skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great article.

Now:

> In 1993, a Defense official in the Clinton administration, Bill Perry, called defense contractor CEOs to a dinner, nicknamed “the last supper.”

Bill you devil.

Jokes aside, now imagine you're this guy and have all this power in your hands, imagine that for a second, what would you do? If you ask him, he did great. Because all he knows is that, he can't see past the situation because he is a small minded creature. This begs a question is he responsible? Well I don't think so. It's us, us people that go to polls and vote.

Now imagine the frustration of the good Boeing engineers of that time. You probably can't because of the today's culture, a culture where nobody is giving a shit about anything.

No matter what though, it's very important not to lose the compass and not forget for what you have fought when the time comes.
Good blog post on the subject here: https://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-t...

TL;DR it's been commonly used this way for centuries, all the way back to Shakespeare and even earlier.

There are alternatives, xe/xer/xem, but you can't wish new English words into existence even if they might be useful. You end up sounding sillier trying to use the new made-up words than if you just resign yourself to "they".

And can I add that this comments thread here is peak HN. There's a fascinating article about an interesting part of history I'd never heard of before, and yet all but one of the comments here are nitpicking over word choice. And I'm not helping any either.
but it's more than they're getting off the people that currently pay nothing ...
It's all about layers of management where such things aren't possibly taken into account. The mechanical gauges don't have delay by their nature, so everyone expects the software ones also to not have any. But when the work is signed off, no one explicitly has power or resources to stop the production because of that.
vacations? Human config error is probably most common cause of services failure, so if there are some more senior people missing it might lead to some fails.
Well, okay. https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/2/18518176/boeing-737-max-cr... agrees (though I vehemently disagree with its title when interpreting it as referring to pilot errors! But that might be the point). Problem seems to be that it was basically impossible to realize which checklist to follow and to identify the problem. I think my sentence when interpreted with that in mind still works (and you are still right as well): Pilots had no opportunity (several reasons, like not being informed about system changes) to save the plane, but not it was 100% impossible during the whole incident to save the plane (it was probably impossible after they deactivated the electric trim system).
Weird how all the hot tails fill up after 2000 and all the cold tails filled up before 2000.
I put, as a test and for fun, a "Disallow" entry in my robots.txt (with a campy name to be honest) and not a single crawler hit that dir in more than three years, don't know if others had the same experience.
That's how biologists study changes and shift in diurnal cycle and circadian rhythm with pretty much every organisms. Rapid eclipse-like changed have been studied in automated incubation chamber. And all this was already known, and was part of my biology text book 20 years ago. That scientific news in NYT is the new normal sensationalism. The plants aren't really shocked. They've dealt with that for millions of year. It's not like they can escape, or turn on the artificial light bulb.
I reached a point last year where working on frivolous tech products made me guilty and depressed. As a result I've spent the past several months pivoting my software consulting career to be focused on sustainability. My strategy so far is to:

* Understand the science behind the causes and effects that make up the broad problem of "climate change"
* Learn as much as I can about current policies, technologies, strategies, etc
* Read well-regarded books on the above topics (e.g. I just finished Koomey's [Cold Cash, Cool Climate][0])
* Observe/follow leaders in the space
* Meet people who know and care about protecting our environment
* Find solutions where I can contribute my software expertise to the greatest effect

I'm just scratching the surface but there is light at the end of the tunnel. There is a tremendous amount of work being done across major sectors like energy, transportation, building, manufacturing, etc. that is both fulfilling and well-funded.

I'd be delighted to connect with any other HN'ers who want to collaborate or chat. Email in my profile

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Cold-Cash-Cool-Climate-Science-Based/...
Reliable, great hardware quality (keyboard aside), gorgeous Unix-based OS out of the box, excellent driver support.

Edit: And the best trackpad ever designed imo
My 'gut' intuition is that doing that is the same as applying the cipher of length 2, then the cipher of length 3, 5, 7 each in turn invidually, but I haven't had the chance to dig out cyberchef to confirm this.

Edit: Indeed: (no spoilers for the fun of actually breaking your message)

https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=Vigen%C3%A8re_Encod...
Using OpenAPI to Build Smart APIs for Dumb Machines
> Oh and the escape key… long remapped to caps lock. If I really need caps lock, fn + caps lock key toggles it.

I've remapped escape to caps lock too, but how do you get fn + caps lock to toggle caps lock?
I agree with this. Political humor used to fill a small niche, and was always an ‘easier’ form of comedy.

I remember Bill Maher’s standup in the 80s and 90s, and was completely disinterested. It was simply not amusing.

Political humor is one of the lowest forms of comedy to me, and unfortunately has become a quite popular genre.
Outlook.office.com – 503
It's surely fair to use the page title as the HN link title.
>The profit motive was great for cutting through the more idealistic 'open web's" occasionally stubborn^ roadblocks.

