skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm intuitively on team #noestimates but trying to have an open mind/not dig in my heels.

I feel like no one does a convincing job at communicating why estimates matter (and how much value you get out of how precise of an estimate).

Fundamentally, an estimate (or any piece of information) is really only of value if you're going to do different things based on learning it. E.g., given an estimate, you might:

* Prioritize one project over another based on ROI.

* Know when to communicate that something might be available to users (though that's still not intrinsically valuable, you have to have some kind of marketing/sales-cycle based reason or something that it matters).

* Know when to begin supply-line stuff so that a factory is ready to build a thing as soon as possible (but no sooner, since then maybe you're holding up parts of the pipeline from doing other things? maybe?)

I feel like so often people try to underscore the importance of estimates but don't say anything remotely close to the above. A lot of times it's just "this is important/urgent". Ok, so? If it's urgent then that's even more reason to start actual work instead of spending time planning, if you can't point to a concrete thing you'll do differently having known the plan.

Even when people do talk about the actual reasons for wanting an estimate, it's always totally in the abstract. The precision of an estimate is always on a "delivery day" level, even if that level of precision is totally unnecessary for what this particular estimate was used for.

I think the real reason for this amount and kind of emphasis on estimating really has to do with:

1. Deadlines make people work harder/faster.

2. It gives people sticks with which to measure people/teams.

I think #2 is mostly straight-horseshit. #1 is maybe somewhat true, but I think it's not nearly as good as other ways of getting people motivated to work harder which have fewer negative externalities (e.g., more autonomy, instilling more of a sense of ownership).
Amazon basics high capacity AA rechargable used to be made in Japan. People speculated they were rebranded enloop based on specs and charge profile.

I just ordered a new batch and they are made in China! Same product description, same picture with the old label, and same good reviews(though the recent reviews are now warning of the change and complaining of quality issues).

Amazon is now gaming their own review system. Supposedly Amazon is under heavy scrutiny over Chinese batteries in general and are getting sued by insurance companies.
Problems at Scale
Isn’t that plain illegal, full stop? If that’s not the textbook definition of false advertising then I don’t know what is.
Also: "Trick is that i,d are the same for printf but match differently for fscanf/scanf according to C11."

It's the same for all versions of C. The difference is that f/scanf interprets 0x__h as hexadecimal and 0__ as octal when %i is used. But we aren't using f/scanf here, so it's entirely a moot point since we're using printf where %d and %i are technically equivalent.

It would have been a good/obnoxious trick if they made it 0255 instead, though.

The LinkdIn question isn't at fault. I'm not even a C programmer (I dabbled, so I can pretty much fake it. You are more experienced than I by quite a bit), yet the answer seems clear enough to me. The use of char instead of int tipped me off to how I would program this in assembler and what the result would be, and gcc seems to agree when I generate assembler from the C code.

#include <cstdio>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
int a = 255;
char b = 255;
int c = 0255;
char d = 0255;
printf("i:\n--\na = %i\nb = %i\nc = %i\nd = %i\n\n", a, b, c, d);
printf("d:\n--\na = %d\nb = %d\nc = %d\nd = %d\n\n", a, b, c, d);
return(0);
}

Output:

i:
--
a = 255
b = -1
c = 173
d = -83

d:
--
a = 255
b = -1
c = 173
d = -83
See also Clay Shirky's thoughts on this topic[0]

> So, what happens when a medium suddenly puts a lot of new ideas into circulation? Now, this isn't just a contemporaneous question. This is something we've faced several times over the last few centuries. When the telegraph came along, it was clear that it was going to globalize the news industry. What would this lead to? Well, obviously, it would lead to world peace. The television, a medium that allowed us not just to hear but see, literally see, what was going on elsewhere in the world, what would this lead to? World peace. (Laughter) The telephone? You guessed it: world peace. Sorry for the spoiler alert, but no world peace. Not yet. Even the printing press, even the printing press was assumed to be a tool that was going to enforce Catholic intellectual hegemony across Europe. Instead, what we got was Martin Luther's 95 Theses, the Protestant Reformation, and, you know, the Thirty Years' War.

