skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The point of this service is to actually cancel the service right before the trial ends so you won't ever actually be charged.

The Free Trial Card is a virtual credit card you can use to sign up for free trials of any service anonymously, instead of using your real credit card. When the free trial period ends, the card automatically declines to be charged, thus ending your free trial.
It's cheaper to do business in higher cost of living areas.
The way I understand their implementation [0] is that the client sha256s their password and sends the first 5 characters, not bytes. The server then responds with all the matching hashes. In the article the example was 477 matching hashes.

So it’s not all possible hashes with that prefix, it’s only the hashes of entries in the known passwords.

If the server was compromised, it would be able to know which users requested which hash prefixes and compare that to the “known hashes” that match that prefix. Not all passwords submitted are matches, but some are. And it’s likely that a users pattern of testing particular hash prefixes could make it much easier to crack a password.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/validating-leaked-passwords-with...
For the ones, like me, that didn't know: "blubber" is the fat of sea mammals. Whalers used to hunt whales to extract blubber, then transform it into oil (used for candles, fuel, etc).
That fact that just knowing English you'll get by in most of the world doesn't help either. As a native English speaker there is less motivation to learn another language, this affects the UK and Canada as well, I suspect it impacts Aus, NZ, etc...
My claim is that Google entering China is making a bad situation better
Looks a lot like the classic view, with more minimalism and whitespace. And lacking the sidebar.
Has anyone else noticed the correlation between public policy that favors walking/public transport over cars, and unaffordably high costs of living?

ducks

Edit: My pet theory is it effectively decreases the available housing supply by reducing the number of locations that people can practically commute from.
So first you have to get rid of lobbyists. Your voice is heard every election; that of lobbyists every day.
I like the idea of asking if the new task is top priority.

At the end of the day what he says goes, so if it really is what he wants, better to make it clear, and then say, ok, I will then prioritize the new Task B instead of Task A and set expectations.
Interesting!

I imagine churn will still happen, except it will be in the library/framework ecosystem around the language (think JavaScript fatigue).
Indeed buses or by no means the optimal technology of transporting people. But they often are the cheapest and easiest, and therefor often the smartest choice for urban planners. However once buses start to become congested (Seattle, I’m looking at you), or forseen to become so, they really are a terrible option next to some sort of a train (light, or heavy, underground, elevated, or on ground).
We could just ensure the population stays below 2B. Education, emancipation of women, access to contraceptives and abortion, immunisation, and improved healthcare for new mothers and infants: these are proven time and again to reduce fertility rates.

There’s no sensible reason to keep using infinite expansion as a measure of the health of national economies. We should change the goals to improved access to services, and more even distribution of national wealth (ie: lower spread between richest and poorest).

When we run out of fresh water, desalination should not be viewed as the answer but only as an emergency measure. Desalination requires abundant energy and pollutes the marine environment with over-salinated water. Recycling sewage I to drinking water only works as long as the equipment is maintained fastidiously and never breaks.

Rather than producing more food, we should focus on producing fewer people.
Ask HN: Good source of education on building an independent consulting business?
Periodically we see topics on freelancing and consulting, and usually a few people comment that they are successful and happy as solo (or self-owned firm) consulting. And often, those people stress that a good percentage of their time is spent networking and marketing to keep business flowing in.

Can anyone in this situation recommend modern, high quality resources where one can learn the networking and marketing skills to use to build a successful solo tech/dev consulting business?
> Both systems worked exactly as specified and were bug free

If the system is working as designed, then there really is no bug. A bug is a malfunction, after all.

I've always called broken systems that are working as designed BAD: Broken As Designed.
The idea that types are hostile to scripting sounds really weird to me. Turtle[0] in Haskell is absolutely amazing for scripting -- especially if you pair it with Stack (with its shebang support) -- and it is as strongly typed as Haskell.

There is a bit of learning curve (because, well, it's not shell which is what most people are used to), and you do have to please the compiler before being able to run your script, but OTOH, you'll basically never have that "oops, I just deleted my working directory because I used a bad $VARIABLE" experience.

[0] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/turtle
Was the controversy really about the need for the feature? I thought most people agreed it was a great feature to have, and most of the arguments were about `:=` vs re-using `as` for the operator.
>it would be create potential readability difficulties for human reading

I think the major argument (at least, the one I see most frequently) is that the walrus operator does create readability difficulties for humans, which is exactly why many people view it as non-pythonic. This is one of the few times I've seen someone argue that ":=" makes things more readable.
That's especially funny given how everybody screams "that's not pythonic!!1!" nowadays when somebody does _not_ use a list comprehension...
I would go so far as to say that every single SaaS company in existence has autorenew. Literally the entire business model is built off of a predictable set of customers converting and renewing (and thus a predictable revenue stream).

