skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem I witness when the general goal laid out is improving "velocity" tends to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what velocity is.

Namely, velocity is speed plus a direction, and most of the activities that would normally help codify a sane and deliberate direction (i.e. rigorous requirements, rigorous design, rigorous validation, etc.) are all primed to be sacrificed at the Agile altar. What you end up with is just "speed" as a priority.

When organizations have KPIs & OKRs which set "velocity" as a prime directive what that usually means is just "speed". As long as your development cycles are shorter and shorter, then you're rewarded. In these kinds of organizations the incentives align with flailing around spastically, so long as you're doing it 1x a month, 10x a month, then 100x a month. Taking the time to be exactly right 1x a quarter, and then building on that, isn't seen as desirable.

As one would expect, there aren't an enormous number of people who are actually satisfied by doing random crap for a random cause as fast as possible. In fact, that's what machines are for, not people.
Democratic process is slow but i am optimistic that these problems will be solved as the country grows richer. It’s chaotic but there is progress in this madness however slow.
Unfortunately, some services won’t accept a Google Voice or any voip number.
This isn't about east and west it's about today and the past. In fact if you look at the air pollution levels in New York and Chicago in the 70s they were very high and something was done about them. Currently developed nations had the advantage of being able to externalise the environmental cost of pollution without it affecting them as much immediately during development. Developing nations today don't have that luxury. Time is running out.
The amount of JS I come across on sites that is purely superfluous and serves to irritate, manipulate, or simply waste resources far outnumbers the actually useful, efficient, and purposeful use of it in webapps. I'm talking about things like loading several MB of it with half a dozen frameworks and libraries, just to render a few KB of text. Don't even get me started on popups/popunders/popins/clickjacking/scrolljacking/historyjacking and all that other crap that JS gets used for far more often.

Observe that Bellard's own site, despite having a few JS-based projects and demos, and now himself being the author of a JS engine, has not succumbed to the "JS everything!!!1" fad.

(FYI I didn't downvote.)
Coding Session Playlist (5+ Hours of EDM to Code to)
Linus has demonstrated incredible long-term effectiveness as a software developer, both creating and then shepherding two of the most important pieces of software of the last 50 years. But he seems qualitatively different than Ballard.

I'm trying to put into words what the difference feels like. Git and linux demonstrate, for Linus, great intelligence but not genius, the way Ballard's works do. And on Linus' side, git and linux demonstrate leadership, pragmatism, and a tremendous understanding of how to actually drive a large project forward over time, which Ballard's works don't.
How does it compare to iPhone sensors used for Face Id? I’m wondering if mounted to a workstation it could be used to implement a Face id system under linux.
Perl 6 Myths, Revisited
It's Linux -- if it's missing something, I can just build it. And I don't have to write my code in something horrible like Java, or boot up an emulator to test things, or submit my code to an app store, or figure out how to root it so I can remove all the bundled spyware. If I write a command line utility, I don't need to have a separate codebase between my computer and my phone. It's what I have always wanted my smartphone to be -- just a computer that I completely control, with access to a phone network.

It might be terrible. I'm kind of on the fence about it. The hardware needs to be reliable, the drivers need to be reliable, it needs to be compatible with common carriers. There a few other things. But the software on this device just needs to be passable. I don't need it to be particularly good.

When thinking about the Librem phone, mentally move it out of the iPhone category and into the Raspberry Pi category. Even if it comes out and gets terrible reviews and the software is all half-baked, even if it can't replace my normal phone for most things, I still might be tempted to buy one even just as a secondary device.
> So even if they couldn't recognize the bots as such, they would see them as tough players and avoid them.

The problem would be if i was a pro i would rather run 1000 bots than play myself. Which means the only players left are AI and fish. Once the fishies learn of this fact, they will abandon in drove.

It's all gonna go back to live poker soon.
I’m sure people will disagree with this but I think they should focus on getting an easy way for people to target their devices with React Native, NativeScript, PWAs and every other cross-platform framework.

That way they can much more easily acquire software. Seriously making an app from scratch is no small task, and often time isn’t worth it for such a small market.
Please don't post shallow dismissals here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Developers are highly paid because their knowledge is highly leveraged. Someone else is benefiting from your application of knowledge by an order of magnitude of what they're paying you. Why be the cow when you could be the dairyman?
The type checker for TypeScript is >33,500 lines of handwritten code in a single file, which is getting up there for a high-level language: https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/blob/master/src/comp...
"Politically correct", following Gaimen's definition, means "treating people with respect", and this document concerns a "respectful code policy."

So Google wants their code base to use terms which treat people with respect, including Trump, yes?

Seems fine with me. Seems find with the author of this piece too - "Google has the right to set its own rules and goals".