> All right, so what all of these predictions of world peace got right is that when a lot of new ideas suddenly come into circulation, it changes society. What they got exactly wrong was what happens next. The more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with. More media always means more arguing. That's what happens when the media's space expands. And yet, when we look back on the printing press in the early years, we like what happened. We are a pro-printing press society.

We'll adapt to the new medium of the internet. Hopefully without a 30 years war though.

[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_...
Doesn't appear to work on mobile/brave.
Who is starting large-scale new projects in Java in 2019?
I have a b.sc and a m.sc in mechanical engineering. Can I not call myself an engineer now anymore?
To be fair, this wasn't explained in detail until the Brian Herbert prequels. The movie and miniseries also left the nature of Guild Navigator travel rather ambiguous.
Among the conventional talking points that's flawed.

NBA's interest in China is at least $500 million and may clear $1 billion. That's consequence-inducing.

https://www.si.com/nba/2019/10/07/daryl-morey-rockets-china-...
Read these articles to know what is wrong with Math.random()

• https://medium.com/@betable/tifu-by-using-math-random-f1c308...

• https://hackernoon.com/how-does-javascripts-math-random-gene...

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10751396

• https://v8.dev/blog/math-random

> Many random number generators in use today are not very good. There is a tendency for people to avoid learning anything about such subroutines; quite often we find that some old method that is comparatively unsatisfactory has blindly been passed down from one programmer to another, and today’s users have no understanding of its limitations. — The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2, by Donald Knuth
> If the “public” is funding broadcasting [...] do you really think they are going to be overly critical of the government?

This is not a hypothetical question, public broadcasters do exist and do criticize their governments. Will your next question be if public healthcare can work better than what the USA is doing?

> If the “public” is funding broadcasting and the elected officials are holding the purse strings

Then whoever drafted that law didn't do their job which would have included researching how public broadcasters around the world are organized. Or they're British and think limiting the power of Parliament is for Europeans, Colonials and other wimps anyway.

> China had an economy but resources weren’t properly allocated and people were starving in one region while the other region was producing things that no one needed.

Thanks for telling me things that I already know. I didn't write "Considering that the planners of the eastern block had to greatly simplify their plans and still weren't able to finish their calculations within 5 years," for decoration.
I am very happy with my media-dedicated computer and my black-and-white Videosphere TV [jacked into the free digital signal channels with remote control].

I like to think myself unique, even if I'm not to a degree of a few thousand or so.

When I get a smartphone, I won't be using it to tune into The Late Night Show.
The source code literally calls Math.random. I hope that defence wouldn’t fly in court, even if accidentally true.
They paid you if you volunteered to be part of the on call group. Previously, it was mandatory and the majority only got TOIL.
Catch 22 just happened.

This was just "censored" by being flagged itself. Made me laugh.
So you agree that it's "one of the best in the world"?

The US highway system is extremely impressive given the low population density.
I forgot to mention. Schwab (and other brokerages) now have 0% commissions. I.e. you don't have to pay commissions.

And if you're poor, you pay 0% taxes on capital gains. Zero taxes.

There's never been a better time for anyone to join the ownership class.
I have eaten at some incredibly fancy restaurants and I think the chef would have to be an incredibly self-centered dick to have an issue with me adding some salt or oil to the dish - everyone has different tastebuds, if I want more soil then judging that is silly.
> see an asteroid coming straight to earth as a great economic opportunity to mine lots of stuff.

I hope he didn't actually say that, because it would betray a rather fundamental mistake in space travel - that of distance vs delta v.
It is hard to pull an accurate history from a couple decades ago. All I know is that when I worked at IBM in those days, a few coders told me that OS/2 was supposed to be an OS for mainframe controllers, but that it got usurped by people with other ideas, and was just another project that wasn't going to fly very far.

