It's hardly mandatory, but I'd argue you should invalidate a lost or stolen seed for the same reason you should reset a lost or stolen password.

Of course it is not possible to access something protected by MFA if you only have one factor. But I don't think it follows that making it easy for an attacker to obtain a factor since you have two is OK; the whole point of MFA is that single factors are too easy to guess or steal. Solutions that encourage seed export and sharing make it easier to steal the seed, and leaving a seed active if a device it's on has been lost or stolen is like saying you don't care.
> Worse would be to talk about reeducation camps, or organ harvesting. It's meme-like at this point and has no bearing on reality.

https://chinatribunal.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/China-T...
Location, location, location, even within the same city it's $300 to $5000 per month.
Yep, it's why they're so expensive to repair. Everything is basically a single piece, so if a $2 part goes out you replace basically the entire system. Sounds economical, and consumer friendly!
Seems like I recently read that the Ada folks might want to borrow some concepts from Rust. To me that says both languages are working toward similar goals.
I never said they're omniscient. But it sounds bad middle management than C-LEVEL bad management. When things are asked to be done, there's a process to know this. Nothing starts, at least, in serious companies, without measuring the scope the project, the time requiered and the amount of resources (maybe you need to hire more or something pro on that area) to achieve something.

It's true there are companies where the CEO jumps on the role he wants and start changing things micromanaging.
I would be very reluctant to give up my computer for 1-2 weeks. If they are so concerned about safety, they should either fix it when I bring it to the store or give me a replacement.
I'm ambivalent about the multiple factors case (unless one of the factors is SMS). My feeling (can't back up with evidence) is that most people who do that are savvy, but remember that part of the point of recovery codes (which are in fact a second factor) is to protect you from the service provider's account recovery flow. The more routine account recovery has to be, the less secure the service is likely to be.
> but "what can we afford? and what do we want?" In that order!

I'd switch the order. Once you decide what you want, then you cut or adjust expectations to fit your budget. Just make sure to set the budget before making decisions. For example, if you want live music at the reception, you find a musician(s) or band that fit your budget, without simply deciding you can't afford it.
> I can go on.

I'll skip that too. I have a counter argument literally for every your affirmation. Big part of modern CE devices do not fit into your description (or at least, we clearly have in mind very different ones). The more expensive a device, the more complex it generally is, and the higher is the motivation to repair it. I don't think we need the law only to repair car fobs and wireless door keys.

> I have yet to see an industry certification which has not clearly put in place for a business reason.

Since when business reasons became intrinsically bad? Aren't we on HN?
I can’t imagine Apple, a champion of privacy, wants to keep a mapping of serial number to user emails. Even if harmless or if it already exists, it might taint Apple with a creepy vibe.
Conway's law. If you fuck up the org of a project, the project will be just as fucked up. For something that is supposed to integrate across google products, it should never be so isolated.
So it's alright for one group to affect change on the area, but not the other?

We should just suck it up, let foreign investors buy up property to rent to other foreigners, and commute a couple of hours to work every day instead? Canadians are polite, but we're not THAT polite.
Well, it worked for toilet-training our daughter. "Pogs" (colorful cardboard disks) were in at the time, used here as rewards.
Your selected example has a negative externality of being deadly to bystanders if driven on a public roadway, and a more measured man might make some stipulation about such a vehicle only being driven on private land, but this is fundamentally how I feel. If I want to die in a flaming wreck, or if I want to accept a chance of dying in a flaming wreck in exchange for a discount on material goods, I don't want well-meaning bureaucrats to gavel about telling me I can't do it because they know what's best for me. We all make tradeoffs and take chances in life, and you wouldn't like me telling you which tradeoffs and chances to take, so why should you get to tell me which tradeoffs and chances to take? An appeal to numbers (democracy -- that thing that got Hitler elected) won't get very far at changing my mind, nor will an appeal to the ideal social contract conceived of by an entity whose intelligence approaches the hypothetical limit (for more than one reason, but most simply because I generally accept the orthogonality thesis).
Looks like an ad for Vanguard and ETrade. You should never pay $10 per trade. Included in this cost is the privilege of placing a market order at no penalty. Use Interactive Brokers instead and place limit orders at nearly no cost. For someone who espouses "1% can make you a millionaire" and then advocates spending $10 on a $1,000 order is just stupid. By their own definition, this alone will make you a millionaire.

Another thing I hate, the 10% return on average of the stock market. Since the inception of S&P 500 in the 50's, it's almost 8%. In fact, the average rate of return over any 40 years (the typical investing age) is something around 6.5% [0].

The single greatest thing you can do to save for retirement - negotiate for a 2% salary raise when you start your career. This will literally beat every piece of advice in this entire document combined.

