skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That's a ridiculously narrow view of what democratic representation means

I don't think the literal meaning of democracy is a "ridiculous narrow representation of democracy". We may agree that the right to vote does not, on its own, in all cases, entirely embody all aspects of the democratic ideal. But it is certainly not a "ridiculously narrow interpretation".

> Is it still democratic representation when some people are barred from voting for no good reason? Subjected to undue burdens or intimidation?

I'd say it is still democracy, but imperfectly implemented. The overwhelming majority of Americans are able to vote. Should it be better? Of course. But the idea that the poor in aggregate are unrepresented politically is ludicrous.

> How bad do these distortions have to get before we conclude that we're no more "democratic" than the old USSR? They had elections too, so it's all good, right?

We're a lot more democratic than the USSR. To suggest otherwise is the height of privileged conceit. Modern Russia is more democratic than the USSR, and if you think our democracy is equivalent to theirs, take a trip over there and try running against Putin in the next election. See how that works out for you.
Cars are pretty expensive and I think most people really only need them sometimes (if you're poor enough for this to be an issue you won't be driving all over for fun nights and weekends). If you could bus to work, taxi to a few stores and only pay $100 or so - that's just insurance. If youre paying a car off its easily $200-500 a month in top. Plus gas, plus maintenance, etc.

Cars have the same issue phones do - they aren't necessarily needing to get better, but manufacturers want money so they're expensive when they don't really have to be.
Is there a case for an Apple antitrust in the US due to this issue ?
How is it different than MS baking IE into their OS back in the days ?
The default search spot is a directed search with intent, so pretty valuable.

I think it will be a pragmatic business decision.
If you are using any language other than SQL, then you better have a way to convert SQL data to the appropriate data types of your language and vice versa. And it better be injection-proof and reusable. That's already at least half of an ORM right there.

I think I know SQL fairly well, but I don't see how I could implement things like django admin, form validation, template views etc as elegantly on top of plain SQL.

So I really don't agree with "ORMs are only useful for SQL-noobs".
Over the past few years I've built out this Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) Chrome/FF extension that shows an APOD as your new tab page. Just recently I've overhauled it with React to try and reign in the features I had built in Vanilla JS originally.

Anyway, with these updates I've added a service worker to make it load as fast as possible and in case there are others here that really love the APOD I wanted to share.

EDIT: Here's the Firefox link https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/apod-by-the-t...
Managing Yourself: A Smarter Way to Network
I must be the only person in the world who likes being tracked and getting tailored ads. I've found lots of things I've bought due to ads that were obviously targeted at me specifically.
I bet a lot of people will find this advice completely confusing. Emailing a patch?
> Soon we will reinvent the BBS, shareware, etc.

What I want back are the duck-strangling noises that the dial-up modem makes when connecting.
Let's dispense with the emotional imputation, then. The point is: this person is concerned about rich people being rich, not poor people being poor. Anyone actually concerned with helping the poor would look at the current system, and notice the tremendous job it's doing lifting the entire world out of poverty, and do everything they could to keep it going. So whatever the emotion, it's abundantly clear that the only thing this person actually cares about is tearing down wealthy people. To me, the emotion that best explains that fact is envy, but feel free to fill in the one that you prefer.
Teardown of a Failed Linux LTS Spectre Fix
> you will spend most of your time formatting strings if you do your file I/O asynchronously

Which is why good logging systems try to defer as much formatting logic as possible until the last possible moment (ideally render time).

I wish more logging frameworks would log in some efficient intermediary serialization format like Cap'nProto or Protobuf.
No idea why this is downvoted, I think its a daring thesis that China cares what the rest of the world thinks. On top of that there are only a few countries that can afford and are willing to actually act on something like this, there is just to much money to be made in the Chinese market.

That lethal force against protesters leads somehow automatically to breaking down of political support is wishful thinking. Do you really need a list of countries who regularly use lethal force against protesters and are good friends and partners of western governments? When it comes to a state killing protesters all that matters is who the state is.
A task manager was recently added to Firefox. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/task-manager-tabs-or-ex...
Ads are not of interest to users. I think their display is a waste of time and resources, as well as the risks associated. How blocking ads make a browser “misaligned” with users? It’s in fact the opposite. Brave is simply, like stated before, a Trojan Horse. Replacing google with another ad broker is not helping anyone.

>> Brave browser (Stage 1) is a Trojan Horse for their actual business which is a blockchain-based advertising platform (Stage 2). https://mobile.twitter.com/aral/status/1013047635253526530
They admitted it themselves, put out blog posts about it.

They've been putting out blog posts over the last 2 years specifically talking about the performance fixes they've put in.

Firefox themselves have admitted it's not FUD. They acknowledged it was a real problem.