I didn't know whether that was true, why they said it, or what really was going on with the people involved. But I remember the comment and always take what I hear about the history of projects with a grain of salt.
Seems like you and the article agree with me here (the consequences are financial, not imprisonment for the average NBA player.) And if financial consequences count as a free speech issue to you, then you agree with me that free speech isn't just about judicial arrest.
Reckon QuickBooks accounting software crippled to force subscription upgrades
Kraft singles in your area!
The journey to software freedom has been bogged down for too long by people that drive away large chunks of potential developers & users[1].

If you want to be caustic, we won't stop you, but you can't come into community events like LinuxFest Northwest, SeaGL & such, shit on people there who are writing libre software, and expect us to invite you to come back.

1 - https://www.networkworld.com/article/2988850/linux-kernel-de...
The outrageous gets eyeballs, and isn’t that the real metric they are after?
Skype was 1 of the 100+ teams.
Maybe part of the reason for the higher GDP is the lack of wasteful infrastructure spending with low returns?
I totally agree. Coffee is also dangerous to anyone with acid reflux. everyone reacts differently and if you don’t feel right consuming something, you shouldn’t consume it, health science rules be damned.
The problem is building a stable system. You can have high taxes on the rich, but they will always use their riches to lobby to have them abolished. And even if you don't have an elite ultra-rich class and massive income equality, the nature of liberalism (in the classical sense) is this will always eventually happen through the upward flow of wealth. To have a system that won't destabilise itself like this you would need a radically different economy, but I don't know how.
That's not Hanlon's razor: they had a moment where they commit an act of fraud by intent, not by incompetent behaviour.
What if a lot of this culture war stuff is happening in the US because of geographic clustering? I'm not sure why a couple hundred twitter-addicted people from Portland/Seattle/SF get to pontificate all the time about who or what should be allowed in 'tech', which is a giant global industry...

I appreciate the 'Awokening' in American political culture to some extent but I've never really been comfortable with stances like, "by including X person, you are excluding me." There's some creepiness to it I can't quite put my finger on. Also, the more you take this to an extreme and purge everyone who isn’t fully aligned with your thoughts and values, you’re just going to end up in a very insular group that isn’t reflective of how things work in the outside world.
Online Influencers Tell You What to Buy, Advertisers Wonder Who’s Listening
Elon Musk hasn't been involved in OpenAI for a while now.
Happens every time the accountants and MBA's take over. Experience with three companies bought out by investment funds/accountants. Move on as quickly as possible.
Cheers
> Kudos to you for apparently reading past the headline and understanding that the demo was actually about hand dexterity. But come on. The average layman reading the headline is going to believe that what's newsworthy is that OpenAI solved a rubik's cube.

I criticize OpenAI's aggressive marketing as much as the next guy, but I don't actually feel this was one such case. I only ever assumed from the headline + video that they were using neural nets to control the hand, not to solve the Rubik's cube.

I'm not an average layman, though, so YMMV.
Aluminium–Air Battery
The point is to acknowledge that the way most technical people are hired isn't the way that maximizes outcomes for technical people. Patio11's point is that the way to maximize outcomes as a technical employee is to _break out_ of this paradigm. It might reduce some of your top of funnel (random recruiter outreach) options, but it will increase the value of the opportunities that do arise.
I'm not so sure that era if over, it's simply changed mechanisms. Instead of direct moderation in the form of editorial boards working at the behest of corporate owners, it's more indirect in the form of algorithms made by developers at the behest of corporate owners. Decisions are still made that present some information or viewpoints and not others. The flavor of bias will likely be very different: in the past, one was the political vector. In the algorithmic method such things are a side effect of a "click more" bias.
Not allowed by the license usually
That's only a small number of the hundreds of major road projects. Most of them you don't hear about because nothing interesting happens.

