skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going just off the website, but this honestly feels like one of those personal development courses that your employer pays for and you go to and feel like it's a waste of time.
By making computers more reliable, a company like Dell could dramatically reduce the amount of computers that require on-site servicing in the first place. For instance, what percentage of Dell XPS's have their keyboards fail within a year? What percentage of MBPs do?

Right now a base warranty for an XPS includes on site repair during business hours after a remote diagnosis for one year. Getting three years of that is $160. One year of the more advanced "ProSupport" is $50 more than the base price, and three years of that is $280 more. The non-linearity between those two figures is perhaps indicative of the failure rates Dell is expecting.

I couldn't say if Dell is losing their ass with these service contracts or not, but from what I've seen it works pretty well for the consumers.

Edit: And beyond baseline reliability, the particular design of a computer can determine whether a particular failure is cheap or expensive to fix. If the Foo widget requires replacing the Bar board, that's going to be a more expensive design to fix than a computer in which the Foo widget and the Bar board aren't soldered together. This matter crops up in things like "flexgate" for Apple, where faulty cables necessitate replacing the entire screen. What could have been a very cheap repair suddenly becomes a very expensive repair. I can't claim to be familiar with the insides of a modern XPS, but I wager they tend to be cheaper to repair than modern MBPs.
This seems like the perfect book to round out these:

- Berkeley: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs [Racket version] (http://berkeley-cs61as.github.io/textbook.html)

- Duke: Discrete Math [Racket] (https://www2.cs.duke.edu/courses/spring15/compsci230/syllabu...)

Can anyone recommend other core CS books/courses that uses Lisp (or variants) or other functional languages?
I still prefer Emacs/CIDER to the other Clojure editor plugins, but IntelliJ/Cursive is a close second. Atom/Chlorine and VS Code/Calva are getting better all the time, too.
Show HN: Umbrella App – open-source digital/physical security lessons and advice
Rice does absorb much more arsenic from the environment than other crops, so maybe it could be engineered to do that less. In the meantime, we should have stricter standards on arsenic content.
Just a counter-anecdote, but I've only had good experiences.

Just yesterday I picked up my out-of-warranty MacBook Pro whose battery was starting to show problems after 3 years... turns out it was originally a faulty battery and they replaced it for free -- the whole top case including the keyboard.

Last year my out-of-warranty iPhone had battery swelling so it was unsafe to swap the battery, so for the $29 price of a battery replacement they gave me a brand-new iPhone.

Fraying cable on earphones? Replaced them for free as well a couple of years ago. Lost the rubber buds at another point? I stopped in, they just gave me an extra pair no charge.

Maybe being in NYC has something to do with it? But service at the Apple store has been so far above and beyond any other company I've ever dealt with, it's been a no-brainer to pay the "premium Apple tax" in the long run for me.

I wonder how much discretion managers in stores/countries have to be generous or stingy, though, or if they explicitly have different internal policies around these things.
Global or Local Secondary Indexes in Scylla? The Choice Is Now Yours
Well this was also on MIT's The Download. So I think more than just HN crashed it.
I started programming properly in 2010 when I was 12 or 13. Before that I did some small things in Inform 7, and now I remember it, Visual Basic, but I don't really consider that 'proper programming' as it was mostly cutting and pasting code with little understanding. I started with Inform 7, Python, and a little bit of Processing and Lua. I did three or four ludum dares and at some point I made most of a game in Lua with Love2d (around October 2012ish).

Maybe a few years later I started delving into 'hacker culture', and I picked up C with K&R (since it was almost universally recommended and easy to read), I also at some point picked up UNIX Power Tools (recommended in Linux Format) and The Practice of Programming. At some point after that I became really interested in Compilers and Operating Systems.

When I went for my first internship three years ago, the interviewer said I knew more about the things we talked about, than most other bona fide engineers they interviewed. The university-hired interns that sat next to me couldn't read the Erlang manual or documentation because it just didn't click with them, which while I can appreciate on some level that people have different sources of information that suit them best, it's still astonishing to me.

