skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Would this be a reasonable analogy for building a bridge?

That is also a useless analogy. Do bridge builders get to test and re-test their bridges in the real, non-simulated world? Can they instantly make a copy of their bridge with a few critical differences and see how the two behave? Can they re-build their bridge in minutes?

Metaphors aside, I think history is ample evidence that "coding your way around a problem" rather than conceptualizing a solution first is a perfectly valid way to approach professional programming. It's not the only way, and it has drawbacks which others have pointed out here. So does the conceptualize-first approach: you might solve the wrong problem, make something inelastic in the face of changing requirements, or fall into the psychological trap of being attached to your mental model even when it turns out that you really didn't think of everything and have to make changes on the fly.

I'm really tired of people being dogmatic about either approach ("move fast and break things/pivot; anyone else isn't really interested in getting stuff done!", "you're just a messy code monkey unless you can hold the solution in your head before you start!"). It's almost always veiled arrogance rather than honest improvement-seeking, in my experience.
A mega corporation with billions of dollars and thousands of workers is going to be held to different moral standard than a single person buying a camera lens. Clearly society doesn't judge 4 year olds to the same moral standard as 50 year old men. You'd laugh at a 50 year old man crying over spilling his juice ... but not a 4 year old. So why should we judge individuals to the same moral standards as mega-corporations?

The relative value of $500 for an individual is orders of magnitude higher than $13k for Amazon.
An AI-assisted e-tongue for fast and portable fingerprinting of complex liquids
When the original article appeared, in addition to the "no comment" from Google and Xilinx and the denial by IBM, there was some deflection by commenters here along the lines of "that's ridiculous, OnePower is all about technical specs for power supplies" or something along those lines.

Can anyone point me to a link on this organization? I found one to something called the OpenPower Foundation which apparently involves IBM and has to do with data centers, but "OnePower" only produces links to consultancies, etc.
Expect-CT is pretty marginal. In principle a browser could implement Certificate Transparency but then only bother to enforce it if Expect-CT is present, in practice the policy ends up being that they'll enforce CT system-wide after some date. Setting Expect-CT doesn't have any effect on a browser that can't understand SCTs anyway, so that leaves basically no audience.

Furthermore, especially with Symantec out of the picture, there is no broad consumer market for certificates from the Web PKI which don't have SCTs. The audience of people who know they want a certificate is hugely tilted towards people with very limited grasp of what's going on, almost all of whom definitely need embedded SCTs or they're in for a bad surprise. So it doesn't even make sense to have a checkbox for "I don't want SCTs" because 99% of people who click it were just clicking boxes without understanding them and will subsequently complain that the certificate doesn't "work" because it didn't have any SCTs baked into it.

There are CAs with no logging for either industrial applications which aren't built out of a web browser (and so don't check SCTs) and are due to be retired before it'd make sense to upgrade them (most are gone in 2019 or 2020) or for specialist customers like Google whose servers are set up to go get them SCTs at the last moment, to be stapled later. Neither is a product with a consumer audience. Which means neither is a plausible source of certificates for your hypothetical security adversary.

As a result, in reality Expect-CT doesn't end up defending you against anything that's actually likely to happen, making it probably a waste of a few bytes.
How long it will take to refill our deepest lake
Ask HN: Books to recommend about early tech history (late 90s)?
Just got finished reading e-Boys - I learned a lot about the early days at Webvan, e-Bay, Benchmark and the overall vibe of the dot com boom in the 90's. Although the book did not cover them in extreme detail, it offered a good primer that urged me to probe for more elsewhere.

Are there any other books you guys would recommend (similar to eBoys) that cover early Dot Com history?
My partner works at a hospital billing insurance companies and nobody there can even figure out what prices are. They can't optimize their work based on price because a $700k bill might end up bringing in $30k in revenue, while a $45k bill might bring in $35k.