Could you give some examples of this, please?
Best in class screens

The trackpad is unsurpassed in the industry

Low power consumption / good battery life
The Kryptos puzzle [1] also contains two Vigenère ciphers.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos
Most people are running Windows. That means most people trying to learn how to program are running Windows. I wouldn't want to figure out how to set up a web server on Windows myself, and absolutely wouldn't expect someone learning to program on their own to be able to art it up without getting frustrated.

Even for people on Mac and Linux, having to start by learning the terminal is a pretty big and unnecessary obstacle to just getting to writing some JavaScript. Sure, you and I think it's easy, but it's a completely different paradigm which requires practice to get comfortable with.

Even if you can be there right by someone learning to program, and help them set up a web server, they will have to remember how to do that when they want to play with programming while you're not there. That's actually quite a lot to remember when you don't yet understand what the commands mean; you think of it as "go to the directory, start SimpleHTTPServer", but they have to memorize the text they have to type. Maybe you're the one who cd'd into the correct folder for them, and they remember to type `python -M SimpleHTTPServer` in the terminal you created; they will then have problems they don't know how to solve when they go home and open a terminal and type the command and it doesn't work because they weren't in the correct directory.
What you will discover is that you soon have no systemically-important high-tech companies.

For example, the excessive litigation in the 1970s against general aviation just led to Cessna and co. making planes designed in the 1940s.
there's definitely a market for an easy-to-use security product like this
I'm a big believer in taking action. Even if you aren't sure how you can help by trying you never know what will happen based on your actions. Two months ago I became motivated to help fix the climate, so far I have:

Started https://techimpactmakers.com/ to bring together tech workers to communicate and collaborate around the climate issue.

Launched https://climatechoice.co/ a website which educates you about how you can help prevent earth’s climate breaking down today.

Announced The Climate Fixathon. The world's first online hackathon for makers to help fix the climate. Full launch next week - https://fixathon.io

My long-term goal is to figure out how to do this full-time.
> What are they best in class for?

The overall experience.
first they came for the fake news, and I said nothing because I didn't care about the fake news' rights

then they came for the altright, and I did say nothing because I didn't like the alt right content

then they came for the historical channels for they talked about the rise of fascisms and I did say nothing because I was thinking of the easily influenced children

then they came for the technical content, and there was no one left to speak for me
Walmart's done a good job of trying to carry as many things on its site as Amazon. I find most things listed on both sites. I also like the idea of free ship to store and use that.

The problem is the same that Target, and Barnes and Noble all have in competing with Amazon. Their sites aren't as good. They are spartan, uninteresting, hard to navigate, difficult to find things, and often so slow as to be unusable.

In short their developers, development managers, server staff, etc, aren't good enough.

On Amazon I can find what I need, the site looks good in all browsers including old ones, it doesn't bog down the CPU, stall or crash the browser, and products can be found using their own search mechanism without having to resort to using Google.
Try to create some wetland - a pond, or if there is a stream dam it and flood some of the land.
> E.g. we have strict rules regarding political advertisement and campaign contributions which means money is not an important thing in Norwegian politics. Consequently politicians are not bought [...]

This is not true if Norway is anything like Germany. A few years ago the German government commissioned a study on the public's influence on policy.[0] It concluded decisively that political decision making aligned the closest with the wants of the wealthiest while there was even a negative trend with regards to the poorest in that policies favored by a majority of them were especially unlikely to be enacted. Europe isn't as insane as the US in that regard but that's not a high standard.

[0]: https://www.bmas.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/PDF-Publikatione...
I’ve had one for a few months now and it seems fine, however the failure rate is a real problem.
I managed to learn Spivak pronouns because I knew someone who used them, but that didn't make it easy.
It is actually probably kind of like that, although not as part of a moralistic panic or a political purge as seem to be the common assumptions. What they likely have is too much content that makes too little money and attracts too few advertisers, so they're willing to lose the content they can most afford to lose. It's a simple cost/benefit analysis to them.

Social media sites which depend on user supplied content use that content to advertise the platform. Maybe no one told Youtube content creators that they were really doing sales work for Google, but that's always been the nature of the modern social media model. They don't work for you, you work for them.

TANSTAAFL.
I feel like I'm the only one that actually preferred the new butterfly keys over the old one; even after some keys got sticky and I had to get them replaced.

I was able to get a few more 2 year old internal parts replaced while it happened so it was pretty worth it IMO.
If they are successful, then their posts are worth more than $4 so they wouldn't be eager to trade one for an ice cream cone.
Agree on almost everything you said, but not having children will have far more impact than giving up meat. Going childfree almost like a taboo subject when discussing the environment.
I had written the wittiest of emails, clicked 'Send', and the button just went grey. No other signals. I hit refresh, ignored the warning about losing data, autosave drafts FTW right(?!).