SaaS companies are also heavily incentivized to make it harder for you to cancel a trial. Yes, if you get down to it this is not in your interest but also it ends up being a relatively positive tradeoff. You can either have free, no commitment trials with autorenew and all the economic activity that they bring (probably hundreds of thousands of jobs, hundreds of great, useful products) or you can have no autoconvert and also basically no tech sector. I suggest you set up a calendar reminder when you sign up for a free trial or use a temporary credit card (many solutions are a quick search away).
I don’t see how “population is the root of the food availability problem” compares to “lungs are the root of the smog problem”. Can you elucidate?
That's just an announcement that they reached the end of the list of user-facing syntax changes on their roadmap.
I just listened to a very relevant podcast, Planet Money episode 909: Dollar Stores Vs Lettuce https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/26/717665452/epis...
Show HN: Tweetlength Terminal Photoshop
>Retail stores buy the products they put on their shelves, at wholesale prices. They then mark up the prices to a retail price charged to the end buyer when they resell the products to the end buyer.

Why is this difference salient? This process of selling, reselling and markup recurs for years. Economically the outcome is the same as the store charging a fee like Amazon, just with the payments split up and time shifted. If you doubt that the same power imbalances exist in brick-and-mortar, read about how Walmart squeezes suppliers.
People who want the injection of politics into product generally aren't good customers. In many cases, they don't have that much money to spend, and in other cases, they're too much trouble when less demanding customer's money is just as good.
Because we are realising there are limits to growth, and the cost of ever-expanding deforestation is visible in ways it never was before.
The financial uncertainty would be appalling.
I'm 35. I've been a freelancer for the past 5 years. There are three paths directly before me:

* Move into management. People have been pushing me in that direction for a while now and I've resisted. Recently, I've discovered that I don't need to actually type the code myself to get the same enjoyment and sense of accomplishment from building something. So, I've been considering it.

* Start my own one-man company. I have no idea what I would make. The only industry I know anything about is web development and startups, so finding good problems to solve has been challenging.

* Double down on freelancing/contracting. I make good money with the handful of clients I have at the moment, but I could make a whole lot more with only a little more effort. I could also focus on finding a larger variety of problems to solve instead of just frontend web development.

As for which path I'll take... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
One of the primary flaws of capitalism is that there is little incentive to enter a lower margin business when a similar investment can still yield potential profit in a higher margin business. This is also generally why new housing is almost always "luxury" units instead of affordable units.

The end result is that poorer neighborhoods often don't have the type of service infrastructure that is generally provided by for profit companies. Retail banking and internet providers are two other examples beyond the grocery store example in the article.
"It’s hard to tell whether the increased dollar stores have harmed health, researchers say"

The cities are so worried but there is no evidence health is impacted.

Maybe they should look at the reasons why supermarkets don't want to open, but convenience stores do.

It may simply be that it is unprofitable. Supermarkets run on razor thin margins and require significant volume.

No amount of zoning will change that.

Edit: Maybe providing discounted/free public transport to new or existing supermarkets would change things.
280 Source Letters of Code.
The sound goes on ;)

If you make something with it, tweet it at me, pls (for the warm fuzzies)
This is a good point as not all passwords will be in known set.

I guess it’s only a 1:500 if the password has been pwned. In which case, the owner should promptly change it and remove the risk.

Thanks, I didn’t think of that. For some reason I was stuck in thinking that all passwords have been pwned and in the file.
So we can go and destroy another planet? Better to invest billions in teraforming tech and cleanup on Earth. This will benefit all and not just the rich. I also wonder how much carbon emission building and sending rockets to space produces.
Look at his profile.

> Represented by 10X Management.
Mid 50s. I still love programming but am very happy to have teaching, research, and writing too. Hoping to retire to Paris at 62 and everything seems to be on track.
They address this briefly in the PEP[0], and it's largely because they want to be very clear about when it's happening. The distance between

if x = y:

and

if x == y:

is very small, and easy to ignore, so insisting on

if x := y:

makes it very clear that what's happening won't be mistaken for comparison at a quick glance.

[0]: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0572/#why-not-just-turn-...
> So := is 'gets a truthy value from'?

No, “if <expression>” expands to “if <expression> has a truthy value”.

“<var> := <expression>” is itself an expression, which can be best (IMO) read in English as “<var> (which is <expression>)”
> UAL's Mr. Petty refused, writing back that the command would be confusing if a pilot by the name of "Max" was in the cockpit!

