skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good on him for taking the time and energy to get through it. Apple is still waging a war on its own customers.

They wouldn't replace a faulty magsafe charger that suddenly died and that was still under warranty. The "genius" (that term is so ridiculous) at the store claimed that accessories were not covered, which is very very wrong under European laws.

He then left me waiting and went asking his manager. This took a good 20 minutes and when he came back, the employee was adamant that the only way out of this was to pay 100€ for a new charger. I had to pull law excerpts, raised the tone of the conversation and started making a fuss.

Then the mood magically changed when the other customers started noticing the argument and I left with a brand new charger.

This was a terrible customer experience.
Thats one way to look at it, but to get rich you want to join companies that are growing like crazy.

A company that grows 20% like google offers high cash low stock. But a company that grows 100% every year can make you a millionaire in a couple of years.

Its true startups lotteries are not great for employees in general, but who would have bet that UBER wouldn't IPO in 2014? or some other companies like Airbnb, etc.
It's also called burn out. Often times you will spend years slaving over one program, making improvements and changes for different cases while simultaneously maintaining it, installing it, documenting it.

After years and years of this, 8 hours, 5 days a week, it gets really monotonous.

You'll thank yourself when you think maybe I can get into journalism, or HR, or accounting, or any X-degree field at a different company without even having to take more college because you already went.

There's also bad universities, you went to a bad one or you didn't continue far enough past general ed.
Couple of years ago there was a professional football player that took an Uber from O'Hare to Buffalo, NY for just under $1000 to make it practice on time.

Anyway, this guy could have taken a Megabus to from Chicago to Cincinnati for $25 and then done a rideshare the rest of the way. It would have been far less expensive.
I think an undertone point might be that sales is manipulation.
Also RIP to Shake by Nothing Real, then bought by Apple and killed.

One of the best node-based creative environments I've ever used.
What incentives are there to claim that their company can sell your company access to their secret sauce which greatly improves some metric which is notoriously hard to measure?
> Stuff like this makes me glad to live in NYC

This is the same place that has E-ZPass trackers and automated license plate readers all over the city tracking vehicle movement, that has an untold number of CCTV cameras, and corrupt cops that get away with murder.

I'm not saying we shouldn't commend them for this, just that there are many other major related issues that should be equally concerning.
Show HN: LidLayer – Protect and Preserve Your Laptop Stickers
The point should be obvious from the context, that Franklin was very far from any sort of anarcho-capitalist/libertarian extremist.

> Was he some sort of fundamentalist anarchist?

The quote plainly refutes that idea.
I Asked 100 Founders, CEOs and VCS About Career Transitions: What I Learned
I just posted some rambling thoughts in this thread about not having a CS degree (or any real degree) and being successful as a self-taught software engineer.

I briefly mentioned how my non-formal studies of religion and philosophy have helped to inform me - mainly in the context of "machine learning".

Your thoughts about how such studies apply to CS in general, though, are interesting. I noted that there are extreme overlaps between CS and many, many other areas of study that I believe both informs and is informed by those areas (whether known consciously or not).

We may actually be doing a disservice to ourselves (and perhaps for the world) by having (though rightly, I suppose) tying Computer Science so tightly with that of Mathematics.

Of course, that could just mean that mathematics also in turn informs and is informed by those subjects, I suppose...? Which is arguably true from what I understand of mathematics and the history of mathematics!

I guess, though, is what I am getting at is that we - humanity that is - have somewhat "enclosed" CS as a subset or adjunct of mathematics. Many don't seem to understand or "see" that so many other subjects and topics are involved. Not having that understanding may be hindering our advancement (both in CS and perhaps even as a species).
You will have to be in airplane mode (no cell reception) for this to be meaningful. Even then you probably turned it on enough times in the places you frequent for the data to be solid.
That's what the Henry David Thoreau reference was supposed to cover.
and it says:
"Free for the first week.

$84 thereafter."

so, is it $84/week?
> Metrics give you feedback on your level of mastery.

Metrics can give you feedback on your level of mastery, but this varies wildly with whoever is providing the feedback.
> I had no trouble understanding object oriented programming

Indeed, Object-Oriented Programming is harder to learn for programmers who have experience with other languages already (no pun intended) ;-)

When you know a language like C/C++/Java and you learn about OOP you think you understand, but in fact, you don't. So while functional programming was probably the easiest course for me in university, it took me 1,5 semesters to actually understand OOP. In the end, it is not that complicated, it is just that you have to think more on the meta-level than on the implementation-level and I think, for someone who doesn't have access to the implementation-level, it is easier because it doesn't get in the way.
Fuck that, I've been doing this for 25 years and what I want in order of importance is:

1) Pay me
2) Autonomy
How CIA Made Google
How to run an effective machine learning team
I feel the author was struggling to find a suitable anecdote to open the story. And this one seems a bit far-fetched, perhaps even exaggerated by Mr. Kelly as a means of illustrating the hassle of curtailing the surveillance apparatus of Google. But someone who has gone to the lengths described probably knows how to block requests to google-analytics.com.
Am I the only one who abhors the term soft skills?