But the article ends with an unsupported and seemingly pointless jab:

> if it thinks it is a good use of company time and resources to compel its employees to sanitize their past work in order to appease the diversity and inclusion team, then that is how the company's time and resources will be spent. So goes the swift rise of the hyper woke.

I didn't see where this policy was meant only to 'appease the diversity and inclusion team'. The only mention was '“If you have any questions, you can ask your D&I [diversity and inclusion] product team at app-product-inclusion@.' but that doesn't say that the goal is to appease the team, only to use them as a source of advice.

Nor does this seem like a "hyper woke" policy.

I mean, Netscape had people go through the code to remove swear words before open sourcing Mozilla. Wasn't that "politically correct" in the same way? And back in the 1990s?

And the "master/slave" brouhaha is at least 15 years old, when Los Angeles made the news for requesting (but not demanding) that suppliers use an alternate term.

Is there something intrinsically wrong with being "woke" or "hyper woke"? Doesn't that just mean an awareness that different people have different views/needs and attempt to support them within a system of human rights and dignity?

Otherwise, can't I just make a seemingly pointless jab that Reason is hyper libertarian, and leave it at that?
> I know you're not meant to ask why the downvotes, but I do wonder in this case

I'm not a JavaScript hater - these days it's my main language - but your comment was pedantic and interpreted his words uncharitably. By "distaste for JS" he clearly just meant vague negative emotions surrounding it, not that he thinks it's an invalid language. He even specifically says his distaste is circumstantial.
Sean Carroll: The Nature of the Universe, Life, and Intelligence – AI Podcast
And the follow-up problem is that most Agile proponents say that "estimations aren't to be taken as timelines". But that doesn't address the fundamental issue that management always uses the engineering estimations as a method of managing their timelines.

Not to mention that "velocity" and burn down charts actually reinforce the idea that estimations are ways of tracking how much work will get done in Agile. Otherwise, tracking those metrics would be completely pointless.
"high-end labeling" for cancer is often done by undergraduates making $0-15/hr after a couple hours of training
To be more precise, the problem is that employees' raises are not keeping up with the job market, so the only way to get what you're worth is to change jobs frequently.

If companies would make more of an effort to keep their employees happy (financially, work satisfaction, etc.), they'd spend much less time recruiting and training new employees, and productivity and profitability would probably increase.

Hiring a new employee at the same level of competence is going to cost at least as much as retaining an existing employee, so I wonder why companies get into this cycle of constant turnover. The only way they'd save money is by constantly hiring inexperienced employees to replace the slightly more experienced ones who left, but what they'd gain in cost would be quickly eroded by lower productivity, loss of collective knowledge of the product, etc.
That's assuming homo sapiens were actually their undoing. They may have just died out on their own.

Or they haven't at all. Consider that people of European and Asian ancestry typically share some Neanderthal DNA, and the DNA difference between humans and chimpanzees is ~1%. Maybe they're just us.
It is similarly horrible on Windows. I utterly boggles my mind how a team of people can write software with such a terrible UI, you'd think someone would notice.
His humility (and general lack of "marketing wank" on his site) is certainly another aspect I admire. There's far too much "look at my absolutely amazing $trivial_app with best-in-class X and high-quality Y and gorgeous Z and ..." out there, that just seeing the equivalent of "This is a JS engine I wrote." and a simple enumeration of features without all that embellishment feels very refreshing.
I've seen people spend far more effort trying to cheat on tests than if they'd simply studied the material.
How on earth is MSFT supposed to maintain comparability for quintillions of iterations of hardware across millions of machines with no data on what works and what doesn't? Unlike FAANG they aren't out there pushing listening devices or trying to build exclusive data sets; they are trying to maintain the stability and security of 78.43% of the world's desktop computers. I don't care for the alarmism here when there are blazing infernos of actual malevolence burning in every direction.
Just FYI, Hasura GraphQL Engine has native support for GeoJSON types:

https://blog.hasura.io/graphql-and-geo-location-on-postgres-...

PS: I work here. Apologies for plug.
AI Artificial Intelligence-Entrainment, 5G and Love-Based Sovereignty
From that and lines like this one, I'm guessing the author does not use a password manager:

> use more than 8 characters, or use a password manager if you are really nervous

Also the article mentions that pw managers will get you long passwords, which will protect against brute force, but doesn't really mention the more significant benefit, that they protect against password reuse. Not to mention they're far more convenient than trying to remember strong passwords.

So don't use a PW manager only if you're really nervous. Just use one, full stop.

(But yeah, set password length at something like 13-14 characters. More than that doesn't provide any real world benefit, and there will occasionally be cases where you have to type it in. Plus you'll hit fewer snags with poorly designed systems enforcing max pw length.)
Because thats where they wanted to be. Its not that confusing.

