skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That doesn't sound anything like a surgical team to me. It just sounds like you're mixing experience levels to train new people.

I think I'm more saying that we have moved toward a specialization of labor that supports the software engineer in a different way, even though it hasn't ended up looking like a surgical team. We have product managers who understand the user's needs and organize feedback sessions, we have product designers who are experts of UX design, we have junior engineers that implement components with the oversight of the more senior engineer, etc. It has ended up being more collaborative, and it's not clear to me that it would be better if instead we tried to organize it around a single person who was the overall "surgeon" who did the key aspects of all this work with the others in a supporting position.

In some companies there is a "directly responsible individual" who is in charge, but in others there isn't. Are they acting as a surgeon in that case, or are they doing project management? It depends on the organization. How much ownership that person has and what is the impact on that person of success and failure? It's hard to analyze a different organizational framework as it relates to Brooks.

> Why? Has human nature changed in 40 years? This isn't like reading Plato, where he simply made up things he didn't understand. On the contrary, I would be much more surprised if the nature of team productivity had changed in only 40 years.

Brooks' writing wasn't grounded in fundamental human truths, it was grounded in his observations of software projects that existed in 1975 and related observations of how work was performed in other industries.

My intuition is that if there are Way A through Way Z ways of doing things that are optimized for A through Z different types of organizational problems, Brooks was saying "Way D is the best for software projects." But because we now work on different types of problems (much shorter feedback loops, higher levels of abstraction, users with higher levels of sophistication, greater importance of software ecosystem) maybe Way E (Silicon Valley style agile, lean product management, etc.) is more appropriate. Since Way E has been successful in the market, it at least seems adaptive. Otherwise companies would have a strong incentive to change to Brooks' Way D.
Look at the business signage, rather than dig for it through all the advertising plastered around? Or use maps...
That's not true. Existing satellites can provide internet access across the whole world, but the hardware required to access those satellites is often highly regulated or just illegal for normal citizens to own. A Starlink terminal will be just as illegal in China in the future as a BGAN/VSAT/Iridium Certus terminal is today.
I am not sure how much a return to glass would cost consumers. Taxing plastic might be required, unless someone can come up with a market based solution.
>but for highly adaptable products, 2 months is the maximum something would not change.

This is what differentiates as a startup from a real company.
>> Amazon customers want environmentally friendly shipping.

Citation needed. They want it without the burden of...

>>> So they pay the extra $5 deposit

I highly doubt a large percentage of Amazon customers want environmentally friendly shipping that they have to pay a deposit for and mind a chain of custody.

As I noted, Amazon literally already tried this and it didn't work. So, yeah, it's a problem. And eventually someone will fix it. But you act like Amazon hasn't tried it, and you're ignoring all the chain of custody issues with a deposit system that requires shipping rather than a customer-returns method that worked decades years ago when people shopped locally only.

People on HN are pretty out of touch with the every day person, I think. These ideas sound really good to medium-high net worth individuals, but the average consumer on Amazon is not in that group and really does not care about the environment all that much if it is going to potentially hurt their pocketbook.
>I've seen advice coming out of companies like Microsoft that password expiration dates are not useful, in part because they encourage insecure practices,

The need to come up with a new password and memorise constantly a new strong chain of characters is an unrealistic demand for regular users, that results in attempted get arounds (passwords with a correlative number, post it notes, etc). I don't think this kind of risk is present for certificate renovation, where it's safe to think that whoever is in charge of managing it has a security background.
I agree. I wonder if any doctor has ever been disciplined by a licensing board for his or her substantive judgment in one of these accommodation cases. (That is for an inappropriate decision rather than for some procedural lapse like not doing an examination or something.)
I smell some kind of a DRM coming.
With this 3 day wait, you bet your bottom I'm going to have a release channel outside the play store. I can't do hot fixes of issues anymore. All bugs will take 3 additional days to be fixed now.
No, I get what you're saying. It's just that I think the solution you've proposed is unhelpful.

> how likely would a British journalist have the best interest of China at heart?

More likely than the British government.

Additionally, under a free press, anyone in Britain can publish anything criticizing the BBC, and anyone can claim that it doesn't have China's best interests at heart. Heck, even China can publish information in Britain that criticizes the BBC. Under a state-propaganda system, only state approved actors get to publish information, which means that however slight you think it is that someone would call out the BBC, a free press is still the more-likely system for that to happen. China is better off because Britain has a free press.

In regards to China itself, the idea I gather you're putting forward is that China can't counter the BBC's propaganda on its own and therefore has to protect its citizens by shielding their ears. There are a lot of problems with this idea that boil down to, 'every time a nation has tried it, it's been awful for the citizens involved.'