I have been trying to put my finger on what about it rubs me the wrong way so much but can't quite figure out why the phrase makes me so uncomfortable. Part of it is the implication that we're all socially inept computer nerds, part of it is the implication that technical skills are "hard"...
Lyft open sourced its autonomous driving data set
The real take-away from this article is: These people are legitimately ill. But we still are no closer to knowing what caused it or by whom. The previously released sound recordings are likely made by Indies short-tailed crickets.

There's been a lot of finger pointing, but until we know HOW this was done it may be hard to figure out WHO conducted it, or even if it was man-made at all (e.g. disease).
It sounds like you're speaking for yourself more than for anybody else.
> Not everyone can learn coding without externally imposed structure.

That's actually not what a CS degree is primarily about. You learn to code in maybe the first 2 or 3 classes. After that, it's assumed that you can translate ideas into code and you start learning about different areas of computer science.

If you just need to learn to code for a job, there are bootcamps that can teach you that in a fraction of the time and cost.

> But those who can't probably have an ongoing problem in keeping up with the state of the art.

Personally, I wasn't able to learn to code in any meaningful way before college. I had tried to learn from books and online sources but never got beyond basic scripting. After working my way through a bachelor's degree and PhD, I don't have much trouble keeping up with the state of the art now.
This is super concerning
That’s not a logical argument by Franklin, it’s his opinion. There’s no axiomatic reason why Ben Franklin’s opinion is more correct than anyone else’s, even William Barr’s.
I hate ads, but I agree with you. I hate them because they work. Or at least, all this money wouldn't be flowing into the industry if it really wasn't working. Maybe FB is fraudulent due to the accusations in the article (inflating numbers to advertisers), I don't know; that's unrelated to the issue of giant, innovative tech companies basing their entire business models on advertising things to their non-paying users, and visitors, and also anyone else who ever visits pretty much any other website on the Internet.

Advertising isn't fraud. Neither is data collection. It's just unfortunate. I wouldn't even be surprised if many Google and Facebook employees agree it's unfortunate. They're probably thinking: what else exactly can we do to sustain all these non-paying users?

It's really not even the data collection that bothers me so much as the fact that it's being used for such a... dumb purpose, I guess. The best minds of our generation are dedicating their life's work and all of their brainpower to thinking about how to get people to see or click more advertisements. What a waste.
This reporting is terrible (and pretty hard to read) but here's a cool graph of the approach to Earth: https://theskylive.com/how-far-is-2019od
Engineers Want To Learn, Even If They’re Very Senior

But /what/ do they want to learn? Something about this bit is rubbing me the wrong way:

> "In 2002, a very good COBOL or Fortran engineer was probably in a good place as far as their job search was concerned, but today they're unlikely to get much attention from companies that have moved on to more modern languages. Had that engineer focused on growth to keep up with changes in the industry, they might have learned Python or JavaScript and been able to keep up with the market."

Is .. reinventing the wheel, or learning the same thing in a new language, really the same as "growth"?

Is it even "learning" in any way more than "memorization"?

Since when is "keeping up with the Joneses" the same as "(personal) growth"? Had that engineer focused on growth and learning, perhaps they'd now be a High Performance Computing specialist in Fortran, or a business analyst with an MBA overseeing a COBOL team's migration, or a founder of a COBOL codebase analysis tool company, or a bi-lingual contractor traveling to help foreign companies move away from COBOL, or .. anything, growing and changing instead of writing a database report in COBOL then in Java then C# then in JavaScript.
His bar for "excessive" is pretty low though. We aren't talking 3rd home, plausibly we aren't even talking 1 home.
"opportunity for growth" is ambiguous. TripleByte should really be asking about more specific things like "skill development" or "opportunities for promotion". I expect that you'd see some pretty different patterns with those.
The context when Franklin said that is interesting. Pennsylvania was having trouble on the western frontier due to the French and Indian War, and the legislature wanted to put a tax on land to raise money for arms for defense.

The governor was blocking this, because the Penn family, which owned a lot of Pennsylvania land, objected. The Penn family did recognize the need for defense (although they were largely absentee landlords so not in personal danger), and offered to donate a lump sum for the arms if the legislator would agree that it did not have the power to tax Penn land.

Franklin's quote was in a letter he wrote to the governor arguing for rejection of this offer.

