skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The worst documentation -- typical of virtually all consumer devices and software -- simply runs through menus (or commands, funtions, features, etc.) and repeats to you, often in the same words, menu options, without telling how or why or when features apply. Very frequently units are omitted as well.

"The frobinator txl parameter sets the frobinator txl". What is the frobinator? What is the TXL? What are the units? Seconds, tenths, mills, nano, minutes, hours, days?

Good docs:

- Explain why and not just what or how.

- Give an overview of the tool or system. Technology is a means to an end. Describe the ends and the means.

- Describes the components. What are the parts of the system? How do they relate to one another, and the problem domains?

- For quantities, specify units. Integer, float, signed, degree, etc. Physical units if appropriate.

- Give a quick-start guide. If I just want to get up-and-running, what do I need?

- Give a detailed walkthrough of getting up and running. What parts and steps are needed? What prerequisites are required before starting?

- Intended audience.

- Operating parameters. Minimum requirements. Maximum capacity. SLAs if appropriate. Service tiers, if appropriate.

- Practical examples and recipes. Unix Power Tools by O'Reilly & Associates is nearly a quarter century old, but remains an excellent book for getting "over the hump" in understanding the 'Nix commandline environment. Interestingly, its GUI companion, X11 Power Tools was vastly less suited.

- Task-and-domain oriented, rather than component-and-function oriented. We have problems, and apply tools to them. Very few people pick up a tool and look for a problem that fits it (at least to a first order). Evi Nemeth's Unix Administration books are excellent in this regard.

- Examples. Useful recipies (as noted above).

- Danger zones. Places to watch out for.

- External references. No, you don't need to include Yet Another Bash Programming guide, or yet another <your language here> guide. Refer to a good third-party reference. Even if your company / publisher didn't produce it (O'Reilly used to be really good at this).

- Differentiate between basic, advanced, and debug modes. Most technologies have basic operators, advanced operators, maintenance, construction, and architect roles associated with them, in rough order. (Some might argue that mainenance is harder than construction and architecture.) Basic operators need the least information and access, architects and integrators need more.

- Distinguish internal and external interfaces. These generally fit different roles.

- Performance tuning, if appropriate.

Regards mgt. wanting stuff up-and-running and people being impatient: those are bad signs of high technical debt. That gets repaid one way or another, and it's usually not pretty.
It's certainly a complex and worthy philosophical question but what does it have to do with a child rapist contributing to MIT? My take is 'nothing'. Like, you shouldn't have child rapists contributing to your institution. It seems morally and philosophically trivial.
Important to you. Not me
She is still going to get ticketed for the illegally tinted lights though.
XWP vs. JAP
The absolute key to good technical documentation is to have a writer that understands the software.

Lacking that, good documentation is impossible.

With that, good documentation is possible, but still requires a lot of other things (like a well-designed doc framework, good writing style, etc.)
Group Seeks to Collapse Civilization
A Complete Guide to Hiring AngularJS Developers: Roles, Skills, and More
Spotify used to not handle this well, but now it works perfectly.

They also support special-case DJ playlists for EDM etc: you can listen to the full track if you play it individually, but cue points and fade duration are stored in the playlist metadata such that the cross fade happens at the right point in the song so everything blends seamlessly. As far as I can tell you can’t configure this in user-created playlists though.
Should've called it the Galactica Act
It would be interesting to consider word length, as well.

Longer words would seem to convey more information.
A while back I stared extracting all this cruft / boilerplate stuff into a parallel web application that complements your web app so we can avoid rewriting it and let it stably do the boring stuff while your application develops independently. I have a few details left to take care of in the coming weeks and then it will just be a rock-solid, well-tested, well-documented companion web app for everything from tiny web apps through to SaaS and Stripe Connect platforms which it supports through modules.

https://userdashboard.github.io/home
It’s up to each individual to make the most of an environment where the utterances of senior engineers are just advice. You don’t need their permission.
It works well enough for Netflix - https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/edda-learn-the-stories-o... - and Target ( https://tech.target.com/2017/04/07/how-and-why-we-moved-to-s... ) :). I've only ever used Edda as part of a Spinnaker setup, but there's no reason it couldn't be used with something else, or the same idea in general reused.

You don't have to cache it for very long, but you get two benefits here: Being able to query the data and search through it ways you simply can't do when making an API call to AWS, and having primarily only one system munching through your API throughput limits. If you've got a large account with a lot of resources and a lot of people or systems that are querying the API frequently, you'll probably have more consistently available data, rather than having systems sitting around doing retries and getting throttled there, on repeat.
Just make sure not to vandalize it as much as much as Linus Sebastian's car at LTX 2018.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCSyNKbapdE
Remember the posts from people who mocked Warren Buffett for warning people away from BitCoin?