Consider that programmers started out as secretaries learning how to program the machine from the specification and the schematics given. A lot of the programmers I have met, probably wouldn't be able to cope with such a task, I include myself in that category.

I agree with you about the quality of books. A fair chunk of the books on my bookshelf from that era are 80s/90s to early 00s because those books are just an order of magnitude better written, with a high signal to noise ratio.

Can you imagine a modern language like Swift or Rust being taught to the same level, in the same space as K&R? I can't!
I looked at it, and it is very good: good baselines, explanations, visualizations and going deeper than a typical "it is a black box but if you copy & paste it will work".

I was surprised by the nice network vis (and I did dive into the subject before: https://medium.com/inbrowserai/simple-diagrams-of-convoluted...). The only thing that looks clunky is the text logs for training (a shameless plug: https://github.com/stared/livelossplot).
Metabase can't be beaten in terms of looks and functionality but I do like this.
No, I just said it wouldn't be better... there are many scenarios where the best way to do something in one perspective is not the best seen from another perspective.
As others have mentioned, there are many folks working in the gov world without CS degrees. This is especially true for older workers who graduated at a time when CS departments weren't common place at every college as they are now. However, if it's credentials that you are after, governments love certifications as well.
I'm a 40ish FAANG Manager without a CS degree. I would point out that while I agree that it is possible to have a great development career without a CS degree, I wouldn't recommend doing it this way if you have a choice. So, if you are contemplating dropping out or skipping doing a CS degree and going right into the industry, you are going to face obstacles and bias throughout your career that having the CS degree will mitigate.

No one second guesses a CS degree, but a good chunk of CS grads (your future coworkers and hiring managers) will second guess a self-taught education.
It's not an "ideological battle" if it's empirical (based on evidence and rational discourse).

The only "ideological battles" are religious in nature. I'm fine with keeping religion off HN, but you can't just call a contentious topic "ideological", especially if there is evidence and/or rational debate to be had. The fact that an insufficient number of people opt-in to discussing some topic in that way does not make it "ideological". Would you also consider conversation about climate change "ideological" and thus unworthy of HN?

In any event, the original post (interestingly) got unflagged, so this was superfluous anyway.
This sort of thing drove me insane in elementary school and still does to this day. In vernacular English, "can you" is just a more polite and less aggressive form of "will you". Having those two options is really useful. Distinguishing between them like that always feels more like a power play by someone trying to force someone else to use an arbitrary phrasing, rather than an actual lesson in how English works.
Is there any independent audit of any advertising platform's data at all? Like Facebook tells me that 10,000 people saw my ads and I have no real way of verifying that. And I'm supposed to believe that Facebook is being honest even though Facebook has all the incentive to falsify numbers
There’s a lot of debate between the browser vendors and automation tools around whether the Chrome DevTools Protocol is the right abstraction layer to focus browser automation around. It’s a nuanced topic and if you dig into it you’ll see that all the different sides make good arguments. My guess is that this debate stalled your project. I’m putting myself out here on the topic because having a coherent and enjoyable cross-browser integration testing story would be a huge win for the web at large and it’s something worth making people aware of in the hopes that we can find common ground.

Edit: I actually have no right to comment on what stalled your project and have no idea what happened there. I just wanted to discuss the fact that we need a good abstraction layer but seem stuck in debate.

Disclosure: Chrome DevTools docs guy, just speaking personally based on my research into the topic over the last year
Funny how I knew I would get the "that's Gene's book" comment as soon as posted it ;)
They're going to be constantly explaining "No, it's not NodeJS". "No, it's not graph db nodes either." "Yeah it's kinda like graph nodes."

