skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, I feel exactly the same. Except that I have been a software engineer for 20 years. I lasted so long changing jobs every 4-5 years. Usually, every time I started feeling exhausted at a job, I started looking and changing before it was too late.

In my current job, we have a globally distributed application that can handle 1000 times more load than expected. We have a sufficiently complex CI / CD process that took almost as long to develop as the application. We have a developer whose job is to fill out TPS reports. The application could have been much simpler, but we had to use certain technologies. Then we have so many ceremonies around it, such as daily surveys, meaningless waterfall style planning and then the use of tools for agile practices for waterfall style releases. It takes at least one hour to create tickets for the approval of the commercial process before each production boost. All the time, they told us that we needed CI / CD so that we can release code more frequently and easily.

Now in my forties, I have a hard time changing and I have probably stayed too long in my current job. It's not that I'm not receiving offers, but I feel that all jobs are the same, at least, for web developers. Basically, create things that help with sales and marketing, either directly or indirectly.

Sometimes I think that my feelings are what some people call midlife crisis and that I should do something typical of people in their 40s, like buying a sports car.

Not sure what the answer is. I felt that I should also share my frustration.
As someone who’s interested in living in Amsterdam, I wonder what are options to commute other than by walking, cycling or taking a public transport? As far as I know, electric scooters are illegal in the Netherlands. I fancy motorcycles but I’m not sure if they’ll be banned right after cars (at least those that use ICE).
how are these 'libre' alternatives?

(libre being typically used to disambiguate free-as-in-beer vs free-as-in-freedom in the english speaking OSS world)
That's close to one approach (generate a float in [1, 2) by setting the mantissa with a constant explonent of 1, and subtract 1), another is to generate a 32 or 64 bit integer and multiply by 2^-32 or 2^-64. I think both of these can generate all floats close to 1, it is the floats close to 0 that they're less good with.

There is some concern with the bias due to missing small values (and missing low bits, even for moderate values), but this is often ignored, and is usually good-enough.
I was referring to expanding out into space.
I've wondered about this. For the past 10 years, I've worked for various companies that have purchased licenses for me. I was certain there were still torrents out there, even though the actual programs are "rentables". But that whole scene is just a crypto-mining nightmare, I've heard.
This is an extremely quality response. Thank you for the info.
Understanding the Other Through Religious Imaginations
Via and the city of Cupertino are launching an on-demand public transit network
It's a very benign/harmless post, but kind of weird that is posted on an official Microsoft blog (even though it is a personal blog, it's also an official blog from Microsoft by a Microsoft Employee).

Big companies are so paranoid about everything that I guarantee someone in their legal team is frowning upon this.
I'm not parent but I'm still looking for a vector graphics replacement for Illustrator.

Sketch, Designer, etc, are all pretty crippled when it comes to working with groups instead of layers. Many people have asked for group isolation mode in Designer for years, but it's not really a priority for Serif.

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/1640-ad-is...

I tried developing a script for Sketch but the SDK doesn't provide the needed API to implement it properly and quite frankly Sketch is super slow once you work on complex projects.

The only software I've found that does groups well is a little software called Amadine, but it's still not very mature.

The team that develops PixelMator promised a vectors graphics software but are too busy with PixelMator Pro.

I haven't used Corel Draw in almost 20 years but now that they have a mac verson I will give it a try.

Affinity Photo is a great replacement for Photoshop though.
Yep, it's the flip side of the cloud coin: you're no longer in control [of the thing you just bought]. Average users don't fully appreciate the distinction, until events like this underscore it.
I'm not sure that you as a homeowner should have the right to dictate what type of housing nearby property owners are allowed to construct solely based upon your proximity.

> do we want to be knocking down turn-of-the-century craftsman and tudor homes

Yes

> They can bring a ton of character to a neighborhood.

Who gets to decide what constitutes "character"? Who gets to decide that "character" trumps affordability? Who gets to decide when "character" supersedes property rights?

Moreover a lot of these craftsman homes were pretty "cookie cutter" when they were built, and a lot of them were ordered from catalogues. These things change with age as facades are updated, repaired, and replaced. Our cities have been so slavishly devoted to fictionalized imaginings of their own pasts that we are impoverishing real people today.
Of course. I immediately thought the same. Doesn't change what he explicitly and unapologetically said.
Here in San Francisco, CLT won't be legal for buildings over six floors until about 2023 because of dumb policies. California uses the International Building Code as its base building code and then modifies it based on particular laws we have here. This modification & ratification process takes about two years. Then San Francisco does the same thing, adding another two to three years (because surely _our_ engineers are better than a consortium of the world's best structural engineers...)