I surely do. I'm a Boglehead, I like to read that stuff.

If you are unsure of what happened (and why you should have been on the sidelines), please visit Bogleheads.org. You will learn that anyone can become relatively wealthy given a little discipline and a lengthy working life. It really works.
Replaceable and obeisant? You've watched too many movies. Skills learned while under stress will be with you when you are under stress again later. A doctor is trained under stress so that in the future, when their patients are about to die in front of them, that they react as trained. A doctor will see more blood, more death, than most soldiers. The parallels in stressed training are not insignificant, and have nothing to do with obedience.
I just engaged a local class company who’s Yelp reviews were atrocious. The reason was, 3 of the 4 were reviews of the guy’s driving, not his skills at changing a windshield. I went to FB, and saw reviews with pics of work and overwhelmingly positive scores. Gave him my business. Though, I did think about it a bit before hand. Also thought about Yelp’s relevance and the value of the very recent reviews that were all not for his work, but his driving.
I’ve actually worked in astrobiology research :)

I would point you towards the research that went into ALH-84001. Even if you don’t buy that it was an example of fossilized Martian life, analysis of the thermal stresses it suffered from ejection from Mars, time in flight, to impact on Earth showed conclusively that it was survivable. Had it been the other way around (Earth to Mars) it would have seeded Mars with life.

We’ve shown that rock which could be carrying microbes can and has been exchanged between earth and Mars. Lots of such specimens land each and every year. You can quibble that we haven’t found actual life yet, but

(1) lots of people think that’s exactly what ALH-84001 was.

(2) we don’t have that many samples of Martian meteorites. We know lots of it falls every year, but most is either not found/collected/identified or contaminated on impact.

(3) Mars meteorites falling now, ejected from a dry and sterile surface, would not be representative of what was falling in the early earth that was thrown from a wet, habitable Mars.

To be clear, from an astrobiology perspective a negative result from the search for life on (or from) Mars is harder to explain than finding it. Both panspermia and second abiogenesis are simpler explanations.
the linked source document is a fun read: https://www.slideshare.net/sebrose/rekursiv
Are you sure? In The Netherlands you must notify the government if you change the color of the car so they can update the registry, if there's any doubt they'll help you pick.

The list of colors is finite and based on EU law[1][2], so it would be odd if Greece didn't share the same system. It would mean you couldn't import re-painted vehicles into Greece, maybe that's true, but that seems like it wouldn't fly with the single market.

The car in the article clearly has a base color of "yellow". On my street there's a car completely covered in stickers, to my eye it's mostly white, but looking it up I see it's registered as blue (barely any blue visible). So perhaps covering it in stickers is a way to get around this in some areas of the EU.

1. https://www.rdw.nl/particulier/voertuigen/auto/het-kentekenb...

2. It's: blue, brown, yellow, gray, green, orange, violet, red, white, black. Anything not listed must be whatever color is closest, e.g. pink is either "white" or "red" depending on if it's light pink or not.
> Actually it's not as much as enemies of India. I have seen fairly negative comments about India's accomplishments from neutral folks.

When Israel's lander crashed there were lots of negative comments as well.

I think some people are just ... I don't know, just not good people.
Just a consideration: Do these differences in salaries for professors of the different subjects also show up in tuition fees for students of the respective subject?
Do you really think that plot is complete bs though? Sure it cant be 100% accurate, but it seems to me if the "stamp collecting" effect were so strong you wouldn't see such clear trends. Also, wouldn't you think that such macroscopic analysis would account for the records incompleteness without necessarily destroying the truth of the trend? I tried to see how they derived that plot from the original article but I cant say for certain yet I know. Here's the link though https://muller.lbl.gov/papers/Rohde-Muller-Nature.pdf
Trees will plant themselves.

The idea that humans have to intervene in nature is part of the problem that brought us to this place!
Does Congress have the power to do this? Genuine question. What enumerated power would this fall under?
>How is only allowing "natural" pesticides not appealing to the naturalistic fallacy? If you really care about improving ecosystems, you should be using the best knowledge and techniques available.

Because “what is best” is not always obvious, especially when something is relatively new. Pesticides in general are prohibited, and if the conditions for an exception are met, then the criteria for selecting a pesticide are that it based on precaution. It’s not that “natural stuff is ok and synthetics are not” otherwise the organic program would permit natural substances such as rotenone that have been shown to be harmful. The perspective is that synthetic substances are also subject to the precautionary principle, and should be studied to determine the safety and efficacy before they are permitted. Much of what we call “organic” is just “the way things were routinely done before the invention of selective herbicides” and when credible concerns about those substances and practices were raised, the rules were changed to reflect that understanding.