But a more general argument against this idea is that it doesn't scale -- it is always easier to win an argument when you control what the other person is and isn't allowed to say. If China doesn't trust its citizens to hear news from other countries, there's not going to be a point in the future where it suddenly starts trusting them. It will always be easier to make the argument that we have to protect stupid people from hearing stupid things.

An indefinite state-propaganda system is in the long run almost universally worse for the world as a whole, and almost universally worse for the citizens of individual countries. We also have a lot of examples in the past of it being worse for citizens in the short term. But the fact that there is no off-ramp for state propaganda, and no check-and-balance system to prevent it from going bad -- that would be enough to make it dangerous even if that short-term data didn't exist.
Ask HN: How should I impress 8th graders with web technology
Hello!

I'm a frontend develop for ~10 years, and I've been invited to a neighborhood school (8th graders) to present a one hour demo related to web technologies, mainly HTML, CSS, and JS.

To gain some context, I want to start with a brief explanation about basic stuff like what is a server, browser, how they interact and so on. Then explore a little bit the developer tools by modifying some pages in the browsers. For the final part, I want to edit with them a premade portfolio website so they can add their bio. It will be great if at the end they can say "I made a website".

The whole idea for this hour is to explain how web technologies work and what they can achieve with that.

I'd love to hear what other ideas you all might have to totally wow some teens or what experience you had in a similar situation.
> The strength of the random strategy is that it approximates the theoretical ideal - a maximally diversified market-cap weighted portfolio.

That was a very elegant way to make it click for me, thank you.
So they pay the extra $5 deposit

Suppose you live in a location where you leave the materials out for return pick-up, but scavengers collect them rather than the shipper?

It's not feasible for the customer to stand guard over the packaging. It's effectively discriminatory to impose a financial penalty based on residence (a factor which cannot readily be controlled or changed).

Some alternative means of assuring returns would have to be arrived at.

Tracking, centralised or localised return depots, or other mechanisms, might be possiblities.
One is mine, one is my wife's. We both suffer from anxiety and depression.

> I'm not trying to be a dick [...] if you are so fragile psychological and emotionally that you can't function for a few hours without your two dogs at your side should you really be flying?

heh
There are not citation requirements, as per the GPL. The text that the tool prints without --will-cite is merely a strongly-worded request.
I cannot even sit in a normal plane due to my height, and yet people fly with a horse???? I really want to find some way to fly with a Pygmy Hippo. Or how about a friendly Caiman?
http://www.whenprophecyfails.info/Conditions.htm
Performance Under Load – Adaptive Concurrency Limits Netflix (2018)
Nice to see NYT engaging in clickbait headlines.
Totally Cool . . . .
That’s my point. That code is broken but still readable. The OP is trying to equate readability with correctness.
I'd love to know where you can get a fiber circuit for $500/m. (And even if you can, then you probably can't compete with whoever's selling you that circuit anyway.) When we started we haggled considerably.. (had to sign a 20 year deal) and managed to get a 2G/10G circuit for $1,500/m. (A 1G circuit would have been $1200/m)
The person they hired (in all likelihood many people) represents Virgin Mobile in an official capacity. The people in that thread are primarily talking to their followers (because it's Twitter and not a BBS) and are secondarily addressing Virgin Mobile UK. They are not responding to the person you imagine/are assuming must have come up with the Tweet on their own free accord.
I don’t think she’s that amazing either, but there seems to be this growing trend of intentionally taking the dumbest interpretation of your opponents idea and then lambasting them for it. I think we would all be better off if we stopped intentionally misstating each others points in order to make the person seem dumb or not worthy of being heard. This technology isn’t new now and it wasn’t new during her infamous interview but people treated her very poorly and they were wrong too.
Running a household and running an economy are totally different things. There is a reason macro and microeconomics are taught separately.
Your site is down, FYI.

> Error establishing a database connection
Yeah, you'd have to combine it with something like

https://github.com/erikfrey/bashreduce
The Elder Scrolls: Skyblivion
>> You can oversell bandwidth considerably

Not as much as Comcast/$ESTABLISHED company can. The people most likely to switch to a WISP or alternative ISP are the people most likely to crush your bandwidth.
Ask HN: What is a good tech business model to start during a recession?
In the WeWTF article that's currently on the front page, Scott Galloway mentions that the firms he started during recessions were more successful for these reasons:

1. an easier time finding talent

2. easier to control costs

3. getting immediate feedback because clients/customer held their purse strings closed

What type of business model do think would be more successful under in an economic downturn?

For example, I think services where users altruistically pay to support creators whose media is largely free to consume (e.g. Patreon, Twitch) wouldn't yield as much revenue because people have less disposable income. I can't really think of a model that would do well under these conditions. Of course I could look up Scott's past work, but that would be cheating.
You might consider evil/evil-collection/spacemacs to get vim modal editing (and keybinds) in Emacs.
I haven't tried installing new fonts, I don't think Safari would use them even if I installed them for privacy reasons.
I'm not the parent, and I'm guilty of being exasperated at people calling their purse dogs "support animals" to get them on planes, BUT...