The reaction of a manager who's watched too many Simpsons episodes [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSVms6cT9nk
One of my credit cards (Citi) allows creating virtual credit card numbers. I've been hesitant to use them in this way, though, because I'm concerned it could affect my credit.

Does anyone know if legally you're on the hook for the paying the service provider? As technically they did provide the service, and you're "refusing" to pay for it. Presumably, if so, they could send the bill to collections and put a black mark on your credit.
Have you tried editing your footprint further in the accordion below the first six questions? There are options there to edit your diet, transportation, electricity etc. at a much more granular level (i.e. I eat meat twice a week). The first six questions have the greatest deltas between you and your country's avg, which is why they're first, but I see how the setup makes it confusing that you can go more in depth underneath. Let me know if you were able to get that to work!

> switching to electric car gave me another 10%. IIRC that's making some big assumptions (not considering electricity costs, lifetime emissions, state electric emissions).

Are you talking about not considering electricity costs for manufacturing an electric vehicle or more generally for your personal footprint?

Might be helpful to note that our previous calculator set up was much more state specific (to postal code level) but we had to switch up the setup so it could accommodate for international users. Our breakdown is still based on the Berkeley Cool Climate model (https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/publications) but scaled by a country's per capita emissions (data from World Bank). Unfortunately that means there's less granularity on region specific data for the U.S. for now, but it should still be a pretty good estimate. That said — there's still plenty of improvements that we can make to the calculator, so thank you for the feedback.

Oh, I like the idea of competition on a country basis. Maybe showing your percentile in your country could work. Let me know if you have any other ideas here!

For the fake emails, from a product perspective it was more confusing for people to enter in their emails after calculating their footprint than right upfront. It might have been the way we had it set up or something but we can come back to explore what can be improved there. For now if folks want to calculate and leave without a way to get back to their footprint calculations or offset their footprint, it's fine to leave a fake email. If users make it to the create account page, they're able to confirm their email or change their fake email there. :)

Ideally we're going to make the calculator completely open to use, but for now it's still in our onboarding flow until we get around to spinning it out into a separate tool.
Is it possible to have some scheme where the client can provide all the initial randomness for the connection?

For example, the server could have an RSA private key, and the clients have the corresponding public key. A client could generate a full RSA block of random data, and encrypt that with the public key, and send the result to the server. The server could recover the random data and use that to initialize a CSPRNG.

This CSPRNG could be user mode code running in the ssh system, and only used for randomness needed for that particular connection, so that if a client supplies poor random data it only weakens that client's connection.
Victor Stinner made a demonstration pull request using the walrus operator in the standard library where it makes sense. On balance it removes several hundred lines and often makes the code much clearer, e.g. https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/8122/files#diff-78e8e...
Great idea. This is what Pachama uses to base their analysis on. https://www.pachama.com - They did YC winter 2019.
> It should start by acknowledging that in 99% of cases any outsourced systems' stability will be better than anything in-house.

I can't acknowledge this, as it has not been my experience at all.
Why do you think the only form of population control is mass murder?
That wouldn’t be a disclaimer that is accurate, so I don’t think I would use it.

Anyone who takes my security recommendations is already familiar enough of my math vs informed prejudices balance.
An exercise ball! Maybe it's called a "yoga ball" too?

I say this as a person that has used a ~$400 chair with mesh on the seat and back.

I've had several bouts of sciatica over the last few years, even with a moderately soft chair.

A registered massage therapist recommended an "exercise ball" and I got a Trideer brand from Amazon.

It makes for more small movement, and less/no soreness at the end of the day.
There's a fascinating story of Pilotwings being (very gently) bitten by a very slightly different hardware revisions that causes the idle animation plane to just barely crash rather than land safely: http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2019/05/random_the_captivat...
Could you provide some examples? Without having had that experience, I’m having trouble picturing a concrete example that I would be sure is of the same kind.
What would "do/while" look like in Python? Since blocks don't have end markers (e.g. "end", "}", etc.) there's nowhere to put the while expression if you want the syntax to be consistent with the rest of the language.
As it should be! That's the most beautiful part of the DMCA, allowing sites to operate without having to police every bit of user-uploaded content, only requiring that violations are removed after having been alerted to them.

Could you imagine an upload filter or moderation queue before you were allowed to push code to GitHub?
Yes, in the ER, doctors look at things like heart rate, respiration rate, and temperature. But they also draw blood for electrolytes, glucose, creatine kinase, etc. since those can detect underlying problems which the body is compensating for.

