skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd say all of the above objections don't fix any of the actual issues (which revolve stem from there being multiple, similar, metrics one wants regarding the size in bytes, characters, normalized characters, etc of a unicode string), while introducing extra semantic bike-shedding!

Whether the metric is called "length", or "size", or whatever, is irrelevant, and length for strings and arrays and lists is so well entrenched and understood that the objections don't make sense.

What's actually the problem is not that "string length" is not "really" a length in the way that a leg or a wall has length, but that for unicode strings it's difficult to calculate, and confusing, unless one understands several unicode implementation mechanics...

The name length itself, for example, or the measuring of said length, was never an issue with ASCII strings (the issue there was to remember to add/subtract the NUL at the end).
Calling it a cult after growing up in one is a bit insulting. But, yes, I don't run much on my personal K8s clusters. But, I've lost count of how many problems Kubernetes has solved for folks I've worked with. It might not solve the simplicity use cases but, that's not the intended design of the tool to begin with.
Can Messi Ever Leave Barcelona?
My local news ran a segment about THC vapes. Some local doctors were talking about an increase in vape related hospital visits.

They interviewed the guy and he basically said he bought a random THC vial from some guy who walked up to him on the street. He said it didn’t feel right and was probably spice or something synthetic.

Be careful, YMMV.
Some links from Project Gutenberg:

Essays, by Michel de Montaigne

In English (Vol. 1), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3581

In French (Vol. 1), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/48529

Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius

English translation by George W. Chrystal, 1902 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55317

English translation by George Long, 1957 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15877

Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo

In English (Full), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/135

In French (Vol. 1), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17489

20000 leagues under the sea, by Jules Vernes

In English (slightly abridged), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/164

In French (with illustration), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/54873
A little off-topic:

I'm currently trying to find a way to write (type safe) business logic once, then reuse it pretty much everywhere (mobile / web / desktop),and it seems to me that typescript has become the only option. Javascript runtime is present everywhere, and can interface with anything.

Does someone knows of another alternative (viable right now, or in the coming months) ? I know llvm can theoretically target any platform, including wasm, but how painfull is it in practice ? Can you write a line of code that does a network request then expect it to run as it is on the browser and on mobile platforms ?
I wrote it as a praise. :) I agree with it 100%.
Not an expert, but I would imagine the speed at which these carbohydrates get metabolized is a factor in whether or not it messes them up? Carbs from bread take a much longer time to raise blood glucose levels and do so for longer than a spike induced by drinking what is essentially liquid sugar.
> I can't imagine they made this decision without at least some data backing it up.

Mind that there is a feedback loop between data of current usage and an eol announcement.

If they announce an EOL close by this creates pressure to migrate.
>The problems only arise when taking about "a string of length 20" which indeed has a strong smell

It has no smell at all. We interface with all kinds of systems with limited display space, external forms, POS displays, databases with varchar columns, and so on all the time.

Whether certain strings should have a specific length is a business decision, not a code smell...
After years of ignoring it, I'm no longer able to fight the cloud urge. What's the best way to learn k8s in 2019?
Ecosystems can adapt very quickly with a little help.

We often see just a few members of an invasive species transplanted into a favorable environment multiply and spread and end up dominating the local ecosystem in far, far less than a hundred years. Let's use that to help ecosystems adapt to climate change.
No need for cameras. Use existing vehicle tracking, via driver app GPS. Some phones have poor GPS, so wait until at least 2 vehicles pass the same route.

The issue isn't about missing roads. Most problematic are missing places when searching by business name or wrong/missing address numbers. (I work in the industry)
Pelias project helps a lot, but there's still more data + software work to be done.
> The cycle of picking a tech, jumping ship to it, religiously evangelising it, riding the wave and then jumping ship to the next related tech is typical in my opinion.

To balance this with a counter example from the quieter group of people not "hot for the latest tech":

I'm a "dev" and i've never had this problem, however I work for a small company, where everything I make and deploy I also have to maintain in some form or other. This gives me a strong bias towards operational simplicity and trying to essentially eliminate dev ops... New tech which is both complex and opaque in solution without clear cut advantages is basically repulsive to me, because trust and reliability without constant attention and tweaking is important.
I like to think that I'm good at these combinatorics-kind of questions, but I can't wrap my head around this one. I can follow the construction of the matrix, but I don't understand how you came up with the formula.
>> just constructing classes

I usually do not want to construct classes, it does not help me achieving what I want in my day to day duties.

>> using a bunch of stringy typed arguments?

I usually have all sorts of typed arguments.
I've just followed @_syntheticminds on twitter. Looking forward to reading what you've been up to.
AI Is Coming for Your Favorite Menial Tasks
>You just make sure all translated text is in UTF-8, and use Google Noto fonts for those languages. All game engines I know render UTF-8 text without problems if you supply a font that has the needed glyphs.

