skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Haven't looked recently, but in the early '90s there were about twice as many private guard service employees than there were sworn law enforcement officers. The ratio has gone down to about 1.4, probably because rich people and businesses have moved to municipalities that provide excellent police services.

There was a thread last week on what are good business areas to get into, and providing security to rich people is quite promising.
Virgin Galactic Goes Public
Sure, but that doesn't really change the point. If you decide that cloud is where you have to go, Netflix doesn't have an option that's not competing with them, really. Doesn't mean they love bankrolling Amazon.
NSFNET was just a long-haul backbone, part of the underlying physical network at the time.

The Internet is really defined by the inter-networking protocols, since the very term "internet" implies it can ride on different physical networks. To be a part of the Internet you just have to speak the TCP/IP protocol stack. The same wikipedia page points out these were standardized around 1982.
A reusable space plane has always been popular with the military. There were several secret military space shuttle missions. At times the military talked of owning one of the shuttles. They keep this dream alive with unmanned space planes.
Every new thing has humble beginnings...

https://blog.risingstack.com/the-history-of-react-js-on-a-ti...

Fun Fact: The audience was skeptical. Most people thought React was a huge step backward. This happened as mostly 'early adopters' attended this conference, however, React targeted 'innovators.' The creators of React realized this mistake on time, and decided to start a 'React tour' later on to turn haters into advocates.
Writing a function docstring is just muscle memory for me. It's part of my process. Explain the objective, then implement it. Docstrings are usually the first or second thing I write after the function signature.

I would also have serious reservations about taking a job where documentation is considered a negative during a coding interview.
Is there a general way to convert bit strings that are similar by hamming distance into a scalar value?

Is that what they’re talking about with having a randomly connected network that sums its inputs and keeps the top 5%?
Today's Royal Navy would blow yesteryear's RN out of the water before the latter crossed the horizon. Modern naval combat generally isn't conducted by sight. Never mind that modern naval warfare is about air superiority as much as anything.

Or really, who knows what real modern combat between naval powers would look like. Let's hope we never find out.
The Manager's Path by Camille Fournier does a good job covering the various steps from technical individual contributor all the way up through the ranks of management and looks at questions like when to stop getting involved in technical decision making. Would recommend for anyone interested in pursuing a leadership role.
wtf luajit is a monster
Hardware:

* Raspberry Pi (I've since moved to a Ubuntu server, but Pi was perfectly capable on this entire setup)

* Aeotech Z-wave z-stick (for controlling the wireless sensors)

* Lots of z-wave sensors (door, motion, temperature, humidity, flood, one that listens for my smoke alarms going off, a whole house power sensor in the circuit breaker box, ...)

* Lots of z-wave switches (some where I replaced light switches with smart switches, others where I just piggied a z-wave relay between the wall and the thing)

* A few Phillips HUE lights for fun color BS

* an old 433 MHz temperature sensor that the previous tenant left without the weather station (read through a $5 USB TV receiver)

* Another Raspberry pi sitting on my stereo hooked to Snapcast to pipe synchronized wifi audio throughout the house from a single source.

* Mopidy as the central music server to pipe stuff through Snapcast

* OpenWRT router running some scripts for presence detection

* Cellphones via web interface for control

* Also a fun little LED dot-matrix display for fun displays

* A few Amcrest IP cameras (with cloud crap disabled)

Software is very Home Assistant heavy, with lots of little auxiliary scripts, some home-built, many others from other enthusiasts. The central community is the Home Assistant crew. But also:

* MQTT on a remote MQTT broker ($5 VPS) for communicating with external devices (like my mom's house and my cellphone when off-site)

* Owntracks for GPS-driven automations

* Self-hosted e-mail (totally unnecessary, just a hobby)

I think that's about it.

For getting started, yeah just start small. Get a z-wave usb stick and a pi and a few little sensors. Hook it up to your stereo and wifi and start fiddling based on the examples from home-assistants forum and docs. Then it just slowly bootstraps up to something elaborate, if you're enjoying it.
This trend is not just in retailers. I have clients asking us who _our_ vendors are, and if _they_ are on AWS, and trying to push us to vendors not using AWS.
> Everything that turns into a monopoly should be nationalized instead.

I don't think it even needs to be a monopoly there are services that makes no sense to have companies competing to provide them.

Most utilities fall under this

Don't get me started on water in the UK.

It's private and you get no choice of supplier, how this is not a national scandal i don't know. At least with Gas/Electricity/Broadband (Excluding virgin from this) at least there is competition if delivered through the same means.

More controversially, post/parcel delivery could likely benefit from being a single company IF run properly, big if, I know.
Ah, okay, thank you.
Wouldn't have worked. For example in Chinese many double meanings come from the similarity in sound of words, something a dictionary would never be able to pick up. So youd be crippled trying to guess which words it relates to without knowing which words it has a false friend.