The "essential Liberty" he was referring to was the liberty of the legislature to legislate how it saw fit, including taxing Penn land to pay for security, and the "purchase a little temporary Safety" was the one time lump sum for arms.

That was in 1755. He did re-use the phrase 20 years later in 1775 in a more general context, closer to what people quote it for nowadays.
I'm holding out for cities on the carbon neutral push to offer subsidies for full remote work. Cheapest way to reduce carbon emissions is to get cars off the road, cheapest way to do that is to remove the need to travel.
Wow, was just reading this article after reading the one about SAPs. I don't have much of any knowledge on aerospace engineering or what the Air Force/Navy have planned for our skies, but it's still a crazy thought that they'd abandon that kind of tech. I understand the upper echelons of governments get really bureaucratic but a lot of the times their decisions are incredibly simplistic, a program like this could be abandoned just because the top rung shift focus to intelligence gathering, any platform that doesn't fit that purpose or can easily be made to fit that purpose gets the axe, despite how useful it may be in the future. All boils down to money eventually.

I'm really interested in what the "next phase" of aviation combat will be, or if there even will be a next phase. It's possible some organization would create a weapon that would physically disrupt any vehicle or object flying through a certain patch of sky - that may push us into a air-to-groud laser or smart-guided weapon age to counter those kinds of measures, and also means air vehicles will need serious intel platforms to get around them. We also may see vehicles that can transition from air to sea and retain full combative power, anything in the skies that can't float at that point goes the way of the do-do, no matter how intelligent it's systems are, so maybe the USAF is waiting until it's clear what will work for the next 50 years, while other branches invest UCAV technology.

*air-to-ground, not ground-to-air
I ripped my entire catalog of CDs accumulated throughout the 90s-2000s into digital format and threw that collection into Plex so I can listen to my own personal (paid for!) music library remotely. I also took digital download codes for recent Blu-Ray purchases and stored those in Plex so I can watch lower-quality versions of the movies I paid for.

For all I've heard, KODI was the platform that harbored the most piracy in terms of user base but that is just as baseless of an assumption that this article makes for Plex.
You mean tax revenue that is spent to benefit the people who live there?
Umm, what you said doesn’t have anything to do with what I said. If a person googles “hacker news” this is the first thing that comes up even though there isn’t a whole lot about hacking here. It should really be called tech news or startup news.
> signalling to the world that you have the chops and the work ethic to go through with a major project with many frustrating stepping stone

i.e., hazing.
+1 for Luxon.
They need the 3D elements of the face, probably to help train the system to avoid being faked by photos :-)
Ah, I think I understand. So, you'd measure whether this person made a purchase without ever having viewed the ad. Thanks for explaining.

I can see why platforms would be reluctant to offer this feature. If you're running ads on multiple platforms and only one offers this feature, it will make itself look uniquely bad. However, the other platforms probably also provide little extra value compared to running ads on a single platform.
Maybe. But the lack of cash tolls also enables the Surveillance State. So once again, we're trading privacy and liberty for what amounts to pocket lint.

I think we have closure on the American experiment. Laziness/convenience trumps anything else.
> Companies should realize doing things that seem "fluffy" and not entirely necessary, like moving to a newer tech stack, might be worth it as it will make it easier to attract new talent. And if they stay behind, they might encounter the famous "dead sea effect" and wonder why things break, and every new feature takes forever -- the best technically minded people have left for greener pastures.

I think when they get to this stage they outsource to small dev mills. I don't know about Houston, but here in Toronto there are plenty of those who do "enterprise" work that consists of writing something once and walking away leaving any leftover internal developers to manage it. I've worked in ecosystems where that kind of stuff will stick around for 10+ years, broken and bandaged with no documentation. Sometimes even more.

Many companies that operate that way don't want to pay for a development team. They just want it working. Hell, sometimes they can't justify the headcount of having a few developers on board but can easily get away with dropping $250 - 500k a year to outsource the work.
Why not just build “don’t let anyone with an account less than X” message me?
Study cryptography now, because at the rate we're going, even teaching/studying it will be restricted in the near future.
Superset's very powerful, but other options can be easier for common use cases.
I'd rather accept the security risks of not having encryption backdoors
Was it a sonic attack? or some drug which destroys brain tissue, and as a side effect messes with sound processing parts of the brain too.
The arbitrary resolution support and superior color saturation might still justify using a CRT in some cases. Back in the day I ran a CRT at some bizarro resolution with custom XFree86 timings to get as much screen space or as high a refresh as possible while matching width or height of another different display. LCD scaling will always be blurrier.
Personally I couldn’t care less about status, but money is very important to me, because I want to “retire” (work on my own stuff and by my own schedule) by the time I’m 45.
The author Denis Pushkarev (zloirock) of core-js is an example of what not to do as an author of a popular library; he's spamming people's install logs with his own job advertisement and blocking anyone on github who express opinions other than his own views. The advertising might also be a violations of NPM's policies. Never ignore community feedback, particularly if your package is being used as a dependency for thousands of other packages.
IMHO the main problem are macros. Macros in racket/scheme/lisp/clojure are very powerful. You have the complete language available to make any transformation you want.