1) The obvious answer to your first questions: lots of people do work from home, and/or work in dog-friendly locations. Also, lots of people take their dog with them on all car trips including local errands.

2) Re: "can't function for a few hours without your two dogs" -- the FLIGHT is a few hours but unless the dogs are beaming there via transporter, they still need the dogs at the destination!
I'd buy the argument that using single-letter flags is confusing, except...

the huge popularity of hot keys in GUIs, etc, which have the additional demerit of not being particularly discoverable or guessable. We accept non-discoverable hot-keys etc in GUIs, so this argument probably results from unfamiliarity.
> Users can then read the profile of the beacon-wearer, and donate money if they’re so moved. Donations can be redeemed at select stores and restaurants. They cannot be used to buy alcohol. The beacon-wearer must check in monthly at a participating nonprofit, or else their beacon is disabled.

Soon there will be multiple agencies that helps homeless individuals build the most marketable profile and increase "Donation conversions".

I don't know much about homelessness and I don't have a solution to the problem but this whole process of only being able to redeem donations at selected locations feels inhuman. We can't trust the homeless so we'll donate this amount but we say what you can use it for because we know better.

Again, I admit my naivety but I can't help feeling there's something fundamentally wrong with this approach.
There are great videos for understanding how it works [0]. I watched a couple of those and after that was able to do exactly what I needed.

For me the trickiest thing is remembering how to deal with redirection. I find the --dry-run option to be super useful when setting up a command.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL284C9FF2488BC6D1
A starter pistol with a non-bored barrel is purported to be legal in Massachusetts, so that's an option too. Just don't bring ammunition, that's a problem if it is a type usable in a regular firearm.
> which implies a deposit you have to pay (increased price on first purchase)

That's not actually the case though. Of course it's costly to Amazon to ship plastic containers, but you don't have to increase the price. In the case of the bottles, it was cheaper to pay people to return them than to make new glass bottles. Likewise, it's likely cheaper for Amazon to pay people to return new boxes than it is for them to send new ones.

The people are the ones helping Amazon cost-save, Amazon isn't doing anyone but themselves a favour by shipping better packaging. The only incentive from Amazon's perspective here is so that they market about how they're recycling more, and how much better protected the items are.
Breathing Supernova
FYI, the term non-PC is mental gymnastics for “being a dick” so I suppose you’re arguing we should be bigger dicks to each other.

IMO, you should be yourself, unless you’re a dick in which case, don’t be yourself. It may feel oppressive to you, but frankly, I don’t ... care, and neither does the rest of society which is why your approach doesn’t get you far. Hopefully this framing is illustrative.
> In the limit where cells are essentially free, putting cells everywhere there is some large horizontal area will make sense.

Going down that road leads to solar power satellites, not solar roadways.
How about building software for local mesh and municipal broadband networks instead? Why does software these days have to reside on servers 1000 miles away? Not only is this slower, but also more wasteful of energy.

To the downvoters: can you actually respond and explain why you are downvoting this sentiment?
Or you can let json.load do its thing and use a nice module like json-syntax[1] to convert it to well typed values and back. (Yup, plugging my library.)

[1]: https://pypi.org/project/json-syntax/
Implementing a binary plist encoding on you REST endpoints is actually pretty great for iOS devices.
My company Althea (https://althea.net) is making open source router firmware that makes it easy to people to set up incentivized mesh networks in their communities. It allows routers to pay each other for bandwidth which means that everyone hosting a node earns money for the packets they forward.

This ends the incumbency problem by making bandwidth a commodity. Want a byte, buy a byte, switching to the best provider automatically. No software knowledge required, fully plug and play. (equipment still required, can't break the laws of RF. it's just regular WISP gear though)

Here's a talk I gave on exactly how the system is designed and implemented.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4EKbgShyLw

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1izRgUr-Tm-ixnqpd7NGW...
IANAL but you should read the actual law, not a summary even when it is from the state:

https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartI/TitleXX/Cha...

I am a Mass resident and know not to mess with Mass gun laws - they carry a minimum of 2 1/2 years in jail.

Total coincidence - MA has the lowest gun death rate at <1/3 the national average and <1/6 some of the most dangerous states:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_death_rates_in_the_Uni...
Sure, if the OS has an API for that. If it doesn't, then the Chrome developers have to figure out what to do.
My problem is that I want to do this with fiber, not Wireless, which is considerably more expensive.

If only regulatory capture wasn't a thing...
> The founder of WeCount, a tech entrepreneur who has sold multiple companies to Google, raves to the press about the “huge emotional ROI” (return on investment) donors get from participating.