Hospitals basically need an army of lawyers to renegotiate costs on a per-patient basis. Talk about efficiency!

Medicare/Medicaid literally keep most hospitals afloat. They are basically the only insurer who is fair and pays consistently.
When politicians are staging national interventions to force us to connect with each other — and actually spending real money on the problem — you know it’s a genuine crisis

No. Politicians throwing money at something is not evidence of a crisis.
Github repo: http://github.com/cloudflare/circl
I forge the referer as the root of the site, except in the case of news sites that allow referers from google news to bypass the paywall, in which case I always forge that. This very rarely breaks anything (one out of a million sites expect an external or specific referer.)
Yes contributors are welcome. I will write up some guidance in the next few days for those looking to contribute!
Electricity-conducting bacteria may inspire next-gen medical devices
This is why we need the changes that Chrome is making to their extension APIs [1][2]. We cannot trust extensions to have access to all URLs since it lets them collect all browsing history and content. Even if they're not doing it now, who's to say they won't sell their extension next year to the highest bidder who will. By forcing content blockers to use a new API that doesn't expose every visit to the extension itself a whole class of _potentially_ bad actors can't turn around and sell your data.

The average consumer that is installing these extensions are not aware of the risks they come with. An extension could easily be collecting usernames and passwords for banks, crypto wallets, etc. They have this ability because the extension requests access to all URLs and it's so common that no one questions it anymore. I'm glad to see Chrome taking steps to limit that access.

[1] https://blog.chromium.org/2018/10/trustworthy-chrome-extensi...

[2] https://blog.chromium.org/2019/06/web-request-and-declarativ...
You can always check out Interrail[0], I know multiple people (travelers) using it to get around Europe.

[0]: https://www.interrail.eu
At what time of day does famous programmers work? Part 2. Workweek vs. Weekend
Not wanting to do paperwork generally isn't a good enough reason to do live work, though.
The Track ~ Tracker for Personal Projects
Raytracer.jl: Differentiable Renderer That Supports Parameter Optimization
Compared to the cost of software engineers a few million every few decades for a mainframe aren't that significant either way.
>might be quite an overreaction, but is at least in the realm of understandable, no?

You think it is "understandable" to burn down a building because someone stole your work? If someone did that I would call them "crazy". I definitely see "mental stability" or "mental health" being a root cause here. Rational, healthy people do not respond in that way. Call it "temporary insanity" if you want.
The industry has moved from pay sites and piracy where you wouldn't track people to free porn sites that are ad supported. Obviously it's easier to use the free sites so the data tracking is not surprising.

If you don't want to be tracked, pay for your porn. Or pirate it.
> There's an asymmetry because Amazon can "afford" to double check everything? How?

Well, Amazon shows you the percent discount. I can't imagine that there are too many items over, let's say, $1000 that are at a 90% discount at any given time. Seems easy enough to flag those for manual review, especially if they are being sold by Amazon directly.
Hugo Dark Theme Website Generator
Nice work with this extension, I like that you've made it quite configurable. I personally don't like the auto-switch or scroll effect, but it's good that you added the ability to turn these off using 0 values.

Just a couple of things that I'd suggest to add some improvements to the extension:

- One thing that I'd suggest is adding the ability to Alt + Y, but keep the popup open. This means that you could then do something like navigating the list with tab/hkjl/arrow keys. Without this functionality, the extension basically works the same as pressing Ctrl + Tab, but with a rendered list instead.

- Another thing that would be cool to add is a search function, so that I can Alt + Y, type "hn" or "ycom" and the list would be filtered to show news.ycombinator.com ( also matches the HN ) in the tab title.

Both of these are already available in the vimium extension [1], but would be kind of neat to just have a standalone extension for this functionality.

[1] https://github.com/philc/vimium
part 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20468870
The original article form the intercept[1] is quite insane, Whole thing is about OpenPower organization[2]. You can replace it with "Linux kernel", "Risc V" or any open technology.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2019/07/11/china-surveillance-googl...