The 2018 International Building Code provides codes for tall CLT structures, which won't get adopted in the CA code until late 2020, which won't get adopted in the SF code until late 2022 or 2023. At that point, developers can start applying for permits for CLT buildings, which takes about four to five years. Then add two years of construction.

So SF won't see CLT structures over six floors until about 2030. Makes you realize how unseriously we're taking climate change when the only carbon-negative structural building material in existence won't exist here for another decade.
What part of it you dont like? I use Python for data manipulation on a daily basis and I find it very useful.
Not sure if I get what you're saying. How can the consumer have that?
NDC Will Advance Academic Opportunities in the Universities – Mahama
> Is the use case here being able to use it for testing or something similar?

Yes, from the material you quoted: “...to run serverless testing for example.”
That's why you don't work for apple. You would fail the will you inject your own political opinions part.
Justin Kan on Why Success Alone Won’t Truly Make You Happy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
It maps to the same spots, otherwise it would be pointless.

You can use the live demo (using the JS library) at https://whatfreewords.org/demo/

The API is down because our new generously-provided hosting does not support executing arbitrary code on the server. Without this provider the site would have been taken down again already, so we are grateful for what we've got.
Many venezuelans work online because of this very issue. So, probably, many.
I don't have specific insight into the machine learning aspects of Alexa, but based on my experience developing Alexa applications, I believe that the individual voices are trained on specific ML models. Most voices are unilingual, but there are bilingual voices as well, for example Hindi / English for India.
https://outline.com/HBFgk3
That is not actually true.

Its the reverse. All healthy, competitive markets exist as the result of a lack of government intervention.

Lack of a competitive market is the result of government intervention.
https://outline.com/486wJ9
There are electric mopeds, but tbh the qualifier "other than by walking, cycling or taking a public transport" does not make a lot of sense when talking about getting around in Amsterdam. You can cycle across the city in 15 minutes along dedicated bike paths and public transport is safe, clean and relatively cheap.
Tacos – Security in Your Smartphone
Reeking of privilege here. "I got born in a developed country, life goes on ".
One big thing I like about redis is that it is single threaded.
China is a totalitarian regime. Any form of expression against their authority hurts them. Not complying with their demands would hurt Apple who want to do business with them.

Your response doesn’t really address the issue though. Say you can find a company that conforms most to your own moral standards (which is already unlikely, depending on where you arbitrarily choose to draw that line), that’s not good enough. You need to find a company that meets those standards, that only does business with other companies who also meet those standards, and only employs people who again meet those standards. That’s simply not realistic in any way.

The real answer to this question is that in order to participate in society, you need to accept that you’re going to have to interact with people you disagree with. Otherwise you can choose between trying to exclude all those you disagree with, or excluding yourself. Neither of which are tenable. If a company goes further than you’re willing to participate in, then your only option is to not work for them. Anybody working at Apple today likely started knowing that Apple did business with China. If they can’t handle that they should leave, and prepare themselves for a difficult job search for a company that doesn’t. But trying to force others to make the same decision is just completely unreasonable.
> they rely on something that is not source code transparent to store the data.

They rely on it to store encrypted data.

If I recall correctly they use an authenticated aes cipher - and the Free software part can verify that correct data is read back (ie: it decrypts and authenticates).
Mnemotechnics and Ultima Underworld II (2011)
“The police are attacking me now”

This journalist was not being accurate. There is a large difference between an attack and pressure. He claimed they wanted to clear the streets of cameras so that the police could do whatever they want. If everyone talked like that, nobody would trust the news. He exaggerated and speculated like crazy.

I’m assuming anyway he’s a journalist. Maybe he’s just a youtuber. Either way, don’t say “the police are completely out of control” when all they are doing is yelling aggressively and pushing a few people.
I've been running my controller on a raspberry pi for a few years without any issues
For reference:
Force U.S. airlines remove Taiwan:
https://time.com/5348666/airlines-websites-taiwan-china/

Hide Taiwan emoji flag in Hong Kong:
https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-hides-taiwan-flag-in-hong-...
Specifically (for the benefit of those who've flagged the above comment to death), Stallman and the FSF have opposed the proliferation of DRM and SaaS for this exact reason: because a company can - for any reason - pull the plug on the software for which you've paid.

There are free-as-in-free-speech alternatives to most (if not all) of Adobe's software products. If they're "not good enough", then it's in our best interests to fix that, whether by contributing code to the existing replacements or creating new ones (perhaps forked from the existing ones). In the meantime, even if they're "not good enough", at least they can be used, unlike Adobe's "good enough" tools, so perhaps setting aside those issues in favor of tools that get you most of the way there without the potential to suddenly disappear from you with zero recourse would be prudent?
The entire law doesn't need to be invalid. But if it says that your employer can force you to be present without compensation, that part can be inherently invalid.
The thing I like best about this article is that it touches on elliptic curves over finite fields in more than a cursory way. But I would love to see an introduction to elliptic curves that completely ignores the behavior in the real numbers, and instead focuses on driving the motivations from the finite field perspective.