>You'd be overgeneralising to say every modern pesticide had this problem though.

Agriculture is a broad field (!) and one can usually find exceptions somewhere to blanket statements.

Is there a reason why some selective herbicides wouldn’t create selective pressure and thereby select for weeds that are resistant to that substance? I think that’s how evolution works and that’s the basic mechanism here. You haven’t seen resistance for the newer substances simply because there hasn’t been enough time for resistance to develop.

Why is this not a problem for pesticides used in organic farming? Probably because pesticides used in organic farming are not selective which means they will damage/kill your crops as readily as they will competitor organisms. Modern herbicides are selective, which means they kill the weeds and leave your crops alone, because the crops have resistant traits. These resistant traits are the ones that evolve in the weeds.
It's the same story as with many other deep and important math problems: Practically, not much would change. Many papers already assume RH - we would just have confirmation that they are reality then. What would change is that we would likely have novel and powerful methods that were used in the proof. This is what most of the buzz is about. For example, the proof of Fermats Last Theorem introduced novel connections between sub fields of mathematics.
Many people swear their subjective experience of the music is better if not digitized. I'm not one of them, but I doubt digitizing vinyl is going to satisfy them. After all, why get the vinyl in the first place?
Speaking of strange life-forms, the first known fully anaerobic animal, discovered in 2014: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinoloricus_cinziae
> since a battery that lasts 5x as long costs 5x less.

This is only true if there is an inflation-adjusted discount rate of 0%, which is unrealistic even in this era of low interest rates. Adjusted for inflation, paying $10 now and again at years 10, 20, 30 and 40 is better than paying $50 up front would be. (By adjusted for inflation, I mean that the $10 you pay in 10 years might actually be $11, but still $10 in 2019 dollars)
Cook's Time Bounded Random Access Machines [pdf]
CDs are far from objectively superior, considering that there are many CDs which are completely sealed but suffering from disk rot due to poor quality control rendering them completely useless. A lot of older CD-based game systems are going through this problem where they're becoming unplayable despite no wear or tear.

The best of both worlds in my opinion is a vinyl + code for a digital copy, which seems to be the direction most have gone for.
there's also Android's troubling anticompetitive behavior against SkyHook location provider:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/09/skyhook-google-m...

and the restrictive conditions imposed on android OEMs:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/02/new-android-oem-lice...
> P=NP in that a solution can be used to attack RSA encryption.

Note that 1) P=NP does not necessarily give raise to any polynomial algorithm that solves a NP problem. The proof would prove the existence of one such algorithm, but it might well never be found (which is the current status quo) 2) even if it would be polynomial, it could still run longer than the heat of the universe. O(n) = n^10000000 would still be a polynomial runtime for example. The second reason is why Donald Knuth does think that P=NP might be possible.
For years I thought "I should learn to use expect...", and finally I used it for ~ integration tests for a project (http://onemodel.org - my AGPL, highly efficient desktop- and keyboard-oriented personal knowledge organizer that I use every day, slow progress lately but lots of plans...), and: expect is very useful, and has depth.
One of the prominent claims about the mission is its low cost, which makes that a reasonable hypothesis.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. The down side is that it's going to take forever to get everyone on board. Mathematicians are very hostile to outside influences.

Constructive mathematics should be more of a thing too.
I don't know. As a pilot of a small plane, I'd say you need to spend at least an hour to plan a flight, if not more. Familiarise yourself with departure and arrival airport and alternates, the route, weather and airspace along the route (you do not want to wander into Class B or or restricted airspace by accident), TFRs (temporary flight restrictions), NOTAMs (notices to airmen), and more. If you're very familiar with a route, it might be less, and if it's a totally new area/route for you, it might be more.

If you pilot a plane, and you make a mistake, your own life is on the line.

When you fly a drone, you still constitute a danger to other aircraft and the people in it, or people on the ground. Why should you be subject to fewer rules, just because you are not aboard the aircraft, and thus not at risk?

Imagine remote controlled cars on the road. Should we allow some drunk kids without license on their computer at home to control cars on the road (and endanger everyone else), just because they are not in danger? Of course not.

So, my sympathy for people clamouring for less restricted drone flights is limited. Having said that, there are tools that facilitate planning a flight (in a safe and lawful manner), and having something similar for drones would obviously be great.
The marketing point reminds me of my disdain for Rugged Radios, who flagrantly markets their radios without any hint that licensing is required. They won’t even indicate which bands are used by their radios, much less warn people that licenses are necessary.