A well designed distributed system is going to be able handle a certain failure rate in its components because requests will be retried automatically. If a component's failure rate increases from 0.01% to 0.1%, there will probably not be any user-visible impact... but if you can detect that increase, you might be able to correct the underlying issue before that component's failure rate increases to 1% or 10% or 100% -- at which point no amount of retrying will avoid problems.
They can, but is it as common in practice? (I earnestly don't know.)
I didn't know this channel existed and it's very interesting. Thanks for sharing it.
Funny coincidence: I can literally see Dollar General CEO's house, Todd, from where I sit typing this, in my temporary office at my inlaws house while I'm on vacation. AMA. :-D

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not anti Dollar General, though I do think we need to take better care of each other. Was just very funny to see DG come up when I was looking at their house.
What did you learn from it?
Vertical farming will never be as efficient as open fields farming. Its claim to fame is quality control and the ability to grow crops year-round by spending more energy.
That flaw is also the root of the "Innovator's Dilemma." The idea is that "best" business practices and especially concern over lower margins and smaller markets, prevent companies from moving downmarket, leaving a gaping hole for an upstart to gain a foothold and eventually mount a fatal attack from the bottom.
Because it is very extremely unlikely that the font license the font purchaser paid for allows them to distribute it to the public.

I could see this happening in a repo by Google/MS/FB/etc., but it probably would be extremely expensive for them. Any other instance of this sort of sharing is unlikely enough that it can be assumed to be illegitimate.
This hasn't been true for a while. Anyone can build and install their own iPhone apps, the requirement to buy a developer license went away a while ago.
A used NUC with a Celeron CPU can be had for 70 usd these days and is way faster than any Raspberry Pi.
Racket truly has some great stuff wrt. macros -- I'm not sure if it was invented as a research vehicle for macros specifically[0], but they've even gone as far as implementing fairly advanced type systems as macros[1].

Besides the one I've linked, they have lots of interesting papers around the macro system: the handling of 'stages', the modularity, etc. Basically just google "Racket [something]" and go from there :)

[0] Probably more just a general 'extensible languages' type thing?

[1] http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/stchang/pubs/ckg-popl2017.pdf
One opened in a food desert in north Philadelphia and it was doing incredible volume.
No.

Pre-authorization times out after 5 days. The merchant does pre-authoriziation first for a small amount (like one dollar) just to make sure the payment is actually valid, which disappears after 5 days with no capture. It's just a card validation method, it doesn't reserve any funds (besides the single dollar). Consumers would be rightly upset if starting a free trial with no obligation immediately reduced their available funds by a significant amount. This is unrelated to the later charge when the trial ends, which is usually more than 5 days later, and will be a distinct charge for the full amount.

There isn't anything unethical about automatically declining purchases. It's not any different, cost-wise, from manually cancelling the trial. The merchant could however continue to provide the service, claiming that you never really cancelled it, then consider you indebted for the declined charges, but that wouldn't go over very well.
Why are dollar stores so popular in low-income neighborhoods? Maybe instead of banning them, we should figure why they're so prevalent in the first place.

Shopping for everyday necessities at a grocery store or supermarket is incredibly stressful if you're poor. You can quickly reach a $100+ shopping bill with just a handful of items in your cart. Dollar stores offer a decent selection of goods and, more importantly, consistent prices.
An argument against expression assignment is that it can create readability problems compared to separating the assignment from the expression in which the value is used. Even most supporters of the feature agree that this can be true in many cases and that it should be used judiciously.

This is in no way contrary to the argument that the walrus operator improves readability of expression assignments compared to using the same operator that defines assignment statements.
>> “I think societies need to learn to recognize this pattern ASAP, because the best outcome is nipping such companies in the bud, before they grow and leave only two bad options on the table..”

Who are you specificities referring to when you say ‘societies’? Government? Consumers?
How Fortnite Revolutionised Game Marketing
The New York Times can eat my shit.
Ask HN: What's the biggest problem you have when it comes to 1:1 meetings?
I am building a product in the space and I would like to solve a real pain that leaders and ICs have when it comes to one-on-one meetings.

What do you think could be better regarding your one-on-one meetings?
I use Pluralsight and I love their videos.

I had a subscription I'd paid for and then I changed companies. My new Company provided a subscription. So I called up and they refunded me the prorated subscription.

I see you emailed customer support, but I'd instead call them. You'll probably have better luck with a human listening. Maybe not but it's worth a try for $300.

An Email should have done it. It's crazy if you do call them and it works, but sometimes that does the trick.
It's apples and oranges.

Python was explicitly designed and had a dedicated BDFL for the vast majority of its nearly 30 year history functioning as a standards body.

JS, on the other hand, was hacked together in a week in the mid-90s and then the baseline implementation that could be relied on was emergent behavior at best, anarchy at worst for 15 years.