Way too much overload of that word.
I've been really involved in teaching people with non-traditional backgrounds (e.g. no cs degree) to program lately, and this has been my biggest struggle. There are people who are working in the field as a web dev and have been for years and can't do simple stuff like iterate. They have no understanding of what the stuff they're actually doing means or does. It's just copy and pasting snippets they see online and fiddling with it til it works.

I've taken to offering three pieces of advice to these people:

1) Go through the basic language tutorial of whatever language you use (e.g. how to declare variable, conditionals, loops)

2) Go read through the essentials guide to your languages (will be slightly higher level stuff)

3) Go read the sections on Data Structures, Concepts and Algorithms and Knowledge Base in Cracking The Coding Interview skipping the problems that aren't answered in chapter. Why? Because it's a solid primer for CS Concepts that people just don't pick up unless they have to, and most importantly short enough (< 100 pages) people will actually go through it. Large CS books with the dense writing intimidate people and so they never follow through.

I've had a lot of success with this method. It's not a formal cs education by any means but I've found it's enough to get people past the constant beginner part.
I highly recommend Doctorow's "Radicalized" for the other angle of this: pervasive, locked IoT devices baked-in to a rental agreement. "Only use proprietary soap for your washing machine - after all, that's the reason your rent is priced where it is."
> What matters in the end is if there's a positive ROI on the ad spending

From what I've seen, the big brands don't really know the ROI of their ad spending. They allocate X% to digital, Y% to outdoor, Z% to TV, etc. Then they sub-allocate across channels within each category. It's not really about ROI.

And smaller advertisers don't have much in-house capability to measure ROI. Instead they rely on Facebook's own analytics.

Only a handful of companies I've seen actually build their own analytics, measure customer acquisition cost, and match acquisition cost to lifetime value for specific customer cohorts.

The smaller firms that do their own analytics invariably discover that 95% of the traffic from "paid social" Facebook ads is low quality, high churn, with deeply negative ROI. And it's impossible to isolate the 5% high quality, low churn, positive ROI traffic and just pay for that.
This seems interesting, but without knowing what a course looks like, I won't sink $84 into it.

If the creator(s) are reading, I would suggest making the first chapter free. That would work better to get visitors to sign up & pay. For example, from what I can see there are 9 missions, so the first is free, pay to continue.
Depends on the country I guess, but in some it is a very valid defense.
Well, thats a fair criticism. But I'm saying its like trying to avoid being kidnapped when you're already in the trunk of someones car. Sometimes the trunk is nice and large and roomy... :)
If the goal of the renovation was to add resale value, as opposed to meal preparation value, to the home they did the correct thing. Kitchens and bathrooms are the "runway models" of real estate.
I have seen plenty of CS grads that can barely code or put together a real solution to a problem. There is no guarantee just because someone was able to muddle through a CS degree that they can do these things. In almost all cases, you really need to evaluate whether an individual shows the aptitude to solve your problems you need solved and crank out good well thought out practical solutions that fit the scale of the business problem. The degree paper is not all that important. I would give bonus points to a candidate if they came from an accomplished but different background than CS that shows they are capable of success/mastery in multiple areas, they are adept at learning and researching new material, and they have the matching technical prowess to spearhead a real project. For instance I have known many engineering (of the physical paradigm) types that are self-taught with no CS degree that I would trust to tackle a project over any random CS degree candidate.
-It’s not just refinishing of the case, but rather cleaning and lubing the movement; you don’t want the innards to grind themselves to pieces.

That being said, my everyday Omega (a PlanetOcean diver) has gone for 11 years without a service and still keeps excellent time; once timekeeping deteriorates, I’ll have it cleaned, lubed and adjusted at my local watchmaker’s.

Oh, and the case will be refinished over my dead body; it has more or less literally gone to war with me, got banged up a bit, lived to tell the tale and is still ticking.
"I've personally come to feel cotton is vastly over-rated as a clothing material for anything but cost-saving goals (which certainly is an important factor.) Of course there's the old adage "Cotton Kills", referring to cold weather ..."