Yes, people should be aware of their obligations, but the companies selling the products bear some of the responsibility for educating the customers, and absolutely should not be free to actively hide that information.
Pretty much all databases are like that? And a ton of other things. Pick a random example: cockroachdb. Has all these properties.

I guess I don't understand what the author's point is.
That's interesting, I always thought there was at least a database layer running separately.
cooperatives seem great.

relatedly:

not sure why we don't create 'partner firms' a-la attorneys -
the model seems a good fit.
I haven't used Beanstalk in forever, and don't think that it's particularly relevant compared to other alternatives available today, but last time I did, AWS support always abbreviated it to EB when I had to work with them on issues related to it.
Congress gets away with a lot in the name of interstate commerce and the general welfare, but I think the best they could do in this instance is threaten to withhold federal funds in the absence of such registration.
I hear you, but I firmly believe the search we did there works far better than Goodreads as outlined in the OP. And could be proven as such with the kind of formalized evaluation you suggest (I am no longer there though).

I agree that underfunded "DIY" enterprise software projects that are not properly/professionally managed/implemented with the proper expertise are a problem, in academic libraries and elsewhere, for search projects and other things.

I still don't see the problem of setting up solr indexed fields and boosts to ensure that "match as phrase" is boosted higher than non-adjacent matches (a feature built into Solr), and "match _complete_ title" is boosted highest of all. This is what the Goodreads examples failed on. It is pretty simple to set up, and I don't see much risk of this causing problems or being worse than not doing it, and would solve those horrible Goodreads results specifically.

I understand since it's what you specialize in, you see the risk of "look at what us non-specialists can set up" sending someone away from... actually I'm not sure what, hiring someone like you? (Which if I were in charge of an academic library budget, which I'm not, I'd be wiling to consider -- don't get me wrong it's not a terrible idea!). In reality, I think what it steers people away from is... a relevancy search like Goodreads has. (Goodreads is _not_ a "plucky little project", and apparently they think their horrible search is good enough! It is not! And I do think they could make it a LOT better pretty easily without having to spend millions on it).

You seem to suggest that products like Solr or ElasticSearch should not be used/configured except by people as speicalized as you backed by relatively expensive search evaluation programs. While I'm sure that would result in better searches everywhere (not being sarcastic, I fully accept that), I think it's unrealistic. If you convince people their only choices are Solr/ElasticSearch/postgres-full-text out of the box using only one indexed field with no configuration for relevance tuning; no search at all; or hiring you or an equivalently expensive search program internal or external -- you're not going to get the expensive search program you want, and you're definitely not going to get "okay, we just wont' have a search at all then", you're going to get people not touching the configuration at all, and ending up with Goodreads search.

Your search really doesn't have to be as bad as Goodreads is, without having to invest in the kind of program and expertise you are suggesting, I really believe that and stand by it. If you invest in what you are suggesting, certainly it will be even better.

(PS: If you have disciplined acceptance criteria combined with qualitative feedback from experts etc -- aren't you still gonna end up tuning your Solr configuration to achieve improvement on those evaluations? I'm confused by your suggestion that turning Solr configuration with boosts etc is not the right tool. Or are you suggesting Solr is the wrong tool for... search?)
The comment to which you replied says that thinking about multiplication as "just" repeated addition is problematic, so let's look at that.

Consider 3 x 2. If we take that approach, it seems ok - we understand it to mean "add together 3 2's" - 2 + 2 + 2, which gives the correct answer of 6.

What about -3 * -2? What does it mean to add a negative number of times?

What about pi * pi? What does it mean to add something pi times?

What about the matrix M * the matrix N?

etc. The parent's point is that this repeated addition thing is just an algorithm one can use to calculate a multiplication for some operands, specifically whole numbers, not a general definition of the operation of multiplication.
Old school mathematicians don't understand the value of theorem provers and aren't all that excited about learning it.
It's worse than that. The system is actively destructive of talent.

Someone with talent from an average background is going to be "out-merited" by someone with average talent from a privileged background - because the privileged person will have the resources to develop their skill, while the other person won't.

In fact not only will they not have the resources, they'll have extra costs - in the form of forced time spent working away from music to pay the bills, college debt, and so on. And of course limited access to physical and social benefits - good instruments, lessons, practice facilities, and ultimately choice of college and the resulting class network.

Apart from the obvious financial implications, those distractions will saddle the victim with a huge extra cognitive load.

A lot of people will be crushed by it, no matter how talented they are.
Todoist user here, personal use only at this stage.

Just as a counter to the comment you replied to, if an app has matured I personally prefer fewer updates as far as new features go and prefer updates only for bug fixes, especially in enterprise software.

For what it’s worth, we’re currently looking for task management software at work (steel fabrication industry) and I’m looking to potentially evangelise Todoist.