It is pretty fast now, but a few years ago (at most 4), it was bloody awful.
One Tab is useful to collect all your tabs in a list instead of leaving them open.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/onetab/

Also, like someone else mentioned, you can visit this in the address bar:

about:performance
(2013; content from 2003)

Original submit, 100+ points:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5683611
Already lot of sites are not tested on Firefox and many explicitly so [1]. Now the web publishers that rely on ads will have less incentive to support Firefox. They might even actively promote other browsers. Similar to how IE was discouraged by websites explicitly.

"This site works best on Chrome" is only what is needed now to reduce the Firefox userbase further.

Note - This comment was typed on firefox.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17363721
Seems Part C would be beneficial to professional drivers and serve to lock non-pros out. Do I have the right interpretation?
:P Thanks!
Hi, our company (https://fanout.io) was the one that was interviewed here. The formatting of the article seems a little messed up. Hopefully they fix that.

For those curious about the technical specifics of our two offerings, we had (and still have) both a hybrid proxy/broker system and a basic JSON messaging system. The proxy system is the reason we started the company. However, we built the JSON system so we could compete directly with companies like Pusher and PubNub.

In old versions of our websites, we tended to highlight the JSON system over the other. For example, in 2014, the "Simple" category was promoted first:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140207193606/https://fanout.io...

In 2015, we changed it use a left/right flow. However, the proxy system was still branded as advanced:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150315032351/https://fanout.io...

Today, the proxy system is the only one we promote on the site. In order to reach that point, we had to figure out how to make the proxy system more usable. We've succeeded at this by creating very fancy integration libraries, such as our Django library: https://docs.fanout.io/docs/django-quickstart
A big reason why I stick with Chrome is because Firefox's menu pisses me off how it's this popup box with huge icon rather than Chrome's more traditional list of text. Sounds stupid, but that's a big enough reason for me.
Isn't that obvious? How else could it be?
Where I live you're automatically granted certain benefits and your company is required to provide you with health insurance, pension and unemployment insurance based upon factors like the number of hours you actually work a week and the like - regardless of what your contact says. Does America have things like that? Seems like it would include a lot of Uber drivers if they did.
As for CS gas, it attacks and inflames exposed mucous membranes.

The best homemade solution for protecting lungs is a wet but separated barrier, like being wrapped in wet towels. Oiled rags work decently too and do not need to be moistened repeatedly.

If inhaled, apply amyl acetate inhalant stick to help with breathing.

You will need tight glasses to protect eyes, eg. swimming goggles.
Temporarily you can cover them with said wet barrier but that loses you vision and is mostly useful for passing area of gas.

Immersing or tightly covering the source will prevent it from spreading the gas. Careful, it's hot, do not use anything flammable.

Of course a real gas mask with filters or P95 (or better) respirator plus goggles is better for protecting lungs. (N level respirators for dust won't work.)

Source: was in civil defense.
Moveworks | San Francisco or Mountain View | Full-time | Software Engineer, Staff Software Engineer | $150-$200k + equity (depends on location/experience/role)|www.moveworks.com/careers

Moveworks is a cloud-based AI platform, purpose-built for large enterprises, that solves one, big, frustrating problem: resolving employees' IT support issues. Instead of tracking issues, we use advanced AI to solve them, instantly and autonomously.

Investors: Bain Capital & Lightspeed Ventures.

Why us?: With 30 enterprise customers and millions in revenue after 3 years and one round of funding, we believe we're doing practical AI right. It is just the beginning, and we're uniquely positioned to soon be the problem solving engine for all enterprise companies.

What we're looking for: The best engineers in the world.

Open roles:
- Fullstack engineer + Conversational UI engineer
- Senior Machine Learning Modeler with a passion for NLP
- Senior Platform Engineer
- Data Infrastructure Engineer
- Another strong cohort of brilliant college grads for 2020

We are hiring on almost every team, so take a look on the link above for other roles as well.

Email me (Celeste) at creppond(@)moveworks(.)ai and mention Hacker News somewhere.

If you're ready to do the best work of your career, let's talk.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of gas cans hurtling down the highway?

I guess that's a valid point, but mailing DVDs still lost out to streaming, same as trucking and piping gas will lose to wiring.
In what way is manually tracking the needed DB changes per feature branch even possibly better? Even if you are not running your migrations automatically on deploy, I would still check those migrations into version control.

Having auto-runnable migrations checked in alongside the code that depends on them allows you to review and test those migrations as part of your normal code review and CI processes.

I think there must be some misunderstanding here because I don't understand why you say either of these things:

> This would mean constant churn of migration code for each branch of the repo.