FWIW, my experience with smaller-scale local projects in my area is that they are completed generally on time, competently, and achieve the desired aims.
Hi HN!

I made a quick mini hack today because I wanted to find out what places would have specific temperatures in certain parts of the year to figure out a place to live throughout the year in the future.

This collects the daily highs throughout the month and calculates the median value. It also shows the humidity. And you can filter on both, for example 16'C to 25'C in January and below 30'C in June with 70% max humidity all year round.

It's a mini hack that exposes a subset of nomadlist.com's giant data set.

It's a self contained PHP/HTML/JS file with jQuery. Let me know what you think!
Anyone does have the right to vote for it, that's how it works. People can decide it's best if everyone shares the burden of unexpected tragedy, just like people decided it's best if everyone pays for street lights, roads, police, firemen, rubbish collection and armies.
Why can’t I choose not to pay for a war that I don’t want? A highway I won’t use or a school I won’t send my children to?
If you can't ESTIMATE your software project, then you have no idea what you're doing.

An estimate is NOT A DATE, an estimate is a DURATION.

If you estimate 50hours and other things come up that eat into your time, you continually adjust the DATE, the duration shouldn't change. If you depend on an external sys and you estimate N hrs, but that system takes N+M hrs, then your duration date moves forward M hrs.

If there were unknowns, risks, as you uncover them, you move the date and if you communicated the unknowns and risks, then you can adjust the duration by adding the new info.

Ideally what you wish to do is eliminate all the unknowns and risk by NOT doing them. You're doing DEVELOPMENT not RESEARCH. Development is simply pulling in all your prior knowledge on how to solve problems and tacking similar or new problems.

Don't mix your R&D.
The rider wasn't being "stubborn".

It's a right hand turn and "locking the handlebars all the way to the left" wasn't trying to correct the "dumping" of the bike.

Locking the handlebars all the way left would hopefully have ensured the bike went down, stayed down and not sat back up again thus causing the "tank slapper". When you ride a bike, especially a motorbike you counter intuitively "steer left" to turn right, and vice versa.

Former sports bike rider here...until I bit the big green banana.
The FBI isn't that holy, they goaded idiots into becoming "terrorists" so they can say "Good job us! We need more budget!", just look up "FBI entrapment".

And what about the phone they found? Presumably the journalist verified that it and the messages on it exist?
I was with you until the last sentence. Whatever happened, this is pretty clearly a story.
tldr: safety critical engineering is hard and expensive...go figure!
> have you given pop_os a try for the hdpi/multimonitor issue?

A rule I made for myself when shifting to Linux is 'no distro hopping'. I want to spend as much of my computer time programming, and as little faux-sysadmining as I can.

So no, I haven't tried pop_os. I'll have another survey of available distributions next time I change laptops, but thats a couple of years off yet which is a long time in the Linux distro world ;)
This is all true, and so obvious that one feels like slapping one's forehead. The algorithms are content-neutral, but they are based on the implicit judgement of the users: and the users engage more with what is extraordinary and outrageous.

So we're in a Black Mirror-esque moment in which the nervous system of humanity is suffering of an anxiety disorder, possibly psychosis, caused by the subtle but constant amplification of emotionally negative thoughts and paranoid ideation.

I think the system needs some form of biologically inspired attenuation mechanism, again based purely on engagement rather than content: for example reducing the amplification of nodes that are "always on", or reducing dissemination past a certain level (WhatsApp has already limited the number of forwards of a message, I think). The problem with these solutions is how to reconcile them with the commercial purpose of the platform.

Probably we'll end up building some resistance, partly cultural and partly enforced by laws; hopefully before it provokes some major catastrophe.
A majority of stuff, don't buy "disposable". As in, buy things of high quality, typically from other countries. While lots of people claim that's harsher on your finances. It's not in the long run.