[2] https://openpowerfoundation.org/
Your page can't be scrolled with the keyboard and it's missing the native scrollbar. You should remove those overflow rules from the body and .content div.
The reason papers adopted the thin column layout is because it suits the eye better. AIUI the eye can cover most of a narrow column and a few saccades to cover the rest. Also finding the next line is easy whereas if it's wide you may find the one above/below the correct one, or simply start reading the same line again (something that happened to me recently). I understand the optimum width is about 6 to 7 english words.

Try reading it. it is strangely archaic but it's an easy read for me, and well, what's more important, the format or the subject?
Works well for me.

If i get suspicious Mail or something similar i use my old BlackBerry Z10 to open it first.

Afaik there has never been a know Malware for the device.
The whole system itself was pretty security oriented from the beginning.
Sure it uses webkit for the browser but a browser exploit is usually just the first entry. Even if the Malware gets root i suspect it won't be able to run anything useful on the QNX Kernel.
This is exactly the situation I am in. We have workloads that I think we could deliver with much lower TCO using Rust/DataFusion/Ballista.

We could probably even use a single node for some of our workflows just using DataFusion directly with same performance as a distributed Spark job.
That's my point you CANNOT possibly come up with the right smaller pieces until you have a solution that you have verified works.

What do you think other engineering principles do? They create a proof of concept. Verify it works and then create the real thing. That is why "real" engineering companies have hundreds of tools to test stuff.

I really don't understand why people want software to be different. You write some shitty throwaway web app then sure go ahead and don't prototype anything just hire a "software architect" that designs something and use that.

But do you want something that actually works then that is completely useless. Prototype, verify, start over if necessary. That is the way to write quality software.
It's worse when it has access to your picture because a friend thought it'd be funny. In that situation the App gets my picture without my consent.
Author is probably a non-native English speaker, so, gentle correction: "At what time of day do non famous programmers work?"
I think one as to be more careful here. At a first level the company plays no role, it is just the customer expecting that mistakes are handled differently depending on who benefits. Replace Amazon with a private person you are intending to buy a used car from, would you still expect that mistakes - say a miscommunication of the price or miscounting of the money - in your favour are handled differently than mistakes in the sellers favour? And we assume no bad faith here, if the seller intentionally raises the price once you have taken a day off and driven a significant distance to complete the trade in the hope that you will pay the higher price in order to not have wasted your time, that is an entirely different story. Personally I would probably not do it, but I think it would be perfectly fine to sue the seller to get the initially agreed on price.

Expecting Amazon to be a good sport only makes sense after you have decided that mistakes should not be handled differently depending on who benefits and that you are therefore not entitled to keep your amazing deal. Then you can start to appeal to being a good sport, or the benefits for the public perception of Amazon, or whatnot to explain why Amazon should honor the deal. But this also brings up question like why would you not be a good sport in case of a mistake in favour of Amazon? Note that I do not want to imply any answers here, I just want to point out which kinds of questions one might have to consider.
My gut reaction to this was the same as everyone else - to question the validity of using commits as a measurement of time worked.

But then I read further and realized that this isn't a research study, it is just a clever script to output some data from github. So I'm going to go run it on a couple of my projects, see what it says, and enjoy that someone put it together.
I will write up some guidance in the next few days for those looking to contribute!
Facebook is an adversary, though. Big difference.
Can't you just initialize everything at once before you need it rather than initializing one object here and there?
Who would you consider famous among currently active programmers that aren’t on this list?

I knew about half of the list (mainly the authors of software I use). I could probably name a few who are equally famous, but not many who are more famous.

edit: I went back and counted. I recognized 4 of 7 names.
It's different because you are not referencing a major plot twist.

And the problem is not so much that it had been done before but that it was obvious.
In the blog post it specifies that it uses the Unix timestamp, which doesn't account for timezones.
Create a professional email signature for you or for your company/business
I picked up a wonderful concept from a teenage summer spent dry stone walling in the Cotswolds.