And now I wait with my wit in my clipboard...
How can we ask that question, if the companies we work for and all the work we do, is asking exactly the opposite question?
There's actually a little wheel at the back of the volume thingie where you can "scroll" to the next and previous track, etc.
I misunderstood your point. I thought you found it remarkable that we expected to be able to discern gender quite quickly. In any case, I don’t know how much our gendered language indicates our values as a society, probably that gender is just information-dense (lots of behavior correlates strongly with gender) such that many languages evolved gender as a utility (and indeed English actually lost much of its grammatical gender though probably not because the density of information was lower in English-speaking societies, but rather due to massive influxes of non-native speakers which had a broader simplifying effect on the language).
Trackpad, battery life, the OS.
I am using Karabiner Elements: https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/

You can do all kinds of Keyboard modifications. See here for the mentioned mod: https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/complex_modifications/#caps_l...
A lot of stuff relies on google cloud which explains some of it... but then I've also noticed other seemingly unrelated incidents on Linode recently, main one was a network outage in the Dallas data centre.

I haven't heard what all the underlying causes are but I wonder if this is to do with the so called "768K Day" issue.
Banning people from planting veggies. Veggies!

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, under US military control, every year, millions of acres of Opium are planted, harvested, processed, packaged and shipped, suplying over 90% of the worlds' Heroin. [0]

What a world.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_production_in_Afghanista...
I'd be interested in MBP sales figures from the batch of MacBooks with the new keyboard/touch bar.

From my perspective, despite a whole host of issues, very few people seem to have actually moved away from Mac's. I hear a lot of grumbling, but you only need to look at this thread to see people claim that the MBP is the best professional-grade laptop available today, when the issues with the OS, the keyboard, and the touch bar indicate that this hasn't been the case for years.

I assumed that for this reason Apple would have stuck with their design choice, and would iterate over time - unless there has been a significant enough drop in sales.
You're erroneously assuming that banks can detect all possible suspicious activity on their own

You're right, that's probably not possible to begin with.

However, if a bank spots patterns, which don't smell quite right they are obliged by law to report it to regulators.

Another reason why Deutsche is yet again in so much hot water[1]. Essentially they refused to report suspicious activities, which was flagged by a compliance officer.

[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/06/donald-trump-deutsch...
Except for trackpad and a decent MacOS, nothing really. Low quality hardware, increasingly subpar battery life on newer MBPs, battery swellings too common.

The hardware issues are common, but PR damage control teams, stakeholders, and fans will bury anyone who mentions it.
I expect it's a slight more meta metric, I doubt they care about the court of public opinion beyond its relevance to company profit.
huh? No children because you want to save environment, sorry to be cynical.
If you need a manual to discover what is arguably the most commonly used function in the car, it’s a design failure.

Thanks to comments on HN and elsewhere I finally discovered the wheel. It’s horrible to say the least:

- literally nothing else in the entire car is operated via such a wheel.

- literally nothing else in the car feels like the wheel (what happens when the wheel “clicks” twice? Is it one operation (like everywhere else) or two?

- For some reason it pops up a modal window on the touch screen that shows the current song, takes a while to show the next song, and the moment it shows the next song it disappears. Why can’t it behave like next/previous buttons on the touch screen?

There’s no bottom to the abyss that is Renault design.
So a browser with a build in Flattr / Patreon / Liberapay option. Sounds like a good option.
I read this article and I love the capitalism.

A company is losing money to give customers better service.

Its not selfless, but its a phenomena.

I have never enjoyed shopping more than with Walmart grocery pickup. And Walmart online is superior to Amazon (cost alone).

Is it bad to employ low wage workers?
Yes I agree, the article that I linked above focuses on the ambiguity of the policy wording, interesting read.
The key feel would only be slightly worse than the current offering.
Ok, fair enough. Before I wrote my comment, I did perform a "view source" to search for "ad-free internet" and it wasn't found. However, if one uses F12 Developer Tools to inspect the DOM, it does have:

"<title>Ad-free Internet by Firefox</title>"

It's interesting that that phrase is not visibly used and the big bold text people actually see just says "Support the sites you love, avoid the ads you hate".

EDIT to the replies: Yep got it. I can't see the title text on any tabs because they're too narrow when I have 50 tabs open.
When you have adaptive cruise-control which keeps constant distance with the vehicle in front of you by adjusting speed, you start to pay less attention to the road in general. You basically can't hit the car in front of you, so you subconsciously start to care less. So there are small curves of the road that fall under your consciousness' "radar" and lane assist actually helps in those cases.