The following story is my mental model for long term savings when I first moved out and realized how to help to save money. When my parents moved to America 30+ years ago, they bought a pretty pricey hand can opener from Germany for around $15 (1980s money). They still own it. To this day. I have a USA one that cost me like $20 about ten or so years ago. Still own it. I have friends who buy a new $1-$5 chinese one from Walmart every year because they keep breaking or dull out to uselessness. While that might seem silly/frugal. If you're replacing stuff constantly, you're dumping lots of potential spending money. I apply the same mentality with everything I buy. Buy quality so you buy it once. Not cheap shit every year. Be aware of what you buy. The more aware you are, the less you actually end up needing to buy.

Tech is a hard one. But is still doable. I'm looking at most of the brands around me right now, it's all either Korean or Japanese. Some parts are from China. Even if the brand is Korean or Japanese, they still do a lot of manufacturing with China. But oh well. It's the nature of the global economy. Same with a good amount of computer parts. You'll have a bunch of the commodity parts and pieces for boards made in China, then other stuff in other countries, with assembly in the USA or elsewhere. Sometimes it's Taiwan though, which is a separate nation.

You gotta do legwork and research on your own. Not everything is made in China that's available in the USA. I find it weird that people think they can't avoid chinese products. I never actually "avoided" Chinese made anything. I just happen to avoid it because I go for mid-tier products so I never have to rebuy most of my stuff. Like, I eat sardines a lot. Go to that section in walmart or any other grocery store. You'll find China, Poland, Canada, USA and German sourced sardines. All side by side.
Judging from the picture, the guy looked like a bumbling American nerd, not some sort of freedom fighter or partisan. I'm sure they pegged him as a potential spy from the start. Got in over his head, lead to a tragic end.

Lesson here is don't play war. Would he still be alive had the FBI not recruited him? Maybe, maybe not, but we'll never know.
Thanks for the introduction to Dank. First time I've seen it and I like the look of it. Particularly the 'f' shape.

What's the closest free font you've seen to it? As it's so different from my usual monospace font I want to try ssomething similar first to see how I find it, before spending money on it.
Why medicine in particular? Presumably you don’t get so worked up about your tax dollars going towards paved roads or police stations. Your objections seem somewhat arbitrary
The Big Interception Flaw in the US-UK Cloud Act Agreement
Booking.com is horrible to use in my opinion. It is handy but you need to ignore the dark patterns on every. Single. Page.

Honestly it makes me want to use the website less, and does not urge me to buy.
That's interesting - FDA forced Kraft the name change due to the ingredients.

> https://web.archive.org/web/20110110185442/http://www.fda.go...
Free speech is a value as much as it is a legal concept (and a rather foundational value in the US at least). People who don’t want to engage in discussion about the importance of free speech as a cultural value will often try to reframe the debate to be an entirely legal one, as that’s open to much less discussion.
Agree with you that algos & crowd data are taking up some of the slack.

But editors are involved before & during the composition of a piece, and can check for things like tone and fact checking. Editors aim for a consistent minimum quality level for everything under their masthead. Algos & votes are trying to do this job after the fact with fewer resources and no consistent standard.

Not sure if the old newspaper model is more trustworthy, or even more effective at surfacing critical information, but you don't have to wade through as much filth to stay informed.
Yes, "free speech" protects it against lawsuits. See Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
I am a subscriber! And, for the readers, try Wouter Hanugraff's "western esoterism: a guide for the perplexed".

We are truly lucky to have such great scholarship
Why is that a catch 22?
AWS Automation Visual Builder – Feedback for PH Launch
Every time I hear a comment alike parent's, it makes me think how many times a day I actually read a comment in the same fashion, but about something I actually know nothing about.
I agreee increasing labor supply can decrease wages. If we allowed uncapped skilled immigration for upper middle class professions like physicians, surgeons, dentists, engineers, scientists, and more their wages may go down or stagnate. Though in a functioning marketplace, costs will go down and production of goods and services will go up. It’s not a zero sum game.

I’m not in favor of labor supply protections for any highly paid industry, they are not the segment of society that needs a helping hand.