FWIW, cotton is very useful as an underlayer for firefighting.

It's very important to not have any synthetic fabrics as underlayers - especially in a wildland/forest fire situation where a flash of heat that might only result in a first degree burn of your skin melts the synthetic fabric to your skin.
I think it's been a general trend for a while (at the very least since the dawn of hip hop, probably punk) that working-class work wear has been leaning towards fashion (Same for military wear).

Even Swedish Blåklädar (https://www.blaklader.se/) , which is AFAIK a fairly new brand, seem to have to lines ; a low quality, highly priced "fashion" line, and an affordable, high quality "work wear" line (that actually market to construction etc businesses, and often include safety wear features with appropriate certifications).

It drives me nuts that it's getting harder and harder to find decent "real" surplus military clothing and cheap work wear (maybe especially in Europe?) - while many of the "same" brands are readily available as overpriced fashion wear.

This really became apparent when I figured out that Blåklädar actually have a handful of stores deticated for b2b (vat not included in prices, generally require a business billing address to purchase) - which quite apart from the not included vat, we're cheaper and generally more "functional" than the stuff with the same brand carried by retailers...
Working should produce results. How it feels is incidental.
He keeps referencing total number of user accounts. This is a bad number to track, precisely because of fraud, duplicate, and unused accounts. A better number is something like monthly or daily active users. Then you can randomly sample a subset of these users and manually determine the number of fake accounts to give you a confidence interval on the total number of real daily active users, which for investor/shareholder purposes, is much better to use than total accounts anyway.
But Dropbox doesn’t even attempt to support the more common cases (pun intended). For example, you put a file in with specific characters in upper case and it might all come out lower case on another (Linux) system.

They claim it’s because not all file systems are case sensitive, but they could at least keep the original case and use it when possible.

Then again, onedrive syncing break on a whole new level. If you upload a docx file, they’ll open it and edit the meta data so the file you added will be different from the one you get back (actually they do it to images and pdfs too).
Same here; While I probably could have wrote as much, because brevity is not my thing usually (anyone here regularly has probably seen some of the chapters of my future book /s)...

What I really wanted to say was "this post needs to be put on /r/iamverysmart" - but even that doesn't convey what really needed to be said.
It seemed a bit much, but I still thought it was interesting to hear their take on it.
I always log in and out of FB on a computer in one browser type and don't have it on any phones. One thing that always strikes me as odd:

Click your picture or add an account, and
Add account
and in big type: Create a new account. It's free and always will be
(un etc fields, birthdate)
The whole front page is set up to encourage multiple accounts and presumably easy to automate the creation of thousands of fake accounts, which as we know is very prevalent.
Great hard hitting article Aaron.
Wired, before the boom/bust, was a massive inspiration for me. Growing up in Central Florida in a “BBS rustbelt” area code it was one of the only places I could find quality writing on a broad spectrum of tech. Or any writing on tech, for that matter.

During and after the boom it seemed to lose its focus on quality writing and countercultural verve, particularly when it got flooded by blurbs and articles about $10,000 wristwatches and stock picks.

There were still some gems though, here and there. But I don’t think much of the writing ever approached this in terms of timeliness and caliber.
Even with Apple margins, the cellular radio adds like $150 to an iPad.

The technical issues are accommodating it with the design decisions made. Personally, I think it’s a smarter decision to make the iPhone/iPad pairing model low friction, as Apple has.

This is also a small/minority use case. LTE laptops are a very small product category — nobody wants to add a cellular plan. This feature will only matter if carriers start killing cable with millimeter wave 5G.
$84 is really steep for a product I don't even get a sample of.

They really should offer the first lesson for free so people know what they're paying for.

I pride myself on my strong soft skills, so I know I won't be paying that kind of a price on these lessons just to see what they look like.
More sensitive climates are more variable climates
Considering the Apple tax is 2x the price, why not get a regular product and replace it with a new product when it breaks?