[0] https://dqydj.com/sp-500-historical-return-calculator/
did the same a while back. Though it likely doesn't change much, never hurts to tell them that this is the specific reason you're leaving.
To be precise: only computers manufactured between October 2016 and October 2017 are affected. I think that apart from the now standard keyboard replacement program no MacBook made since 2018 has a replacement program yet.
It's also often valuable to the ones being pushed back on. Lots of people will just complain and never directly confront the problem by explicitly asking for consistency in information communicated. I much prefer co-workers who will provide direct feedback in lieu of the "inform the manager route". If the problem doesn't correct over a reasonable period of time, then involve a manager.
This is a well-written post-mortem for public reading. I encourage people to read through it.

Being someone who also works in the payments space currently, relying on gateways, I have gone through several similar outages, where we detected a gateway issue causing an outage, notified the gateway who ack’d... and then we waited. More than one time, like Monzo, we built a workaround on our end, before the gateway provider could even mitigate the outage.

Hats off to the Monzo team, who clearly have a solid oncall and incident mitigation strategy in-place. They determined an outage happening in 4 minutes, built a workaround as best they could and deployed it in 2 hours, while it took the gateway provider 9 hours only to mitigate their change that caused the issue the first place. Granted the issue seemed complex, this is still slow.

Unfortunately, in cases like this, the best one can do is make sure there is a clear SLA in-place with the third party, with a contract stating financial liability in case the third party fails to meet this SLA. Monzo will not tell us much about this part, but I suspect the gateway will have to pay a hefty fee to Monzo, as their availability dropped to under 99% for this month, which should trigger payments/fee reductions from the third party with a well-written contract. It is good to see they are pushing the third party to do a proper post-mortem and prevention actions, as well as holding them accountable.

Nice work!
A good example of why HTML emails need to be downgraded to plain text in financial companies, and links stripped and checked before it's shown.
Flip side, I get most/more of my money back by owning a home so I look at it like free rent for just doing maintenance. Buy a newer home, less problems.
> Don't you also lose a lot of the deposit money you put down on the old apartment and the services that went along with it though?

Wait, what? It's a deposit, you get it back at the end of the lease.

Like, granted, if you have a lot of damage to the carpets, sure, you're gonna be out $80 for the cleaning of them. But I've always gotten it back in full after a month or so.

For me, moving is litterally a weekend (maybe including a Friday afternoon). We really don't have much to move. I'm not joking.

Also, my state allows you to just forward the mail to the new address for free. It only lasts a year, but you can re-up that at any time. We've just done that without much worry and we also have a lot of online stuff that works through the phones and whatnot.

I guess I'm just old hat at doing this kinda moving stuff. It's not much stress for me, though you are right, it is some extra stress. For us, it's worth the savings.
I guess the article is, in part, refuting the argument that the tax breaks cause hiring and reduce layoffs. In all honestly, they are likely unrelated events-- but it would be in the public interest to know that before deciding tax law changes.
>housing security

There is no such thing unless your home is paid off.

If you have a mortgage and are hit by a catastrophic life event that leaves you without a job and depleted of your emergency fund, your home is gone.
The Varroa epidemic was widely publicized (and, again, apparently eradicated feral honey bees) in the 1980s, before the widespread use of neonicotinoids.
"Meanwhile, Amazon’s Echo and voice-assisted personal assistant, Alexa, was in an estimated 24% of US households as of the fourth quarter of 2018..."

Well that's unnerving.
I agree.. it sounds like he was socially anxious (not arguing that he should/shouldn't be so) and had lashed out emotionally in the guise of a holier/more intellectual-than-thou snip.

Cultural historical differences be damned; while types of comedy and speech have changed over time, real wit has always been a part of modern human behavior, and putting someone down in the name of comedy has always been a slight. I especially agree with the call out about basically esoteric trivia; it sounds like something I would have said when I was 17, thinking I was above everyone, and just making everyone else around me feel extremely awkward.
Split them into multi-family houses. Cheap density increase, higher revenue to the landlord, and more supply to soften housing costs for tenants.
Madness! This was written by Rich Harris.
Didn't know that. Thanks for pointing it out! Fixed it!
Your manager understands what you are doing and why.

Your manager removes roadblocks from accomplishing tasks.

Your manager finds resources from other teams.

Your manager complements and shares your accomplishments.

Your manager does not allow other teams or managers to pull you down.

You can communicate honestly and openly with your manager.

Your manager does not lie.

Also, this is kind of a tautology, but people are not leaving your team (excepting larger industry or company trends)
I'm honestly confused - why is a wikipedia page about an old computer architecture on the front page of HN?
And Ractive!
I do ask many many questions. Often I realized people fell onto "gut feeling" cases or other kinds of biases where empirical evidence never was presented. That's why it's important to ask.
Sure, but it's great that he could say that sort of thing publicly and not be executed. That wouldn't have been true in the Christian world at the time or a lot of the Muslim world today.
The Artist Formerly Known As Prince
True, but from my perspective moving is a small, point in time hassle that you go through every couple years as a renter, as opposed to a lifelong stream of issues that you have to deal with as a homeowner.
What blew it for me was the way it automatically added gmail contacts to your circles. I started seeing posts from an auto dealer I got in a trivial dispute with years prior over e-mail. Why Google thought I wanted that is unbeknownst
to me.