skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How we code once and ship to both iOS and Android devices
This. Any company pass a certain size has a legion of upper, and middle manglers whose sole responsibility is risk management, and paramount to anything is the risk to the personal wealth and progression of said manager. There is very little incentive to 'innovate'.
> The action itself should be judged on its own merit, in its cost to society, independent of its connection to other factors that may have negative or positive impacts on society.

I think you're missing my point. I agree that many policies should largely be measured with an objective cost benefit analysis. However, for emerging technologies, it can be very difficult to accurately perform such a cost benefit analysis. There is less data, and confidence levels are lower.

It's much easier to evaluate the cost/benefit of taxis than scooters simply because there is far more historical data.
Heh. How do I lobby to oppose this? I don't want bulkier, thicker and uglier devices just so I can open them, because I have no interest in doing so. And I definitely don't want this written into law...
Oh, I agree with feature creep being something you have to watch out for, and there are definitely examples where adding everything and the kitchen sink has led to virtually unusable products/services (remembers that browser screenshot showing IE with about 20 custom toolbars)

But it's a balancing act overall. You need to know what the users will actually use and what they won't, prioritise things that more of the userbase will get some mileage out of, and move away from the idea that simple or complex is necessary better/good for any product.
> The big issue is lack of technical resources to improve GC's performance on D's runtime.

The underlying issue is that to make the GC more performant requires the addition of "write gates", where writing through a pointer notifies the GC that the memory object has changed. This is a reasonable choice when a language is heavily GC dependent (like Java).

However, D is not at all heavily GC dependent. But it is very dependent on memory references. Hence the GC speedup from adding write gates would be more than lost from the cost of executing those write gates.
> I think publishing a book requires a team.

No, you just need better tools to do so. Of course, having humans reviewing your book can help increase the quality, but that has nothing to do with having a publisher.

> I have found kindle books that come from a reputable publisher are MUCH higher quality

You are also biased because there are a LOT of really bad books published by traditional publishers anyway.
I agree with this, and it's exactly the reason why RDP is a vastly better experience than VNC.

Using VNC on a LAN isn't great, but over WAN it's a truely miserable experience.
The key feature of science is that all theories are open to further scrutiny and falsification. To say “the science is settled” is probably the least scientific statement you could possibly make. A deeply ironic position to take for people who’s key complaint about their detractors is that they don’t appreciate science.
I started on D 20 years ago. It was a couple years before I even managed to make a prototype that people could play with. 20 years ago it was a few notes on a piece of paper :-)
Also from the commit message:

> like Shift JIS (sometimes called SHIT JIZZ)

Back then when I was working for a Japanese outsourced project, the code won't compile unless the computer's locale was set to Japanese because the C code had comments in Shift JIS.
This comment made me change my mind from:

"this is an early stage product I might consider using", to...

"this is a weekend hobby project hacked together that I should definitely not pay for or depend on for anything business related".

Some companies can pull off the very human feel, but it takes a lot of effort to do well without trashing a brand.
> that conscious reasoning, the commonly believed remedy for our social ills

commonly believed? by who? I have never heard that claim before.
IT Recruiters in Switzerland?
Hello,

We are (a small dev team in a bigger company in Zurich and) looking for Java programmers; are literally bombarded by recruiters, so dishonest and pushy and annoying.

So, my question, if you do IT in .ch, did you ever get any job through a recruiter? Like, ever?

Any names and experience are very appreciated.

Thank you!
C
> user-dedicated EC2 instances

Ouch, that sounds expensive! I would imagine the economics of this will be a tough sell compared to one's own laptop or desktop?
I actually learned something today about pathfinding by (re) reading that post for 15 mins. The papers linked make no sense to me. Maybe the paper authors need make abstracts and summaries more approachable.
While we are at it, any tips for devs on how to approach companies in Zurich for hiring?
Facebook: Disconnecting the People
Essential idea of Facebook is to connect the people. Idea is sold to masses and that is certainly good for founders.
However, does the main goal of connecting the people is reached?