Despite that, your achievement is impressive. Nothing feels better than making a pun or beating a local in their own language!
Okay that makes sense, thank you.
Not sure I get the logic here. A spun-off AWS and Amazon's interests would naturally diverge over time. What's to stop a situation where AWS become another Oracle that Amazon seek to replace with their own self-built alternative? Couldn't (and why wouldn't) Amazon just start rebuilding AWS afresh?
It was because of the government that AT&T had phone rentals. The government gave AT&T a monopoly and made it illegal to connect your own device to the phone line.
You should take a look at startups, especially keep your eyes peeled for the growing ones. You’ll have to read the culture to see how they choose managers (promote from within or hire from outside) but opportunities are usually abound and companies just need to get things done. Try to hold out for people above you that you really like and are good, kind folks that want to see you grow. That’s also typically a good approximation of company culture in general, in addition to a good litmus test of whether your bosses can help you in your career progression.
> The first limitation is the quality of the graphics and the user interface, which, as you can see from the screenshots above, are pretty bare-bones. The UI is straight out of the Windows 3.1 era, all vanilla Windows radio buttons and lists and drop-downs.

That is sincerely one of my favorite things about games from that era.
SwiftUI Previews on macOS Catalina and Xcode 11
What are they going to do with the coconuts, are they free, whats the point of cash then if they both have cash? Why would either accept cash from the other?
The Essex lorry deaths expose the tragic cost of high-tech borders
> You said "this is why FP sucks".

No, I did not.
The advantage of Oracle analytic functions
Google and Microsoft also expand into new markets. To me, this is a good argument to use one of the smaller but growing players, like DigitalOcean.
If your cells aren't replicating... what do they need DNA for?
There are any some senior tech roles that are not strictly "management": Technical Lead, Application Architect, Solution Architect, Enterprise Architect.
How so?

I do see where it talks about only doing preventative measures when working for insurance, but it also implies that not all their work is for insurance companies. One of the links to the LA times even talks about a homeowner hiring a private fire fighter to save their home, and these instances involve actually fighting fires, not just clearing brush.
About 1/3 of English comes from Norman (“French”) or Latin roots.
I think you're still missing the point. It's not that talking on the phone or using a GUI is more efficient, it's that it allows people to use technology in a way that feels more natural to them, and requires much less training to be able to utilize it.

To your point about clicking vs knowing commands, a GUI is more discoverable for someone, because they can try things and see what happens. Trying to guess commands is much harder, because there are no clues to guide you.
I've been using Svelte since inception, and you're 100% right, there's been a significant uptick in user base over the last 6 mos. Basically since Rich did his Rethinking Reactivity talk at YGLF back in April.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNJ3fydeao
How can something be a status symbol when 50% of smart phone users have it in the US

It's more that Apple has gotten people to view anything other than the iPhone as low status, e.g. green bubbles.
Um, no? That COPY_MAX would still need a different value between small MCU and full-blown PC.

Not to mention that using stack allocation on low-memory device is extremely dangerous... at least with malloc you get a nice diagnostic, while alloca will just do random program damage.
I just got an email today from the O'Reilly news letter.

Subject: 'How’d you weather the dot-com bust?'

Maybe they should focus on how to weather the climate bust.
I'm one of those weirdos that does pay the use tax. I've been paying it since it became a thing. It continually amazes me that no one else apparently does.
https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte/issues/3820
Interesting thing I just found out about Bird scooters. They will allow you to drive into some neighborhoods, but can't be activated from that neighborhood. The neighborhoods you can't activate one from? Poor ones.

If anyone has more info on this apparently discriminatory action I'd love to chat more.
What Mind–Body Problem? Understanding consciousness may be easier than believed
That We have the ability to have technical credit to draw down on shows the power of software and is valuable because it means you don’t necessarily need to build robust code to get something up and functional and it gives you an opportunity to learn.
It's not a great idea because it's already done.

Again, the hard part is not "here is a human, avoid it". That part is done (in Waymo's case).
Definitely accurate, but is the research P or NP though? I.e. does each person who wants to buy a bike instead of a Peloton need to do the same amount of research, or can the entire company be put out of business by one person writing a good blog post and cutting down the research each person needs to do by 90%?

I suspect there are a lot of startups with this vulnerability. There was a company I talked with a year or two ago that made security cameras, and the entire company was built around the assumption that consumers wouldn't ever figure out that renters insurance was less expensive than the camera subscription.
Can you imagine the outrage if public money was used for preventative maintenance of expensive homes?
I can so much relate to the first paragraph. When you just start your career, you enter a junior role. It's than expected of you to grow to a medior role, a senior role and than somewhere along the line become a lead.