> it would require you to write special migration code on a release branch

There should only a be at most a few migrations per feature branch and merging is only an issue when you have two feature branches with inconsistent schema definitions. You should only have to add custom migrations to a release branch to fix bugs and those should be merged back into your develop branch as soon as possible to minimize effort spend merging later.
This is How I Afford So Great Mac Mechanical Keyboard
Original source article:

https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/mbmgqp/this-is-worst-year...
He is selling his custom, secured Android phones by saying unupdated iOS devices are more vulnerable (yes, ofcourse) while tweeting it all from an iPhone.
> Could you expand on what you think is hard about the concurrency in Go?

Go's concurrency is cheap[0] multithreading (shared-memory concurrency). It has a tagline that you should not share memory ("Do not communicate by sharing memory; instead, share memory by communicating"), however nothing prevents sharing memory (so it will eventually leak in) and channels are pretty slow[1] so it's not uncommon to go back to regular shared-memory primitives (with no safety net).

You've got no idea what your application state really is (even less so once things start falling over), and there are no built-in tools for reliability e.g. you can't get notified that a goroutine has keeled over or anything unless you implement that yourself.

> And perhaps give an example of a language that makes it easy/easier?

Erlang / elixir was built specifically with that in mind. It uses lightweight shared-nothing concurrency (non-OS processes) and the system builds-in ways for processes to have oversight over others (e.g. monitors & supervisors) or get killed alongside them (links) and provides behaviours which bundle known patterns, etc…

[0] as in "not expensive", as in uses quite a bit less memory & especially kernel resources than OS threads or processes[1]

[1] though this point should not be too overstated, people commonly misuse "the C stack is XMB" with "creating a thread consumes XMB of physical memory", a C stack is mostly a regular allocation and thus usually just VSS until actually exercised

[2] and not necessarily a huge gain in bug-freedom: https://songlh.github.io/paper/go-study.pdf
All You Need to Know About Giving Feedback
This update just bricked my Pixel - are Google even testing these things?
And since chemical weapons are banned for military, I rrad the morbid explanation for research in the area is "no worries, it will not be used in combat, just for crowd control".
I like design and I like thinking, so I can understand the appeal, but I’m tired of IDEO’s one weird trick.
What other job can you think of where you can work as much as you want, anytime you want? Need a break? Click a button anytime you feel like it. Take as long or as little time as you wish. Want more work? Click a button anytime you feel like it. No timecards to punch. No boss breathing down your ass for being late. Its freedom on a level beyond practically any other major job category you can think of. What more could you ask for?

Sure you're probably not going to be raising a whole family with a white picket fence on Uber alone. They NEVER claimed you could AFAIK. Its never been portrayed as anything more than supplemental income. PROTIP: Uber is a job for the bored college student looking for a little extra spending money not the main means of survival for a struggling single mother of 10 kids. If you're at the point where you're relying on CA to force Uber to pay you more so you can put food on the table or get kidney surgery you're doing it wrong and you have far bigger problems than a company that has done you no wrong other than existing and not paying very much.

Now we're going to destroy this unique business model forever because of the greed of the taxis and people who can't understand that not every single job on earth is meant to earn you a solid middle class income.
2015 – 2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans [pdf]
Entity Framework, even with its quirks, has been the best developer experience with an ORM for me no contest. A lot of that is probably tooling; like the standard C# tooling and also Linq Pad.

SQLAlchemy is probably close to the worst experience and that's likely largely due to python and pythons tooling state.. And the docs. Just something about the docs. Still, other than bulk insert performance I got it to do just about everything I needed and came to the conclusion it was the best python ORM for my needs.
The Gmail Android app has had "Report spam" in the 3-dot menu for a long time.
Ask HN: What mouse do you use?
I bought a vertical ergonomic mouse a year ago and since I don't have so much pain like I used to after working long hours.

Does any of you still own the mouse where your palm is horizontal? Why?
Zachtronics: Ten Years of Terrible Games (2017) [video]
That's a great point - that there are of course those who ride the cloud wave to milk their customers.

To get a sense of how much we're putting the cart before the horse, I recommend taking an occasional look at a subreddit frequented by webdev bootcampers (eg. [1] where they're hellbent to justify using React for static sites, because that's all they really know, and even accuse dissenters of being hiveminded).

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/cxfvcw/is_react_sti...
Given Google Chrome's opposition to adblocking, combined with a ~33% of users using an adblocker, it suggests this trend is going to make Mozilla Firefox more popular; not less. Either way, I regard it as playing hardball.
Rust is challenging C++ fairly head-on.

Golang is challenging Java, C#, Python, nodejs etc. It was also supposed to challenge C++ but based on how the language turned out, if that is ever true then C++ probably wasn't the right language for that project in the first place...
While I may not have intended my reply as being as insulting as it came across, I don't think I'm very wrong on that count.

I just get the feeling that you believe homosexuality to be something that can be consciously influenced by the individual himself or his social circle. And that can be a harmful attitude.