When you pick up a stone from the pile, it MUST be placed on the wall. You either have to make it fit your intended spot through rotation or another adjustment, or you have to find another place on the wall for it. It CANNOT be placed back on the pile.
I'm sure these rules are not adhered to that widely but they had some great benefits.

1. You eye your intended location very well, thinking in 3D.
2. You pick your stone very carefully.
3. You learn something each time the stone doesn't fit.

Before too long this restrictive practice becomes an advantage not a hindrance, and has many conceptual parallels with other physical and mental tasks. It's a beautiful thing.
That is incorrect for the tax service. It keeps your tax data separate. It is true that I get ads for my credit score
Performance Oriented Next.js Starter with TypeScript, Redux and Built-In CLI
They can seize that too and then auction it off later. The FBI seized the SilkRoad's escrow account, 26k BTC.
The ACA was in response to 20 years of super-inflationary price increases and the inability of huge swaths of people to even afford healthcare.
Whats gql-tags? Can you show me?
It's interesting that someone in Microsoft is talking about Rust, but the article is very flawed. For example,

> C#, a programming language developed by Microsoft, also features some memory access improvements but is not as advanced as Rust. [..] Besides [Rust] being superior to C# in regards to better memory protections

That's false, isn't it? C# is a memory safe language, period. It relies on GC for that.

In fact C# has arguably better memory safety than Rust because you can do things safely in C# that you would be forced to use 'unsafe' in Rust for. (Granted, then you have overhead from GC, but that's not what the author is talking about.)

> Rust is also more popular with developers these days and might be easier to recruit for.

The author has misinterpreted what "most loved" means in the quoted survey: it means that among Rust developers, it gets a very high rating. That says nothing about how big that group is, nor how popular it is in the general population of developers.

The Rust community is growing but still very small - it's an emerging language. Almost everyone that uses it decided to use it because they like it. (That doesn't diminish the accomplishment - there are other emerging languages that are not as loved by their users.)
How's the reliability of those these days? At a previous gig I witnessed about a 15% failure rate within 3 years.
Well...I'm a fan!

Knyuck Knyuck
Yeah we would love that! The more niche the better. Thanks for your support.
Is it only my bad memory or some of the dates are wrong:

Tinker 1981, showing a color Macintosh interface.

ProGraph 1983, also using an interface using colors.

Pecan 1984, the year the first Macintosh was released.
https://openpowerfoundation.org/about-us/

"OpenPOWER Foundation is an open, not-for-profit technical membership group incorporated in December 2013. It has applied for 501c6 not-for-profit status and was incepted to enable today’s data centers to rethink their approach to technology. OpenPOWER was created to develop a broad ecosystem of members that will create innovative and winning solutions based on POWER architecture."
This brings to mind a very recent dilemma of sorts that I have been experiencing.

I love strategy games. From Carrier Command back in the 80s to Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri to Stellaris. I've recently picked up Surviving Mars in the Steam sale and it doesn't appear to be holding my attention as well as Stellaris does.

Why? It probably can be reduced down to the reward factor. In Stellaris the galaxy is pretty huge, there's a massive combination of races, ideologies and other factors that all go together to create what feels like a novel/new experience.

In Surviving Mars, your playing field is limited to a 10x10 grid, and you quickly become bogged down keeping ahead of your colonists' needs. The experience feels the same, and there's no real novelty. The planet just kind of exists as a map outside your little grid, there's no way to visit or expand, you just send expeditions out and get a text box saying they found x, y or z.

Now, if someone could write a game that accurately captures the feel of reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars in an exploration/build/research combined with novelty in a truly expansive world, that would be amazing. Setting up your base, digging your habitats, finding volatiles and water and all that good stuff. It would be great, if done well, of course.