Well, that's the biggest BS there is. Not everybody is a good lead. It's a completely different job compared to engineering. It takes people skill, organizational skill and it requires you to approach engineering from a much higher abstract level.

Personally I was really unhappy being a lead and I decided to step down. I was doing more harm than good and no-one benefits from that. Not the company, not the team, and definitely not me.

FWIW, if you still have to work 50 more years before you can enjoy a retirement, you better learn what makes you happy and do what makes you happy.
Wren: Class-based concurrent scripting language
Good point. Just enough so that it smarts but doesn't have to be punitive.
There is a difference. These private security firms don't have all the power the police do. They don't have the power to arrest, don't have their own jails, etc.
Yeah, but the native speaker already has k words.

This article [1] puts the number of distinct French root words (i.e., ignoring conjugation and other modifications) at around 65,000. This long-running online test [2] pegs the average English native speaker vocabulary size as maybe 25,000. So k might be at least N/3. That's not nothing!

Disclaimer: I know nothing about linguistics.

[1] https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/08/international-scrab...

[2] http://testyourvocab.com/
Sure I understand. Schadenfreude is the only motivating principle the anti-american left has remaining, after all.

I just wish that, if American decline was a source of such joy for them, that they would do us the courtesy of not agitating for more work visas and American residency permits....
Maybe people don't believe there should be an association between federal tax rates and state/municipality liabilities? Just a thought.
HIV is much more prominent in homosexual men, not sure what your point is.
Indentation Parsers with Parsec
Note that I had to trim the lengthy title: I think this issue is an interesting and an important one to discuss, and that the discussion doesn’t benefit from the political framing. I certainly did editorialize however and would appreciate a better short title if one is offered.
But it's the fastest way to put together a GUI.
The WeWork debacle should be an indictment of modern finance
> Which is kinda funny. The time everyone really had a computer at home probably didn't even last more than 10 years when it was superseeded by smartphones.

To be fair, smart phones are computers. They're just a different form factor.
Fair, but the rest of the comment did not support that point as there is a direct reference to hiring developers in the same sentence.
Yeah, its pretty crazy how the narrative has become "Trump is insane, AWS was going to win it until he stepped in." AWS fought very well, but Microsoft was destined to win no matter what they did, as long as they could check every box (or make promises that they will check them soon).

You're hiring a new software engineer. You've got one candidate who's a bonafide genius, but young and can't communicate very well. You've got another candidate who seems to be within 80% of the skill level of the former, but came recommended by a trusted third party and can clearly communicate with the team. Which do you pick?
One of my favorite RFCs for sure, and it's a beautifully simple and useful regex. It's a shame RFCs seem to have fallen out of fashion, the WHATWG URL spec is an unreadable mess of a monster, not least the parsing section: https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#url-parsing
>but what major advances in monolithic kernels have there been to invalidate them now?

What are the significant advances in micro kernels that does not apply to monolithic kernels ?

Also they are not only VERY old, they seem intentionally vague when it comes to actual data about the systems they are comparing against. In short, I welcome the new micro kernels so that we can see a comparison between modern monolithic and modern micro kernels and actually get a good representation of what the performance difference is.

Because if not for performance, there is no reason not to use a micro kernel.
When I first learned iOS ten years ago I thought the documentation was outstanding. It had good API level documentation as well as a large number of guides that showed the right way to use the API to implement particular features.

I recently returned to the platform and my experience is very much like the parents. The documentation appears to be almost completely missing. The built-in documentation does not appear to include any guides at all. The API documentation is largely the kind where the description is a more verbose form of the method name, and sometimes when Objective-C is selected the documentation is showing the Swift version.
Yes, but I LIKE Swift, because of all that sugar.

I started off with machine language, in embedded systems. You can't get much more "raw" than that.

I have been writing Swift exclusively for a long time. I speak it without an accent. It's my beauty.

But I also know that you can have so much sugar you fall into a diabetic coma.
Auroa 4x is another good example. Very deep and detailed but also requires a lot of menu fiddling and micromanaging with a GIMP-tier UI.

http://aurorawiki.pentarch.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
You aren't avoiding the risk of Amazon deciding they want to compete.
I'm pretty happy with it. I haven't done any android or ios dev, but I did build an app on the danger hiptop a very long time ago! i've done a huge amount of web front/back for a long time. I picked up Flutter to feel pretty solid on it, on my own, in about 2-3 weeks of effort.

It really depends on the application though. In my case, I wanted both android and ios. Building for both platforms is pretty easy (once you setup all the keys and such).

I also quite like the material-ui components... especially for something greenfield... it is twitter bootstrap... it takes all the questions out for early design so you can focus on features. This is probably my main reason for going with it over react native. i'm also a huge fan of material-ui.com for web stuff... but i think flutter nails a more 'native' experience for mobile.