There are elements that seem particularly interesting to me around this, especially since even elliptic curves with no rational points on them still have points in finite fields, and how to think about what it means for points to be on a line, and derive things like point addition and point doubling from that perspective.

I'm familiar enough with EC math to hand wave around these issues, but it's still something that I struggle with.
StackStorm (IFTTT for Ops) Joins LinuxFoundation
No by couldn't compete, the OP probably means western tech companies do a remarkably poor job of understanding the Chinese market and frequently gets out innovated. When Google first entered the Chinese market, Google PinYin input lifted data from Sogou Pinyin because they couldn't get basic input prediction right. Baidu RankDex predates Google PageRank and was referenced by Larry Page when he submitted patent for PageRank. Before Youtube left China, they were the worlds top video streaming site, in China they didn't even break top 10. Same story for Twitter. Amazon today is unimpressive compared to major Chinese online retailers.

The truth is, these companies were never competitive in China because they never put in the work. Established western companies are not use to the level of competition in China. It's simplistic to say CCP is just arbitrarily picking domestic winners. Thousands of domestic companies (as in the case with ecommerce going toe-to-toe with Amazon) were busy out competing each other and western challengers. When it came to western social media bans post 2007, Chinese companies were hiring tens of thousands of content moderators with understanding of Chinese filtering rules for compliance. Western companies simply gave up and didn't learn how to scale content moderation until the last few years when social media had to deal with the same violent extremism that China did during the Tibetan and XinJiang riots that lead to FB/Twitter ban. As evidenced by current Youtube debacles, Google still can't / refuse to get human content control right. BTW both these companies can reenter anytime as long as they conform the same rules like Bing. Regardless, the government didn't have to tip the scale much to crown a domestic champion over western companies.

See AI Superpowers by Lee Fu Lee,previous head of Google.cn for an overview of Chinese competitive environments. There's lots of extremely technical fields where China is actively conducting industrial espionage and coercing tech transfers in (IC, airplane engines, military stuff). But cloning and improving software is not really one of them.
Using jitter as an entropy source also came up in the recent discussions around Linux getrandom(2) blocking:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21152552

https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/zircon/jitterentropy/config-...

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
They sign malware?
Ellen Ripley would approve.

"I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCbfMkh940Q
> I don't even think Apple makes any sample code for updating old Firewire drivers to run on Catalina

Surely, surely it was obvious for years that Firewire is on the way out? Why are people so reactive and sluggish? People should be ready for change.
What I’m saying is that there are alternatives for some traditional desktop apps. There are few alternatives for the big SaaS productivity apps most users use.
Booking is obsessed with maximizing conversions, which just leads to dark patterns.

One lessons from all these things is they maximize for what’s easiest to measure, not what’s most important. Conversions aren’t the end all be all, nobody wants to come back to a store with the pushy salesperson.
I had the same CPU issues. It turned out to be some bug with the iCloud sync. Constant updates also ate up my phone’s battery and storage.

Turning off iCloud capability stoped the insanity.

Have been using Apple’s betas for years now. This season was the first time I regretted it. But I like telling myself that dark mode and iPad OS multitasking made it worth it.

Some UX improvements across the board are very neat though.
Why not bicycle? We have electric ones and all of our infrastructure is built to accommodate.
Does jitter entropy mitigate the need to install haveged [1] on systems with high entropy requirements?

[1] https://issihosts.com/haveged/
(Super) Magic Hashes
Pivot (YC W15) hiring a senior full-stack engineer – consumer fitness hardware
Moz: //Gfx Newsletter #48
Also combat medics, CASEVAC aircraft, and field hospitals. Not requiring refrigeration is a HUGE benefit during the "Golden Hour" of casualty care.
They have access to internet (although unreliable most of the times) so they can work online. Freelancing is very widespread among those who have the necessary skills. There are a bunch of spanish forums where this becomes pretty evident. They also open bank accounts in other countries so they can get paid in dollars and not be monitored by the government.

This people is trying to survive.
As I recall, neither of our galaxy's jets are pointing near the solar system. And we're distant, and relatively well shielded. So I doubt that there could be any danger.