The game could have used a custom engine (like tons of games do), or the requirement could include e.g. Arabic or some such RTL text, further messing up the display...
Some of them had to be dragged kicking and screaming to do the right thing. Facebook initally dumped a pile of computer vision generated data into OSM, breaking everyone, and didn't tell anyone. It was entirely reverted ( more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17856687 ). It took a lot of effort before they'd listen.
True! I was enlightened in class when we defined addition and multiplication on three random characters then checked if the commutative property holds.

Turned out you can do whatever you want... It just that usually you want addition to be commutative and usually want to use an infinite set of symbols called numbers.
If you can, find the documentary BBC Horizon, Inside Chernobyl's Sarcophagus. I first saw this in the 90s as a kid and I was blown away. Absolutely crazy situation at the time. Hats off to the Liquidators and the scientists who tried to mitigate this mess. Many died and have been forgotten since.
> This will be pretty enormous for grid storage

It's unfortunate they call it grid storage. Apparently you can make money by connecting a battery to the grid as the one in South Australia does make money, but I have no idea how it does it. Perhaps the price goes through the roof when a coal generator trips out and a battery can react so fast it gets first dibs on the money. The one in South Australia has certainly done that. It must be something like that as the storage is so small and the batteries so expensive they would have to get an astronomical price on what they do sell.

A house battery on the other hand - that's a different matter. The price of retail electricity at is 3 times the wholesale price, and unlike the grid battery the house usually pays nothing to charge it - it comes from the root top solar. Even so batteries aren't competitive yet, as in the return you get on installing one in a house in Australia is currently negative. But if the price drops by 1/2 it will save money by adding a battery.

I struggle to see how grid batteries fit in, but house batteries (which are really a grid battery installed at the other end of the wire) seem like they are just around the corner.
The Art of Project Management
> manipulation for personal gains at the cost of a larger good is what is my definition of "politics".

I think that's an unhelpful definition; one should avoid conflating the activity with a particular goal. Politics is governance and decision-making, and how to convince people to support your position; whether that's performed for personal gain, or for the good of the company, or for the good of society (and the three are not mutually exclusive), is another thing.
You're attributing a singular desire to everyone to justify a crime. Given 10 people, if 9 want to work overtime that doesn't make it ok to force the 10th person to work overtime.
I buy second hand cars with some visible damage for a similar reason. They tend to be cheaper and we're not that bothered about any scrape & dents our family adds.

Obviously you've got to check that the minor damage doesn't reflect more severe damage you can't see, but that's the same for any second hand car and a good inspection should reveal that.
> Because you can’t bear the use of parentheses for print, really?

While I generally share your POV, it doesn’t do justice to the situation to trivialize the upgrade like that. Anyone with C based dependencies will have a rougher time (but not that “rough”) due to ABI changes. The harder userland change is string handling anyway (which isn’t that hard either), not parens on print.
It was also obvious from the essay that his Mathematical nihilism didn't extend to computation.

So it kind of begs the question: What does Mathematics mean to a Computer Scientist?

Least we forget that Ed Nelson was a strong proponent of Ultrafinitism ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrafinitism )
That's probably good advice for anyone: don't stretch yourself financially, especially on depreciating assets.
Yes but I don't think most people care about being advertised to like that. That is why they keep using Facebook.

You don't have to convince me, I deleted my account years ago.
Python 2 was nowhere near ready for EOL in 2008; making it not very credible.
> they lie to you because they _want_ to work?

They lie to you because they _want to exploit their workers_, which is exactly why the audits were in place.
Understanding Sentiment Analysis API
Why do people think any kind of “x for people with no knowledge of x” tool is a worthwhile idea? It reminds me of various cloud vendor ML offerings too. With ML, you _always_ need ML domain knowledge to (at minimum) understand the performance characteristics of the black box you’re using, and (more often) also how to re-train/fine-tune/incrementally update as your use case’s data distribution changes over time or your required performance characteristics change over time.

Like with AWS Rekognition where you’re billed on raw usage, which makes no sense when what matters is going to be the precision & recall & false detection rate on your data distribution (not whatever Amazon’s team trains it on). How many true positives / false positives / etc. will you get on your data?

ML is uniquely poorly suited to be treated as just some API or just some black box library. I really wish people would stop popularizing footgun approaches to this!
You're not eliminating "dev ops", you're doing it right.
once companies are larger and have separate teams

The real problem always starts when they become separate cost centers with separate budgets and have to independently show a 'profit'.
Great read! I especially like how a lot of his speculation turned out close to what we know today. Choice quote: "I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale."
Thank you for pointing this out.