But boy, how afraid I am when it triggers in the construction zones!
I’m still using my 2012 MacBook Pro desperately hoping they release a new 15-inch line without the Touch Bar. I had bought a MacBook pro with the Touch Bar and after a few weeks I just hated it more and more and returned it.

I’m still mad about them ditching MagSafe but I can get over that at least.
I hope this is true. I was about to replace my 2013 MBP with a used 2015 or shift over to Windows. (The Lenovo Carbon has a great keyboard.) I can wait until next year to see if Apple really does the right thing but if not - it's Lenovo for the new machine.
Next up, extending the touchbar into a a touchscreen keyboard.

No moving parts, even thinner, far more expensive, looks trendy, absolutely unusable, it's the apple March of progress.
>“We continue to find evidence that the Neanderthals were not inferior primitives but were quite capable of doing things that have traditionally only been attributed to modern humans,” said co-author Paolo Villa, adjunct curator at the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History.

For that I blame the curators themselves. Whenever you go to a museum, the exhibits extrapolate far more than is reasonable from the thing they're actually displaying. And then they blend it in! Entire skeletons to glue together a few bones, leaving you unable to tell what's real - something pulled out of the ground where it's been resting for millions of years - and what's a historian's best guess. Thanks to that we still have exhibits of dinosaurs with bare skin.

Show me the real fossil, it's far more interesting.
And the maximize button that maximized everything except the content
> error check has == instead of !=

And you return the error as-is if its nil; seems fine to me?

Your second example is also a bit... far-fetched because it tries to be smart by putting the error checking in the same line. There's also the "line of sight" guideline which states that the happy path should be left-aligned, while edge cases - like errors - should be in indentation [0]. See also the law of least astonishment [1], which your final example does not conform to.

Yes it will compile and yes it is an issue but that's not because of the language. It's because of an attempt at cleverness by writing more compact, of having the happy path in an if, and (arguably) by reusing variable names - but this seems pretty common, and longer variable names like idk, `osOpenError` and `fileStatError` seem to be discouraged in favor of reuse.

So I'm not sure if you're getting your point across like this.

[0] https://medium.com/@matryer/line-of-sight-in-code-186dd7cdea...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...
> In theory you are correct. In practice, if 97% of society exclusvely uses said aggregator/community to find videos - 97% of your potential audience will never know the video exists - is that not still censorship?

Reminds me of the retort to libertarian/anti-big-government goals: "Lots of things become a government"
> there isn't any magic bullet technology fix

Of course. That doesn't mean technology (this forum's expertise) can't be used as part of a solution though.

> The only way we stand a chance is by making sweeping, society-wide changes.

Sounds like something that we could attempt to throw various technologies at; for instance, I'm sure many users of this site are experts in technology for helping spread awareness (i.e. ad/marketing tech), enabling/improving collaboration (e.g. consensus building for legislators), coordination (e.g. for activists), etc.

> The only thing you as an individual can do is try to pressure your leaders for large scale government activity

If OP was asking what they, as some random Internet user, could do, then perhaps your pessimism would be right. I don't think that's too relevant for what OP is actually asking though, which is what's being done by HN users (a large number of technical experts, wielding disproportionately more power than the average citizen due to expertise in, and stewardship of, technologies with large amplifying effects, like the Web, social media, etc.)
I also have made the same decision for the same reasons. There are too many of us.
I live in small town and people are so use to plastic that they take plastic for every silly things. I believe awareness is best thing instead of some tech thing how we can solve environmental problem.
Publishers work with multiple ad networks to diversify their revenues, but the most they can diversify is around 30%.
YouTube, for example, got online video bigger/better/faster by doing centralisation, flash & such.

..FB also, photos of their grand hildren was the reason a lot of people got online.
I have encountered a few people who use it/its pronouns.
TBH, if you're a real influencer, you're not going to trade a mention for a free $4 ice cream cone.
secondary issue but dad was a environmental engineer at some drilling locations, managing impact and cleanups. guess what job got cut immediately at the beginning of the last decadecrisis? personal action is fine and dandy, but we need to make expensive for company to pollute so one doesn't have to choose between helping the environment and having a family.
The Lenovo Yoga Book is a hinged tablet. Bottom half is a glass surface with both capacitive touch and Wacom digitiser. It comes with a Wacom pen, which has a swappable ballpoint pen nib so you can draw on paper and have it digitised. There's a backlit silkscreen-type stencil that shines through a (permanent) keyboard layout. And touchpad. So, it's touch-screen typing on a fixed keyboard layout. And you can swap between pen-digitiser and keyboard mode. A crazy set of features. I was very excited to buy it.

They keyboard is very hard to use. The pen is laggy and there's no really useful Android software. I use it exclusively for watching videos. Go figure.

Still, I'm glad they tried it. There's too much device monoculture IMHO.

https://www.lenovo.com/gb/en/tablets/android-tablets/yoga-ta...