If you were on axis, though, anything "in" the galaxy would be at risk. Given that we see jets in other galaxies that are longer than their radii.
https://www.gimp.org

https://inkscape.org

http://mypaint.org

https://krita.org/en/

https://www.blender.org/features/video-editing/

https://kdenlive.org/en/

https://www.audacityteam.org
It seems it's not their decision, but US government's decision here.
Thanks. I've updated the article with clarifications and correct TPU numbering. The text already mentions TPU v1 is inference only, and I think it's useful to include as context.
>Stock is up 3% on this news

What? According to google finance, the stock closed $8.57 last Friday, opened $8.55 today, reached an intra-day high of $8.65, and closed at $8.56. There's no way you can say that it was up 3%.
There was a specific law passed by congress to exempt security checks and the like from the FLSA which was essentially the basis of that 2014 ruling (mentioned briefly in the blog post you linked to). The court's hands were tied.
It would go up with flying cars before it went down. Down is very expensive while up is free.
> Self-paid insurance plans only work if you require every one to buy a plan.

The US did this until very recently. It should IMO be reinstated.

In any event, this is more or less orthogonal to the issue at hand. As far as I know, nothing stops employees with employer-sponsored healthcare from opting out.
People always hold Apple to a different standard.

An issue where you are able to view contacts on an iPhone without entering the passcode is an unmitigated civilization ender, while no one cares that many Android phones don’t get any security updates for a large part of their typical lifespan.

See also the stories about working conditions in the ‘Apple factories’, which really are Foxconn factories that build hardware for just about any major manufacturer.
The Quantum Bubble – How two key experiments invalidate quantum mechanics
They should have done it the VW way: make it so the flag doesn't show up for the manager in internal review, but is still visible when the OS is out in the wild.
Enigma – Real-Time alerts for when your power users switch jobs or organizations
Personally I hate seeing this happen both as a specific instance in the case of HK/Taiwan but just in general with corporations and politics.

Professionally and philosophically it's another interesting wrinkle in the implications of the emoji technology.

It reminded of something we saw a couple years ago when Apple changed the depiction of the gun emoji [0]. Interestingly, that blog post's proposed solution (note: same author as the OP article):

> Hide it.

This speaks to how fragile Unicode is, that things that were written in the past may so easily be changed in the future (like the replacement for Taiwan in China) or hidden in various ways. Another article mentions how emoji might be used by e.g. fascists to minimize uncomfortable concepts [1]. Even after you apply Hanlon's razor, there's still opportunity for good old-fashioned miscommunication [2].

[1] specifically mentions the mosquito emoji being introduced for health awareness, but what if we eradicate Malaria or even the mosquito as a whole, and then the irrelevant emoji is replaced with something not widely feared or hated, or maybe even beloved (like another social awareness campaign)? Then there'd be a lot of "Man I hate :positive-thing:" messages out there.

I'm not saying let's ban emoji, it's just interesting to think about. Still, I hope the whitewashing effect mentioned in [1] doesn't gain more ground, here or otherwise.

[0]: https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/ (discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12240386)

[1]: https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2018/07/the-absolute-denial-of-... (discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17552067)

[2]: https://grouplens.org/blog/investigating-the-potential-for-m... (discussed briefly, couldn't find a better thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11446047)
Yeah, tell that to the freelancer who works from Maracaibo and uses US dollars to import the necessary stuff from Colombia, be it medicines or even food.

If I were venezuelan I'd just pirate the software and avoid this nonsense.
In my experience Freedom is just fine if you live in a city with good coverage and don't plan on spending much any time travelling through areas they don't serve. But if you travel much locally it's a non-starter.
> and license activation isn't performance-critical code.

No, but DRM is pretty likely to require your OS to remain exactly bug-compatible with older versions. After all, the entire point is for it to cause trouble if it detects unexpected changes in system configuration or behavior, even if those changes are within the scope allowed by loose API definitions or undefined/unspecified behavior. E.g. it's pretty much expected that when an OS tightens security restrictions, it'll break a lot of DRM and video game anti-cheat systems. Inserting a new compatibility shim is also likely to be mistaken by those systems as a circumvention tool.
And people are baffled that the 2fa SMS to reset it can not be delivered.
Ask the people who worked for Thomas Cook about risk.
To any HN moderator, could you share the reason why whatfreewords' comment in this thread is [dead]?
Many people talk big game about morals and ethics, but when the chips are down, they will happily forget all that if they have to sacrifice even the smallest amount of comfort. Good for you. Seriously.
It's impeachable, but you'd need to actually impeach him.
You presume boring will always be prohibitively expensive.
The central idea is that you want to live as close as possible to work. You shall pay lots of money for the privilege of a cramped, overages, badly maintained apartment in some central location. You are not to have any other constraints on your choice of living space than that. In particular, you are not supposed to live 20km outside the city. Unless that 20km happens to be in walking distance to some remote train station. But you're still weird then.

Edit: Everything I read about these urban Paradise concepts screams "small town" to me. Where I grew up, that was how a small town functioned and of course it was quite nice. But that is not how a city functions.

Personally, I wonder how long it will take cities to depopulate after they made commuting too hard. In my observation, the car just acts as a proxy for the conflict between people living in the city and people that merely work there.