It sounds like these apps aren't designed to help the homeless in the first place. They're designed to help people with spare change feel a little better about themselves.

This seems even worse than trying to make a difference to the housing situation and failing. Along with the idea of requiring homeless people to wear a beacon around their neck to pick up scraps from the wealthy, it sounds dehumanizing. Almost like the romans and their coliseum?

I'd love to hear the perspective of any people who've used these apps from the receiving end though. Maybe it's not as bad as it sounds.
Here are some talks from the guy behind that site: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq4mWTQZmnI&list=PL1MwlVJloJ...

These are very dense talks with tons of information you'll probably not need unless you're reeeally going to do it, but it's good to watch for an overview of all steps involved anyway even if you don't.

The talks are from Altheapalooza from https://althea.net/, but they can be applied to non-Althea ISPs also (although you should consider Althea as it's great despite the shitcoinery).
"... The flares are separated by 100 days followed by a gradual decline, where the supernova rests for about 650 days before the pattern is repeated again. Spectroscopic data shows that it emits mostly calcium and oxygen "
Trump Can Avoid War with Russia
You might find this a problematic approach:

- You make packages track more state―“stuff has changed”―and if there are no triggers, you can't even set a flag for the package's runtime: instead, you have to paranoically check for changes at the run time and compute the difference. Meanwhile, an installer/updater knows exactly that something was changed, and what precisely it was―because the installer just done that.

- You're shifting work from install time to run time, which e.g. in backend web programming is exactly the opposite of the right thing to do. Because modifications, in most cases, occur much more rarely than usage, and because making the user wait is a no-no. So, an admin who wants to prepare installed packages for the use, would have to patch the ‘trigger’ stage back in, via their scripts or something―with the caveat that they can't pause the installation in the meantime, so that all changes are processed before the updated programs are run.
There's some positive results coming out of Helsinki:

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/jun/03/its-a-miracle...

Worth exploring.
It won't be long till dissidents are using FT8. Audio is dead. http://www.arrl.org/news/ft8-mode-is-latest-bright-shiny-obj...
How do you define the "inverse" of a stock-picking strategy?
We should force the poor into indentured servitude or slavery as a proper solution, as the South was better off when workers were all unpaid and uncared for. Giving everyone's tax money to wealthy people will result in a better world for everyone. /s

Libertarian fantasy must be a pretty dull medium. Always the same story.
Re 2, most airlines are completely fine with transporting your dogs, service animal or not. In a crate.
https://www.thechiefnews.com/news_paid/growing-clatskanie-st...

See others at https://althea.net/
> All meaningful decisions and choices are made by the developers themselves

Depends on a type of project and many other factors. If you're say building a business app for a client delegating architecture decisions to individual devs on "as-needed" bases means either that all members of team need to be equally capable, have an excellent understanding of client's business and very clear and uniform vision of bigger picture where project is going - or more commonly that you'll end up with a terrible, suboptimal mess of different approaches and interpretations of requirements. Also you usually don't want to pay 10 expensive devs to study the client's business and specifications for days or weeks, when you can have just one do it and propose the solutions to others. So you need a person in charge, and you need that person to know how to do it good, because not everyone, even senior devs, is equally capable of tracking all the moving parts and envisioning the optimal solution. It's a job for someone who's good at it, and you can call them architect or tech lead or whatever, title doesn't matter, but letting them be focused on global picture instead of doing little isolated tasks with everyone else will save you a lot of headache.

However, I totally agree with you that often people hired to do that are not really good at it, just like a lot of managers are not very good in managing projects (and many devs are not very good in programming I guess). The problem there is not with the role itself, but HR and the organization.
>> The people are the ones helping Amazon cost-save, Amazon isn't doing anyone but themselves a favour by shipping better packaging

Better how?

>> Likewise, it's likely cheaper for Amazon to pay people to return new boxes than it is for them to send new ones.

Plastic is heavier and less uniform than cardboard boxes that UPS/DHL expect, making their trucks less efficient, which increases the prices to Amazon.

It's definitely not cheaper to do what you are suggesting. They wouldn't have stopped doing it in the first place if it was. They asked for customers to return the bins and everything, just like you are laying out. It did not work.
My gut feeling is that geoengineering has to happen. It's like trying to get rich by saving pennies here and there (cutting emissions) vs investing in a successful business (geoengineering).

I mean, we can cut and cut emissions but doesn't that just delay the inevitable (assuming continued population growth)? Plus getting everyone to change their behaviour is a nice goal but at some point we'll need to admit it probably isn't possible to create the behaviour changes needed to stop a catastrophe (human nature and long-term thinking being what it is).
You aren't wrong but this is also you get users who think that Chrome uses all your RAM even if you have a huge amount...