Amazon was playing Tag the Sponsor to reveal all the municipal whores for fun.
So while I totally agree with this, I have some questions:

First off, do you think Agile is better than Waterfall? I personally think that it delivers a product faster, but I'm not sure if it actually has a macro improvement on the job process. I think waterfall probably addresses your developer-centric issue of satisfaction better than Agile does. I think we may have thrown away too much with the anti-waterfall hatred our field has adopted.

Second, what alternative do you propose? I think Agile is a problem, and ultimately a pretty bad process for organizing. The overhead is so expensive. The most effective and efficient my team has ever been was when we just quit Agile and wrote what we had going on up on the white board. And you know what? I've seen this work better than Agile in a wide range of settings. "Self organizing" really seems to be the key, but regardless of the self-proclamations that Agile is self organizing, it really seems to shoot itself in the foot with extra mandatory process.

Finally, it seems like all of the good solutions don't scale. Do you think this is a problem of trying to scale problem solving? I don't think I accept the argument that this is just the cost of working at larger scale, but I haven't thought of a good way to keep a team organized and still get work done without an extreme amount of organization and process (Agile) or a really involved team lead/product owner---who will slow everyone down by needing a lot of touch points.
> People who think that Neanderthals/etc were "lesser" humans (for whatever bogus reasons) probably also need to conclude (for the same reasons) that Europeans are also lesser humans

The strongest real inferiority argument is that we survived and they didn't. But if they/we are still here then that's right out the window.
Some students at Caltech were probably the first to do this, entering a McDonald's sweepstakes millions of times.

http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_caltech_sweepstakes_...

Some of the winnings were used to buy a nice TV set for the common room in the dorm.

The stunt was parodied in the movie "Real Genius".
How do giants deal with the lack of a fast moving courts system?
Could be a Tacoma Narrows Bridge type problem.
At the very least, they won't be trying to chase the fickle gamer market. It seems like Librem 5 is trying to cater to hackers, who would be the most tolerant of deficiencies in the UX.
“ 7 cubic miles (11 km^3)”

They think the conversion factor between cubic miles and cubic km is the same as between miles and km? Hm ....
Kanye West is building Star Wars-themed housing for the homeless
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Editorializing this bad will cause your account to lose submission privileges, so please don't do that.
I think we need to differentiate between just works and barely works. With Slack I think someone decided to go full dot-com and throw away everything known about human communication so they could learn it again by trial and error. You can’t mute bots, you can’t mute plugins, can’t add someone to a private conversation, anyone can auto-join you to any channel, api is full of typemorphic elements that encode their type within themselves, don’t get me started about Slack threads.
Chumboxes cast a wide net. In the brief time I was trying out browsing without adblockers some time ago, I saw some entries I'd have clicked myself, if I didn't know that I'm dealing with the worst kind of garbage advertising. Given how random and unrelated the ads in a chumbox are, any person without developed anti-ad immune system is likely to find something in there at some point.

That's one of the many reasons why I consider it my civic duty to recommend uBlock Origin to everyone, and to install it on any computer I'm asked to do maintenance on.
This isn't really the same thing (and I think compressed sensing might be the direction of research to check out further) but you might find it interesting - check out the modulo camera; https://web.media.mit.edu/~hangzhao/modulo.html

> A modulo camera could theoretically take unbounded radiance levels by keeping only the least significant bits. We show that with limited bit depth, very high radiance levels can be recovered from a single modulus image with our newly proposed unwrapping algorithm for natural images.
That sounds like an academic lab working from grant funding. Did the FDA approve those models for clinical use?
For one player...

$16/hr X (VM|microservice thread) could become astronomical profit.
Signing into some new tvs recently, the google account sign in experience was better than Netflix sign in, as it let you use your phone to sign in (once you’d scanned a QR code shown on screen).
Would Sam Harris be an example of a person who holds such beliefs? I would say definitely yes, but curious if others would agree.
yes. the hard part is implementing FaceID! Lots of papers on the topic: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo...
I'm considering ordering a librem 5, but I would go without any phone at all rather than spend thousands on one.
I generate my passwords with:

$ head -c 100 /dev/urandom | sha256sum

Same pain as you any time I have to type the password in someplace I don't have my password manager installed, but with the advantage that its just [0-9a-f]. I figure with that many characters there's no need to use the full character set.