Facebook is a tool where one is able to find a person, send a message, complain about social issues, read news and many more. But does it mean “connecting the people”?

Human is social creature and the main demand is socialization which stands for being connected to your community. That means that you are in the same network with your community: you can talk to people in your network and they will be happy to talk to you under normal circumstances.

Facebook does only imitate socialization and many people instead of talking to each other touches iphones. This imitation does not provide solid level of connection that allows people to be really connected in the network. Let’s face it - almost all friends in facebook are fake and most probably you are one of them. Fake friendship imitation numbs hungry of being socially connected and in the same time lefts the person in disconnected state.

Facebook reached completely opposite goal, instead of connecting people it disconnects people by leaving them live in a fake reality.
Its helpful to approach https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/ as you would a moderately complex home entertainment system, with a smart tv, a apple tv, a blueray player, playstation, a recorder all managed via a AVR with a 'smart' remote. You are going to spend a few hours setting it up in the beginning.
Heck yeah!

I have a link to this in my toolbar, as it is one of those sites I find myself returning to again and again. I recently committed myself to becoming a better guitar player. I didn't think I'd dive head first into theory, but I'm so glad I did.

I'm grateful to the people who have created resources like this, because I wouldn't have overcome previous biases w/r/t theory were it not for the different approaches and perspectives available on the web today.

edit: a link to another theory project for anyone interested

Open Music Theory: http://openmusictheory.com/contents.html
Microsoft very recently GA'd their Windows Virtual Desktop offering too: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/services/virtual-desktop/

I imagine it will be tough to compete with AWS and Microsoft - I wonder if there is a niche you can specialise in?
The "1986" comes from the publication year of the book that the interview is from, Programmers at Work. In any case, the title is still accurate enough since Iwatani was producer and director, respectively, for Pac-Land (1984) and Pac-Mania (1987): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toru_Iwatani
Closely followed by the Dolphin blog.
Reputable publications put out less than 1% as many books as are self published, and they still spew a lot of terrible junk. Do you include say Tor etc as reputable? If not that percentage drops further.

What self publishing provides is a closer match for your personal interests. That’s only useful if you have unusual tastes, but I have personally given up on published fiction.

PS: What recent good reasonably hard science fiction can you name? Most people say The Martian, but that was originally self published.
Skimping on sleep makes your brain crave sweets
Another single data point, but yes, I find swearing in a product's website to be off-putting and unprofessional.

And I say that as a Scot, where swearing is basically part of the vernacular - it's just not appropriate in a marketing setting.
If we would decide to tax raw materials instead of labour and income, repair would make economic sense again. Raw material usage is not sustainable as the resources are finite. Labour on the other hand is very sustainable, given enough time the supply of labour is infinite and usage of labour is sustainable. What we tax and what not is not a given, but something that can and should be revised to gnudge the world into better shape. Even though I greatly sympasize with the right to repair, as long as it is uneconomical to do repairs due to incentives (taxation) making it so, we are not really addressing the root cause and one could argue that this repair day is distracting attention from the real issues
You can't prove that something does not exist if you can't directly inspect it. "Free will" falls into this pit where it has a fuzzy definition in the first place and can't be directly looked at in any way. Plus, we already know that much of human functions are not based on Free will (how most of our organs function for one), but it's also trivial to show that there is a clear difference between something based on simple rules like a robot or a very simple animal form and human behavior (which we constantly need to study to understand its complexity). If there was no such thing akin to Free Will we would have cracked human psychology for centuries already.
I'm more worried about having thousands of airborne google cameras flying about filming without peoples consent than the noise. Fossil trucks and cars are very noisy already.
This looks great except for something I spied at the end: "Efficient mode" and "Fashion mode", where one looks like Windows and the other looks like macOS. There is obviously a great attention to detail in the trailer. But there might be a great misunderstanding of macOS that they call it "Fashion Mode". Furthermore, I think pursuing two window manager designs/desktops is a poor use of resources. It shows a reluctance to choose a target market as well. I wish them luck and hope they'll make some hard decisions and maintain the support of large tech companies. The ecosystem developing around RISC-V and Linux is exciting.