And the suggestion that "homosexuals would behave equally badly in a heterophobic society" is at best unhelpful.
To be fair, German sleds usually look like this [0], so you are not lying down on the snow (unless you fall off), but sitting upright and quite far off the ground.

[0] https://www.pinolino.de/produkte/spielwaren/outdoor/schlitte...
This isn’t as true these days as it used to be. Many stores use WiFi hotspots and Bluetooth beacons (and computer vision on security cameras) to track customers in their stores to build advertising and placement strategies. Target’s particularly fond of this approach.
Well, if you own a car just for commute, it's sitting idle for 23 hours out of 24. Whereas the Uber/Lyft driver is using it for 8-12 hours a day, and the overall ownership/maintenance cost is not linear with usage. On top of that, add UberPool, and the cost for ride hailing goes even lower. So essentially, ride hailing can be thought of as a form of public transport.
(and Why) to Build a Data Strategy for Your Business or Startup
Booking.com | Android Developer, Sr. Android Developer | Shanghai, China | Full-time | Onsite | VISA

Booking.com Shanghai office is looking for talented Android developers. We're focusing on enabling Chinese people to experience the world in a startup-like environment. We compete with Airbnb, Ctrip, Fliggy, and a bunch of other online travel agencies in a unique market where Google and Facebook are blocked and people use their phones to pay nearly everything. Relocation and VISA are supported.

Ability to speak Chinese is a plus.

https://careers.booking.com/job/BOOKUS2150/Android-Developer

https://careers.booking.com/job/BOOKUS1828/Sr-Android-Develo...

Please email ken.chou+hn@booking.com if interested.
The ads that I find most useful are the ones which mimic olde newspaper/magazine ads by simply showing things relevant to their general readership.

The advertisers don't need to know a thing about me, they just need to know the general demographics and interests of the publication.

For example, the ads on this blog[1] are far more relevant and less invasive/annoying than anything that Google ever showed me before I started aggressively blocking ad networks. I assume that it is because the blog knows what I am interested in better than Google does, simply because I voluntarily go to their website and read their content.

[1]: https://hackaday.com/
Assurance | Seattle | Toronto | Remote | Full-time | Senior and Principal Software Engineers, Data Scientists, Product Managers, Data Engineers, ML Engineers | Very competitive pay

https://jobs.lever.co/assurance

We’re an insurtech/fintech startup growing fast and we need more brilliant people to join our team. Our culture is all about hiring the best people for the job and giving them total freedom to solve difficult problems how they know best.

We are disrupting the antiquated and inefficient world of insurance and financial services. Our team of world class software engineers, data scientists, and business professionals are modernizing how people obtain and manage their financial life all through our powerful platform ecosystem. We are rapidly growing as we expand our product offerings and global footprint, and this growth continues to present new and exciting challenges as we push our industry into its future. We eliminate waste throughout the industry and calculate the complex into simple, valuable solutions to improve people's lives. We are humble, driven, and committed to improving the lives of millions.
It does not block Google Analytics per se. It only blocks the cookie being attached to the used tracking pixel.

Source: verified on own site in v69. Page views show up fine in GA but the browser displays the new warning shield.
Yes, it is common practice just about in every organically grown system, ever. Also anything corporate.
There's been a lot of discussion about food and healthy eating around here... often discussing startups such as Impossible Burger, or dietary meal supplements (or meal-replacements) such as Soylent Green.

Ultimately, I usually defer to the advice from the USDA. While the advice changes somewhat over time, the general discussion points remained the same. The Food Pyramid may have gone obsolete, but the idea of eating a variety of vegetables, fruits, grain, protein... while restricting fats, sugars, and salts... has remained constant throughout the years.
Whisper.ai is Hiring – SF based start up
Whisper.ai is building the first deep learning hearing aid. If you want to join a fast-growing startup with an awesome team and meaningful mission, check us out!

Whisper.ai is building the world’s first noise-canceling hearing aid system: it analyzes your audio in real-time, automatically filtering out noise and amplifying the sounds you want to hear. Unlike traditional hearing aids, which simply amplify everything in the room, Whisper amplifies the person you’re listening to based on millions of audio prints it learns over time so it’s able to pick out who you’re listening to, even in the noisiest restaurant.

Based in San Francisco, Whisper is lucky to have the support of great investors including Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, LUX Ventures, and more.
I used the trackpoint and touchpad a lot on my ThinkPads. And any noname office mouses. Because changing workplaces frequently.
I tried 5 different mouse options. Finally settled on 3M joystick type mouse. I have no pain in my hands anymore.
I know that the propaganda department requires it's employees to register accounts on Chinese social apps and actively ask them to post messages to flood the different opinions on hot issues.

It's not news to Chinese as we call them 5毛 (50 cents)
Or ordinary shared hosting on an Apache cluster (that isn't overcommitted)