Also honestly just tend to use weaker passwords on things I'll need to log into on other machines. Usually those are accounts I don't care as much about anyway.
How do you deal with Lambda concurrency? I have found its pretty easy to hit 1K concurrents if functions take a long time to run and receive bursty traffic.
Office 2016/20019 comes with a spreadsheet compare tool, that will give a full on screen diff between spreadsheet versions.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/overview-of-spreads...
Ask HN: How Do You Network?
While I was living in SF, I went to meetups fairly regularly and grabbed coffee with strangers to grow my network. Now that I'm living in a smaller town, with no real tech presence, I'm struggling to figure out how to grow my professional network. How do you grow your network outside of a tech hub?
This particular requirement is tied to operating what's called a single-brand retail outlet in India. That would be Apple-owned Apple Stores. It is not clear to me if this is a requirement for foreign manufacturers who are manufacturing/assembling products in India and then exporting them.
Haha, small world! Johnny Noodle King is indeed amazing, I have some distant relatives who built the countertops for the restaurant.

Oh Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynfVGyMrvz8
Microsoft does intend to get rid of passwords altogether:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Azure-Active-Director...
This is a huge benefit of AppleTV and having an iOS device. When the password is prompted for on the TV, my phone buzzes and I use the LastPass vault on the phone to paste the gibberish automatically.

I'm sure there are similar schemes for other devices (Chromecast/FireTV?). But when the TV itself is "smart", I bet it's infuriating.
I was wrong about spreadsheets (2017)
TOTP and U2F both perform a single authentication from a captive secret, rather than revealing a reusable secret.

U2F does even better, and ensures you are authenticating to the right website, not an intermediary.

If we eliminated passwords in favor of onboard U2F chips, we'd be much better off than today, though not as amazing as U2F + passwords.
The point of the article is that strong passwords are mostly useless, but unique passwords are very important. The article doesn't emphasize this, nor does it point out that this is the primary benefit of password managers. However, the very first attack they describe, which is listed as very high frequency and very easy, is credential stuffing—ie, trying credentials from a breach in other places. Unique passwords completely prevent this common attack.
Which feature is that? I've been using WebStorm for some time and wishing for a feature that would highlight all matching parenthesis (), [] and {}.
Imagine if everyone learned to code... the coal miners, the fireman and the classy janitor, the cashiers with dignity, the migraine workers... then no one would get paid the big bucks for coding.
That's why it's a good rate online where you can play multiple tables. Unlimited VMs don't help you in a live casino.
I always say that spreadsheets are the saas startups worst enemy, or opportunity. Oh wait, that was patio11:

https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/655674551615942657
That's a pretty small market, and they're on the wrong end of the economy-of-scale curve to begin with.
What trends do we see in RISE 2019?
A lot of Nokia N900 users were very happy with a “barebones list of apps” and the only reason that they had to eventually abandon that phone was because the closed hardware required a specific kernel version and certain other libraries could not be upgraded for interoperability and security’s sake.

If the Librem offers a more upgradable device, then that is already enough for the hacker community. Most of my time is either spent in a web browser, Emacs, or sending SMS. Also, many Android users who eschew Google apps and install LineageOS with F-droid as their app source, would probably find Librem a comfortable enviroment.
>It's great for the much needed diversity (race, gender, background, everything) and I'm certain the results will be great

So far results are disappointing. At what point do we admit that you need Asperger's to be a good programmer?
If no one is paying you, is there still any good reason to use Windows?
I believe you, but a comment like that is going to pattern-match to the internet default, which is snark, in nearly every reader's mind.
Conservation of Massive: When You Lose Weight, Where Does the Fat Go?
And the only thing worse than that is throwing interop/coexistence mode[1][2] into the mix. It's basically a force multiplier on the hell of using Skype for Business with a Mac.

It takes the already gimped Skype for Business on the Mac, and adds a multiplier effect.

[1] Interop mode is designed for a progressive rollout/migration from Skype for Business to Teams. On an all-Windows deployment it generally works well enough to get by with a few annoying UX-related hassles getting passed between the two apps. But throw Mac machines into the mix, with already gimped client functionality, and interop mode just sort of breaks you to the point of having an aversion to any work that involves calls/meetings/chats with coworkers.

[2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/MicrosoftTeams/coexistence-...
djb also wrote daemontools, ucspi-tcp, dnscache, djbfft, kicked off the field of post-quantum cryptography (pqcrypto), wrote the spec for `redo`, and came up with `find -print0 | xargs -0`.

Definitely a legend!
Truly. JC literally largely made gaming what it is today. I remember reading that virtually every game users code he has written, because almost every game engine uses his code in some form.
Besides the hardware kill switches and replaceable battery, I think this experience is going to compare poorly to LineageOS, which has a lot of the same software freedom and privacy advantages with a much more refined and complete operating system.

This phone is months from shipping and we haven’t even been shown multi touch have we? Is that even a feature being promised?

Ultimately the difference between this and the Raspberry Pin is tangible - $614 to be exact. I know that Purism isn’t out to sell a mainstream phone, but my doubts are seriously strong that they’ll sell enough of these to justify the effort.

I can build anything that’s missing in Linux as long as someone invents the fountain of youth so that I can spent a few thousand engineering years on implementation.