Invention is the child of necessity, and the global unease is creating necessity for software and hardware not reliant on US/UK technology licensing.

Open source folks should be excited about this side-effect of the unfortunate global tensions and posturing. There shouldn't be anti-Chinese comments here, but positive ones. It can't be that after years of Linux and open source evangelism, folks are dismissing or gate-keeping the movement based on race, language or anything.

Stallman is giving talks at Microsoft, who historically attack open source and bought the world's biggest open source resource (Github). We're told to play nice with them now and they're an ally. And yet there's knee-jerk dismissal of an open source OS because a Chinese company used it on their devices.

Gatekeeping Chinese out of open source is not only the worst possible thing to do for open source, but probably the worst thing for your career. Folks ought to be keeping up with these trends as China grows and spreads it's technology and brands. Resisting these positive changes because of the anti-china-rhetoric-of-the-day is foolish in more ways than one.

Please excuse the rant. To whom it concerns: I'm a caucasian male in North America, with no financial or employment ties to China, so far as I know.
I have played factorio a lot, and at this point I'm looking for a different game, or something where the design does not include bugs in the pointless way factorio does. It's an otherwise fantastic game. Maybe it's not even wrong to have adversaries, but the way it's done in factorio is so simplified (infinite bugs from outer space) it seems like satire.
Balance and sustainability are so important.

Do you mind sharing the name/url of your SaaS business?
Why do you hate China so much it would dissuade you from a major open source effort?
On the contrary, devices can be made thin and sleek while being repairable. Seems the marketing has worked wonders in making some people believe that thin and sleek can only be achieved by sacrificing repair-ability.

This is not just an issue of corporations greed but an issue of efficient use of finite resources on this planet.
> The other part are more prone to be dictated by logic.

you are right to say "prone to", because as a matter of fact what is happening with logic is usually to give ourselves a reason to fall back on what we believed in the first place. It's very hard to truly convince very rational people that they are wrong (most people don't switch opinions)
Currently in a country with some excellent volcanoes: Ethiopia. Sadly this site isn't loading - I assume it is too big a download (not great internet up here in the mountains). A lightweight version would be great:)
So justification for drones is, in order: "no need to pay a human"/"shifting assets from labor to capital", "customer can't pay a human either", "???" (human labor can operate 24/7 too) and "it's a way to work around local regulations" (i.e. wishes of the local citizens).

My lips mouth "antisocial", but I guess it's business thinking as usual.
I agree. Apple just changes stuff for the sake of change.
Good luck navigating photos for example.

But think about it; as a developer, you don't score any points for not modifying software that works great.
Excellent! Give this dude some money.
Is there really no way to manufacture thin and light devices with screws instead of glueing parts together? Do standardized connectors also stand in the way of innovation?
Brood War API – The Comprehensive Guide: Buildings, and Placement
Community repair is a way to go. Majority of people are incapable repairing a bicycle. For some of them repairing washing machine with connected power plug could be lethal.
> they just asserted that because the impulse starts before you remember making a decision, you have no free will. That sounds like a non sequitur to me.

I feel the exact same way.

It's like saying because a pain signal takes some time to come from your foot to your bran that then the pain is not real, when it is merely delayed.

It seems to me it's only natural that there's a delay between the decision being made and the perception of the decision happening. Doesn't absolutely mean the decision was "illegitimate" and certainly that can't be deduced from the delay.
Regardless, they saw that the price on Monday was much lower than on Friday, why they didn’t double down if they really had inside knowledge?
I used a MacInCloud server as a build server for iOS apps for something like 3 years, and it was a good experience. The server was performant and totally stable, and the one time I contacted support about a billing issue, it was resolved quickly and professionally.