I also like Dart as a language quite a bit. The flutter_graphql library works well. Integrated with firebase_auth for login. I'm using a qr scanner library that wraps the native stuff. Intellij support is quite good. Being able to hot reload on the device is awesome. No real complaints. =)

pro-tip... one wart is their default state management. use the provider api instead. this should be the default imho.... examples...

https://github.com/FilledStacks/flutter-tutorials/tree/maste...

https://www.filledstacks.com/post/flutter-architecture-my-pr...

https://github.com/rrousselGit/provider
That's highly outside the norm of scientific understanding on TMI. Please provide a citation suggesting the dose and dose rate that you think those downwinders received. I can help compare dose rates to expected biological damage and we can look into the likelihood of anyone being injured by it.

Here's a 1984 study saying the dose from Krypton (vented years after the accident) was insignificant compared to the initial accident [1]. Where are you getting your info?

[1] https://tmi2kml.inl.gov/Documents/2d-Other/(1984-08-15)%20TM...

Regarding no one being warned... again, where are you getting this info? It looks like they were warned by the Washington Post [2].

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/05/15/s...
I'm incidentally playing it right now. It's clearly alpha and it remains to be seen how well they manage to deliver the final product, but it's promising.

I've spent maybe few hundred hours on RTW and RTW2 combined. So can't really wait until they deliver the campaign for UA.
Ya, I ran into problems with CTE InitPlan steps. However, I did do some extra work to have them display in the most correct way I could think of.

I’ll add a CTE demo with and explanation.
If you have proof of this contact a lawyer. I am not a lawyer but I think this is illegal.
Not the software startup industry, unless you're flush in easy VC cash. Most of the startups which are trying to solve real problems that I've known/interviewed for are extremely conservative with hiring, for the very good reason that bad hires are not just a 0 value add, then can be a negative value add.

Uber is one of the outliers in this regard. But if you look at most successful others (Instagram, Whatsapp and a bunch of others I don't want to name since I want to stay anonymous) all had very small teams right until they were acquired.
But I don't understand why they'd care. I can run websites on any cloud.
I can say you are def an exception, most ppl get slower at these in their 40's than in their 20's.

You seem to have gotten faster. For most people this knowledge tends to atrophy as they age. Maybe you are lucky enough to work at job that requires you to write algorithms from scratch ( embedded engg?).

What is your theory as to why that homebrew guy wasn't able to solve simple recursion problem ?
Python Community Interview with Al Sweigart
There are reasonable concerns about AWS from non-retail too. AWS is using proprietary cloud services to lock in customers. Future increases in AWS's prices will be passed down to the end users.

I don't see it as so much AWS/Google Cloud/Azure is bad, but, did you build something which is impossible to decouple from. That is an upstream cost risk. If a customer can seamlessly move between their own datacenters, AWS, Google, Azure, and so on, that is a good thing.
There's also an art to realizing you've failed (or are going to fail), and making the best outcome possible from it. Many things don't work out the way you expect them to first time. Things may initially be "failures," but maybe ultimately be some form of "success."
It's a 5x5 grid.
The prices can somewhat be explained by rent, leaving the margin low. But if they're charging more in well-off areas, and with this spread, it seems quite likely stations can manage to slip another 10-20 cents in there as a profit margin.
It sounds like you might not be quite getting the concept behind this sort of interview. Although some code is written, this is (usually) a test of how you talk about code. You want to show that, if a co-worker asks for your advice on how to solve a tricky problem, you will be able to help them figure it out.

Part of this is understanding what they're asking for and adapting. If someone wants to know how to document code properly then you can have a conversation about that and give an example. But if they're asking about algorithms then you write the code and explain how it works verbally. You don't need to write comments because the reader is right there and you can explain it to them. It's not production code.
Of course the real cause of these millions of deaths and cases of child blindness is not so much the block on GM rice, but the extreme poverty in which these people live so that they have no access to better food than rice.

The GM rice is a stop-gap measure in the absence of improving actual living conditions. It's sad that it's being blocked, but it's not the true cause.
I don’t see why there is a technical vs management path at many companies, you want management to be a support for the product that’s being delivered and your teams should be skilled in and embody the product they’re making first. Management for management sake makes the product a 2nd goal otherwise. You could argue we can’t find people who can do that, fair enough, but there are plenty of companies that do and their performance is high because of it.
I do not know how to do it on any platform.

My problem is this:

void f(int n)
{
float t[n];
// what do I write here to check if everything is OK ?
...
}
Elite Scrabble players look at the language differently than speakers. For example you need to know
words with 'Q' but no 'U'. Not something that comes up in everyday speech.
https://scrabblewordfinder.org/scrabble-words-with/q/and-no/...
Why would it be illegal if a customer requests you use a specific vendor?