Maybe the product doesn't break, and you save money, and don't have to deal with Apple.

Or the product breaks, and you get the latest and greatest instead of a year old referbished.
i assumed not. just pointing out a foible of the code’s author. it factored into my decision not to use it.
Widespread aspirin use despite few benefits, high risks
I'm a CS major at the moment.

I learn some of the most interesting shit that I would never have thought to teach my self. Data structures, discrete math, and theory of computation come to mind.

Learning about how grammar and linguistics are so heavily tied into CS has been eye opening and has helped me understand so much more about what's going on in a computer. I never would've learned that on my own.

Sure, probably don't need that to get a job as a developer. But, having a CS degree != being a developer in the first place. I get that they can go hand in hand but it's just not the same.
I doubt there are many Haskell developers (or one at all) without a academic background ..
I imagine engineering it to absorb less of a given substance would almost certainly cause it to absorb less of things it needs as well.

Besides, if editing plants were that easy, we'd have C4 rice already.
lol, what?

they make it easy to create an account if you don't have one.
JS seems even more popular than warranted by its place in the browser. Maybe Netscape management wasn't completely off target with that "Make it look like Java" thing.
Also, your phone manufacturer.
Uncovering the riches of traditional global medicine
Why the WHO’s Emergency Declaration for Ebola Is a Big Deal
As I noted earlier, take a screenshot and post it on "/r/iamverysmart" - then crosslink it back to this thread.

Though that would probably be downvoted to oblivion here; you might even get banned - not sure if that's considered "against the rules" of HN or just "really bad taste"? I kinda suspect the latter, and probably a warning from a mod or two...
Seriously, you should learn Lisp instead.
Hawaii Telescope Protest Shuts Down 13 Observatories on Mauna Kea
> 1pw needs to step up and release another point version with the feature restored.

it seems they've done just that, 5 days after (4 days ago now).

https://www.macrumors.com/2019/07/19/1password-restores-loca...
Ask not how they can give you a rich experience, but how you can try to give them one.
I'd like to question the relevance of this post to HN, but instead I will continue to laugh so hard that tears roll down my face.
I used the next day onside service for my Lenovo X1 Yoga 3rd gen. My laptop broke, I called the next day someone came to my house and replaced the motherboard. Was super easy and convenient.

I looked up my purchase, $2639 for the laptop, $311.75 for 5 years of next day onsite repair service and $169.25 for 5 years of accidental damage protection.
If I wanted to make an industry analogy, I'd go for neural networks in Machine Learning being the show horse.
Because it is a loop in any sane language ... you overheaded functional programmers ..

edit:
Sigh.
I was jockingly mocking.
No degree here. Started programming when I was 14 on MUDs. I actually went to college for CS, quit, went back 6 years later, and quit just shy of my BS. I need 9 or so hours. I moved to another state and didn't want to go through the transfer process and probably end up taking repeat classes...

I'm at the ceiling pay-grade wise now, and burnt out, but that's another issue :) The moral of the story is, you can progress really well in this field if you can prove yourself. Experience > Education
I go into more detail in the report I wrote in January, which also points out that the perfectly constant DAU/MAU relationship Facebook reports cannot possibly be true as growth continues to slow/reverse. See https://www.plainsite.org/realitycheck/facebook.html.
> There's no need for LIQUID CONTACT, or WATER DAMAGE
> to trigger the 'sensor' but just humidity, caused
> for example, by taking the laptop from a well-heated
> room outside, in the winter.

This is backwards. Water condenses on cold objects in hot humid rooms. In Winter the condensation would happen when you take the laptop inside, not outside.
The article is from 2016. A lot has changed since then..
I'm sure it's not the only one, but it's the one that immediately came to mind. I thought it might be in the list because it's close to a foundational word in American English.

Sorry that you chose to read my comment as hatred. Yeah, that's not a real apology.