Recommended. Only reason I don't use it anymore is that Azure DevOps now offers MacOS build agents.
A link to the study:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221499371...
Well duh. In the late 2000's Iceland held their bankers accountable for their actions and threw the worst of them in jail. They refused to bail out failed banks -- refused to socialize losses from gambling that privatized profits.

Did anybody really think the banking system wouldn't hit back?
On Monday you’ll know for certain. Why they didn’t double down since the price was much lower?
Here's my layman explanation:

Pick a frequency. Let's say you picked 400 hertz. If you multiply this frequency by a simple fraction (1/2, 1/3, 2/5, etc) you get a new frequency that harmonizes with your original frequency. That means they sound nice when played together. The simpler the fraction, the better the two frequencies will sound (1/2 sounds nicer than 7/13, for example).

If you pick several of these fractions between 1 and 2 (such as 3/2, 4/3, 5/4, 2/1, etc) you create what's called a scale. All the frequencies in the scale harmonize with the starting frequency, but they don't necessarily harmonize with each other.

Musicians don't always want to play with the same starting frequency so they invented "equal temperament". The idea behind equal temperament is to create a scale using logarithms/exponents instead of fractions. Because it's logarithmic, any frequency in the scale can be used as a starting point and you'll get the same result.
ATM this returns an incorrect answer for me (at Strasbourg, yet returning Dôme volcano circus in the center of France, 645km) as the closest volcano is actually the Nideck, a 250'000'000 year old volcano, a mere 35km from here.

(Photos, with geological layout at the end)

http://www.passion-escalade-et-montagne.com/2018/04/escapade...

http://www.randoalsacevosges.com/2015/03/le-volcan-du-nideck...
Chain Fountains
When I feel myself lapsing into grumpiness at the mundane nature of everyday life I sometimes manage to help myself by attempting to picture the theoretical ideal life I am not living, and then reflecting on the absurdity of wishing things were different. Should it involve: not having to do boring tasks? Being a bit taller, funnier and better looking? Being super rich? Being the most powerful person on earth? Being an omniscient, transcendental super-being, free of time and space, able to manipulate entire galaxies on a whim?

Everyone is missing out on something; everyone is a prisoner of circumstance.
The Most Sophisticated Piece of Software Ever Written
Pulp is, by definition, material printed in cheap wood pulp magazines.

Pulp is, by association, low-quality writing.

Pulp is also, by allusion, a particular genre/structure mirroring the dominant topics and styles of the original magazines - regardless of its quality.
"Dr. Shawn Smallwood’s 2004 study, spanning four years, estimated that California’s Altamont Pass wind “farm” killed an average of 116 Golden Eagles annually... Smallwood also estimated that Altamont killed an average of 300 red-tailed hawks, 333 American kestrels and 380 burrowing owls annually – plus even more non-raptors, including 2,526 rock doves and 2,557 western meadowlarks"

http://savetheeaglesinternational.org/new/us-windfarms-kill-...
One would think that Iceland would have learn to reign in their financial sector after 2008. But hey, maybe they just like it like that up there ...
Boeing Pilots Detected 737 Max Flight Control Glitch 2 Years Before Deadly Crash
Sigh. The usual downvotes because... why, you can pick holes in what I said, or some people's identity is so tied up with a piece of open-source software that they can't tolerate apparent criticism of it?

Fact: the optimiser in an SQL engine is almost the quintessence of it. If you don't understand that then you don't understand that the potential cost of the declarative nature of SQL.

Fact: SQL optimisers are complex.

New fact: microsoft has pumped fantastic amounts of cash into MSSQL. Posgres just doesn't have those resources (and other resources, such as the late lamented Jim Gray).