But maybe by the time someone writes such a beast, we'd have people on Mars for real.
I too like find implementing the structures helps me find the solution. It's quite iterative for me.
Also, I think of programming as a mix of math and writing:

https://henrikwarne.com/2019/03/30/programming-math-or-writi...
The click-bait is strong with this storyline. It's also been posted and upvoted here a number of times over the past week, despite it being a non-story. Presumably people are seeing the title and upvoting without reading or understanding what's actually happening. Especially since this is just an editorial that regurgitates the high level points of The Intercept's story with little further thought or analysis.

I've flagged it. IMO, the mods should change the title to something more honest like, "Chinese Microchip Company Participates in OpenPower Foundation."
I want to point that Built-in CLI is huge timesaver.

It can generate page, functional or class component, connect to redux, add style files and stuff.

It saves a lot of time during the development.
An Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions
A Gentle Introduction to Ruby's Roda Web Framework
A practical implementation of Earley parsing, with some cool features, is Marpa [1]. In particular it is practical in that it parses in linear time

* all the grammar classes that recursive descent parses

* the grammar class that the yacc family parses

* most unambiguous grammars

* all ambiguous grammars that are unions of a finite set of any of the above grammars.

The author's blog [2] presents some interesting features of Marpa, as well as interesting discussion of parsing in general.

[1] http://jeffreykegler.github.io/Marpa-web-site/
[2] http://jeffreykegler.github.io/Ocean-of-Awareness-blog/
Not all porn is equally legal (sodomy, for example). And our society (at least in the US) likes to pretend that it doesn't exist, which means that it's viable ammunition to attack a person's character with, publicly or privately.

So, in practice, this means that these big companies have ammunition which could be used to destroy careers and relationships. Whether used directly or incidentally via a data leak (it's not like those ever happen /s).
Congressman Patrick McHenry Steals the Show for Bitcoin
thanks to podcasts I have 50 business logos, a year supply of dollar shave club, 8 wordpress hosting accounts, and 5 mattresses
Then you simply have a web of LLCs so that each corporate entity only owns a single unit.
I don't think you can reasonably have a Rust dialect without lifetimes. Ownership, borrowing and lifetimes is the very core of Rust. The other Rust submission on the frontpage right now explains this: https://boats.gitlab.io/blog/post/notes-on-a-smaller-rust/
> It does put a lot of responsibility on employees: Don't leak internal data

Mobsters plain and simple.
Understanding the reasons for a crime does not excuse said crime, or say that you're ok with it.

If someone robs a bank, I can understand the motivation: He wants money. If someone punches another, he might want to feel powerful. If someone rapes a woman he wants sex.

And if someones believes that this company stole his money, I can understand his motivations to seek revenge. That does not mean it is right, just or something to look up to. But saying this is completely crazy is a bit naive IMO.
~1.5 billion or ~20% of the world’s population speak English. They also tend to be better off financially than the global average.

Written Chinese is a very large market and likely a good investment, though a significant percentage of the well off also speak English or Japanese.

After that it’s more questionable. Translation is not cheap, but US films are often translated for smaller markets.
It doesn't use the word OpenPower at all, and AFAICS it's nothing at all to do with any particular CPU.
Maybe it's my background (Java and JS with a little bit of C++), but I don't find it alien at all. I do find it really clunky in a handful of situations, mostly having to do with lots of nested containers (Option<Arc<Box<...), but luckily those are uncommon for most use-cases.
We could apply the old anti-privacy trope and say that people (or companies) that do nothing wrong should have nothing to hide.
The article does not seem to mention Alex Inc., a main stream network TV show about starting a podcast with a pretty high caliber star.

And of course, gimlets acquisition by Spotify is probably the nadir.

You know once do you have reliable text to speech for websites and newspapers, podcast will be decimated. Or if audible goes a Netflix r you know once you have reliable text to speech for websites and newspapers, podcasts will be decimated. Or if audible goes a Netflix route.