Many outside of Hong Kong are unaware of the outrageous level of income and wealth inequality and poverty. While the extradition bill was certainly the proximate cause of the protest movement, the underlying dissatisfaction with declining quality of life and lack of opportunity for the majority of the population amplified the reaction dramatically and helps keep them going.

To better understand the socio-economic situation in Hong Kong, I highly recommend reading the summary of the Oxfam Hong Kong Inequality Report:

https://www.oxfam.org.hk/en/f/news_and_publication/16372/Oxf...

A few stats:

- One-fifth (20.1%) of the population is destitute and living below the poverty line (defined as ~USD 500/month). Post recurrent government intervention, that number comes down to 14.7%.

- Median wage is ~USD 2k / month, minimum wage is USD4.80/hr

- The average cost of renting a 400 square foot flat is ~USD 2k / month.

- An estimated 209,000 people (3% of the population) live in what are colloquially referred to as cage and coffin homes. These are individual rooms illegally subdivided by vertical wiremesh fences (cage home) and sometimes further subdivided verticaly (coffin home).

- 57% of 18-30 year old residents indicated they would like to emigrate if given the opportunity.

https://www.censtatd.gov.hk/hkstat/sub/so461.jsp

https://www.hongkongfp.com/2018/01/19/209700-people-live-sub...

https://www.hongkongfp.com/2018/10/06/hong-kongs-wealth-gap-...
> Your language's length function is probably just returning the number of unicode codepoints in the string.

The article didn't say that!

"Number of Unicode code points" in a string is ambiguous, because surrogates and astral characters both are code points, so it's ambiguous if a surrogate pair counts as two code points or one. (It unambiguously counts as two UTF-16 code units and as one Unicode scalar value.)

The article presented four kinds of programming language-reported string lengths:

1. Length is number of UTF-8 code units.
2. Length is number of UTF-16 code units.
3. Length is number of UTF-32 code units, which is the same as the number of Unicode scalar values.
4. Length is number of extended grapheme clusters.
Seems like most of his work on fingerprinting is centered around bot and headless browser detection.
By financial standards :-)
"<doing the thing> is easy, you just need to know how to <do the thing>" isn't very helpful.
Show HN: Vcenter-Connector (0.4) Extend VMware VCenter with OpenFaaS Functions
I think you confusing Range with the loudness here - a good sound card like my Foucsrite Clarett has a range of up to 119 db.

And 96 to 119 is huge improvement.
Technical Writing Memes
That is a good context to have. When I saw the title, I thought they discovered signs of Japanese settlement, similar to the Vikings settlements on the opposite side of the continent.
A bit off topic, but why hasn't the tech advanced too much in the RTA/RDTA area? I tried juul, but pods are just not for me, they produce too little vapour and feel awkward to use.

I've been using Creed and Zeus atomizers since I started and they are really low tech with lots of issues, they leak juice, the airflow is not ideal, sometimes they burn the coils too quickly, no one knows what the ideal wick size or thickness is and so on. I sometimes wonder, if the potential market for vaping is so huge, why are there no better products with better designs? I feel like there's a lot of simple/easy fixed to improve them.
FWIW I heard that Apple FTEs are also expected to be reachable all kinds of hours. Those who try to have some sense of life outside work get dinged in ratings. If this is how Apple treats its employees why would they care about some overtime at Foxconn?
Tiny human efforts against the climate crisis have never seemed so meagre
For the first 8-10 Years, migration was not possible for most people for several reasons, shrinking the timescale to 2-3 years for the majority.
But it's not commercial, and you had four years of guidance.

I feel like this the python community has been the epitome of class regarding communication during a transition.
It is obvious that we do not live in an actual democracy.

Consider this:

Do you actually get to vote on anything?

Do you get to vote on major national issues? Did you get a referendum on any issue, e.g. Gay marriage? Iraq?

Do you get to vote on local issues that affect you? Did you ever get a choice on where the new community center would be built?

Do you get to vote at work? Did you ever get to vote on an acquisition, a new corporate direction, a new office layout, or anything important?

We cast only a handful of ballots throughout our entire lives, and we rarely get a direct choice on any issue - we only vote for a candidate that has already been selected by the élite.

We can have direct democracy now thanks to technology. Citizens and workers should be empowered by technology to vote daily on issues that affect them at work, locally, and federally.

Yes, the system is broken. I, myself, have cast four ballots in my life. I've had nearly no say in anything that has happened in my adult life, and ergo I'm certain that our collective voting history is not the root cause of our problems. Nor are the élite themselves the cause - the fault in our system is of course systemic and material.