Other fact. Postgres CTEs were an optimisation barrier until PG11 or PG12 (https://www.depesz.com/2019/02/19/waiting-for-postgresql-12-...). AFAIK MSSQL's CTEs have never been an optimisation barrier, and I've used them long enough to know. I'm also trying to understand the cost of MVCC, which PG uses but MSSQL now has as an option, to try and understand where that costs, because depending on the scenario, it will. PG does not have READ UNCOMMITTED.

Fact: The guy I quoted had used postgres on large data a while back and said it wasn't as good as MSSQL. He had experience, which is the bottom line. I also acknowledged this may have changed recently.

Other fact: I don't dislike postgres and recently have decided learn PG also, because, for very good reason, MSSQL has its problems (the ridiculous cost not being the only one).

Fact: If you just downvote me without explaining why, neither of us can learn anything.
You can add walls which biters try to move around. I think they add an extra cost since they don't move around them perfectly, and often they try to attack the thinner parts of the walls.
Look I have been programming for 35+ years in both dynamic and typed languages. And my experience is that I am more productive when using a typed language. It sounds as if your experience is the opposite. I wonder why our experiences are so different? It would be interesting to find out.
The math was just the prelude to my real world experience. Please try to read and comprehend the rest of my post. If you can't comprehend it, then feel free to ask for clarification or just leave it be without adding any snide remarks.

People having complained is not a real-life example of an actual performance issue. Until otherwise proven, it's a real-life example of someone complaining about some microbenchmark that, based on my real life experience, would be completely irrelevant if they actually developed their real world problem-solving program which totally shifts the bottleneck to something that actually matters.

Alternatively, it's a real-life example of poor implementation or usage, and not necessarily poor performance of the underlying primitive. This also happens a lot. "Foo is slow!" is true for a lot of things if you use them wrong. Maybe it's simply the user's ignorance, or maybe the API isn't well designed to support their case. Maybe it's poor documentation.

Also, this is a technical forum. There's absolutely nothing wrong with people doing back of the envelope calculations to analyze the scale of a problem. If more people did that while pointing at real examples with concrete numbers, maybe we'd actually know things instead of just relying on hearsay and religion. Whatever, it's a cargo cult industry.

Here's the good part: if someone who knows better comes along, they find those numbers and can tell us why we're wrong. Otherwise, let's just take everything on faith?

It's amazing how often people (like you, who haven't contributed anything except noise to the discussion) just don't want to understand a problem and if someone comes along trying to understand it and do the math, they're called a lunatic.

And this is why some of the code I get to work on is so terrible, people are wasting time and complicating code to micro-optimize things that are completely irrelevant (a conclusion one could come to either by a ballpark-estimate or a quick profile), while massive bottlenecks sit unattended.
While I agree that finding a niche seems like a good plan, I'm not sure that VSCode and JS is the one - node/JS cloud IDEs have already been a thing for some time now.
Honestly, "free will" is the least interesting aspect of this comment thread.

What's more interesting is the original experiment "proving" subconscious decision making found its way to pop-psychology, and for years now, we're being bombarded with assertions that every justification of a decision is a post-hoc rationalization invented by the brain, and it has nothing to do with the real reasons for that decision.

It feels really dumb, and I'd be glad if it turned out to be just an artifact of bad data processing.
I have my own domain for my personal use so that I am not beholden to a random service.

Why would I ever lock business critical data up in a database so that I would be beholden to one company, when perfectly free databases exists, that are in some ways even better?
I think you meant 'each other' rather than 'themselves' at the end of paragraph 2.
Maybe this? https://yunohost.org/

Although a bit limited at the moment as it doesn't support every app.
> The argument is that one world (dynamism) allows for higher throughput than a static-checked environment.

I have programmed in both dynamic languages and typed languages for 35+ years. And I am most definitely more productive using a typed language. Otherwise I wouldn't. So I wonder why our experiences are so different?