The idea is that the language look like an AST written as a list of list, and the tools to write macros look like some pattern matching to transform lists of list into lists of list. (In spite they are not lists of list but syntax objects that have much more information.) (And you are not forced to use some subset of tools, you can write arbitrary code in the macros, but some tools make the common tasks easier.)

For example, to create a new macro that run some block of code n times, you can write

(define-syntax-rule (repeat n boby ...)
(for ([i n])
body ...))

and now you can use that as if it is part of the language:

(repeat 5
(displayln "Hello, Word!")
(displayln "------------"))

(Note that, you don't have to worry that the counter i in the macro will overwrite a variable i in the main part of the code.)

Nobody is sure where is the magic, but writing macros is easies because the code in the main program and the patterns in the macro look very similar.

It's more difficult to work with a language with more syntax. Is the code desugared before going to the macro? Can you use some sugared version inside the macros? Does the user have to learn the main sugared version of the language and then learn the desugared forms?

What if one of the "arguments" of the macro is an infix operator? How does it interact with the other operators?

What if you have two interoperable languages running side by side? Racket ships with something like 10 or 20 internal languages, and you can download 5 or 10 or 20 or 1000 more. And all of them are (somewhat) interoperable. So you can most of the time use the libraries written in one of them in the other. You can even share macros between languages.

What if you have two interoperable languages running side by side? What if you write a macro in the sugared language and try to use in the other, or vice versa? Does they work? How?

Nobody is sure about the details, but Matthew is optimistic that this is possible, and he is usually right.
There are ways to get rich inside the career world. For example, become a managing director at a big bank.
Nobody pays for or gets product placement on HN. You have to make something readers find interesting. I assume that's the case with the current submission, since it hasn't been affected by moderators or by any of the below.

We do sometimes place stories that we or a small number of story reviewers think the community might like. That program is described at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380 and the links back from there. Such stories get lobbed by software randomly onto the bottom half of the front page, whence they fall off in a few minutes unless people upvote them. The purpose is to make HN more interesting (because https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Many good submissions fall through the cracks and this is a way to give some a second crack.

Anyone who knows of a story that deserves a second chance like this should email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we'll consider throwing it in that pool. It's ok to ask this for one of your own stories, but it's better if you just ran across something and think it's cool.

By the way, you can see a partial list of these at https://news.ycombinator.com/invited. Those are the ones that were too old to be lobbed directly when we saw them, so we emailed the submitter and invited them to repost it instead. It's on my list to publish a more comprehensive set of lobbed stories.

There are two other types of placed submission that HN does as a way to give back to YC for funding this place: job ads (https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs) and Launch HNs for startups (https://news.ycombinator.com/launches).
Incognito mode is mostly useless as an actual privacy tool. You're still exposing a substantial amount of information. The most basic would be your IP. Most IPs are of course dynamic, but there are two factors here:

1) The IP only changes when your lease expires or you manually renew it. This is not a normal part of starting an incognito session. Google has a confirmed identity (such as by being logged into a Google service) of tantalor at IP x. A few seconds later IP x shows up at SteamyHotPornSite.com that's running Google analytics or otherwise providing tracking for Google - a recent study of 22,484 porn sites found Google trackers present on 74% [1]). That's 100% tantalor.

2) Even in cases where the IP does change, it's constrained to within a group. As most dynamic IPs are also geomapped, it's often a relatively small group. Now what information is exposed during incognito can be cross-referenced against a very small group of potentials. You can likely hit near 100% on this as well.

And that's just one datum, though granted it's quite a useful one! Incognito should be seen as a tool that does little more than disable any cookies you have and automatically [kind of - depends on your OS] deletes your local browsing history.

[1] - https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-google-quietly-trac...
There's a documentary featuring interviews with him - and many of the people who worked with him - on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/watch/80175483
> "A lot of newer and lower-volume toll exits around me are pass-only. But since the tollway charges double for non-pass users anyways... everyone has the pass."

So making collection easier not only handed over our privacy, it made doing it (i.e., tools) more often and for less money.

And there's Liberty on the side of the road...death by one penny pricks?
> But law enforcement says encryption thwarts their access to communications they claim they need to prosecute criminals.

I think I have more to fear from the government than I do from the types of criminals that encryption backdoors would thwart.