We are living in late capitalism, and the contradictions within western liberal countries are beginning to tear them apart. The dialectical materialist (Marxist) analysis of our system is becoming more correct as we move forward in the 21st century.
While I generally agree with the thrust of your argument. Farmers maximize profit not yields, as those are rarely the same thing.
I'd suggest to read "Kubernetes: Up and Running" book, it's short enough and cover basics of k8s. Also it's important to have hands-on k8s cluster, so Google Kubernetes Engine would help a lot about spinning up a cluster.
For my beloved carbon steel pan, I just wipe it out with some paper[1]. If there are burnt-on bits, I use a bit of salt and oil, and a sponge, half a potato or a wooden spatula to scrape it off.

Then a quick wash it with hot water, no soap is needed. I've never had to reseason my pan once the initial seasoning (using the oil+salt+potato peel method) was done properly.

[1] And put the paper+grease in a empty milk carton or something, and then in the trash when it has cooled. Never dump grease down the drain!
I feel the same way, I've been meaning to do a similar project for France for a long time, a sort of accessibility index for sidewalks that would be added to a weighted sum to give cities an accessibility score.
I feel that's where projects like wheelmap fail since they only map buildings.

I don't know how it is in the UK but I'm not convinced by crowdsourcing in this case, there are so few of us and out of the few how many can be reached and convinced to participate. In most places I've worked or been to I've always been the only handicapped person there and most places I wanted to go to that I checked on wheelmap were not mapped. I feel a solution could be the automatic treatment of aerial photography like you get on google maps' highest zoom settings. It'd be somewhat easy to detect poles in the middle of sidewalks, broken sidewalks, tree roots, etc... and I feel it might be possible to estimate curb height and sidewalk steepness doing some clever processing. So far I'm stuck gathering data, I've found a government website with UK aerial data but was unable to download it and it seemed the coverage was very sparse. Either way I'd be interested in hearing more about your ideas and potentially collaborating even though I'm not in the U.K.

On a related note, I talked briefly with someone who worked in public infrastructure, particularly on "walkability" and he told me to look into Microscale Audit of Pedestrian Streetscapes (MAPS), that might be of interest to you.
I know the author has other goals (a desire to learn/practice kubernetes, and keep host their blog the same way as the other services they manage), but I'd like to point out here that if your end goal is a blog which auto-deploys on each push to master, Netlify has a fantastic free tier. I use Gatsby/Netlify, and operations/deployment is a 100% non-issue, and the site is very fast.
Hi,
I just hope you read this (as I'm posting after 12 days). But since this is not apparent from the Blog, what kind of license is applicable on this new 'Turbo' colormap? Can we use it in a professional application? Thanks!
QI predicts you’ll still be alive in 1M years with 100% probability. Not-QI puts that probability lower.

So if you are still alive in 1M years that’s evidence of QI. Basic Bayesian reasoning.
How Startups Create Investor Relationships
Totally. It's like getting a job in dated Java code bases. Tons of cruft to support.

Boring work though
Basic training is literally about making them think and act certain way. It is literally about them all teaching exactly same set of super basic skills so that the soldiers are replaceable by the end by each other. There is reason why soldiers personality changes after basic training (that is what their families and partners say).

More complex skills are not taught in basic training, but later in specializations.

Under stress and duress and lack of sleep, people learn less. Moreover, while soldiers do in fact have to work in difficult physical conditions in action, doctors don't.

And I am not even sure what death on itself has to do with it. Conditions of encountering it are incredibly different in both professions.
My wife's parents met while working on system software for Stretch. From the stories they've told it sounds like it was quite a beast even by the standards of its day. IIRC, the I/O processor was incapable of running independently, so programmers had to add special instructions in the middle of their own code to give it cycles. Ick.
I think maybe it's easier to blame an external framework in hindsight, than to take the blame for some smaller solution that you personally created in-house.
Being a prerequisite is not the same as being the only thing that matters. Also, the company making money does not mean the employees will get paid.
For a very hands-on, getting-started tutorial, Katacoda is pretty awesome:

https://katacoda.com/courses/kubernetes
Bitcoin's Fatal Link to Fiat: The Number of Bitcoin ATMs Has Now Exceeded 5,500
It's easy to say but hard to do. Every smoker and ex-smoker I know has tried to quit multiple times, so there's a bunch of experience there. Their consensus (I don't smoke, so no firs-thand experience) seems to be that going from 2 packs a day to 0 (or a "party mode" where it's 0 most days but a pack during a festival or something) is actually easier than going from 2 packs to 1.

Habits and addiction work in ways that aren't entirely intuitive.
The proposed scheme trashes the performance while providing a primitive protection that is statically observable (e.g. distinguishable) and thus easily reversible.

Looks insane, in a bad way.
I remember myself and every other senior engineer on a team once rejecting a candidate and being overruled by management. The guy was hired and... turned out to be as useless as we thought he'd be.