skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As the customer (or rather, as the maintenance programmer at the end so one of the customers) of your software, I very much care. As a requirements provider for the actual users, I also care and they do as well.

Your giant if-then conditional "works", but is not sustainable or maintainable. It is fragile and poor quality. Quality matters.

I once got to speak with a materials engineer who had the task of trying to discover why a drone aircraft (ostensibly made the same way as always) was suddenly failing very frequently. This was, essentially, a one-off product. They had one customer, and built the drone from off-the-shelf components. The system was driven by a basic two-stroke engine, it accomplished what was needed. This worked for years, until it didn't. It turned out that the maker of the engine (which included the drive shaft) had changed their source (from the US to another country, but that change itself is unimportant). What was important was that while it was the same (weight, power, fuel consumption, etc.) engine, the manufacturing of the steel components was different. They had different qualities and the new one had a tendency to fracture due to the low quality steel (this took quite a bit of analysis to identify since the aircraft were, well, crashing and breaking apart).

This quality (the quality of the steel) was not in the customer specs. They didn't think about it, it "just worked". Until it did matter, the aircraft were failing at higher rates than anticipated (driving up costs and losing out on the utility of the aircraft). The drone manufacturer was also risking losing this contract, which was quite lucrative to them, since the MTBF for their product was now below their promised thresholds.

If you don't pay attention to these qualities, you'll end up like them. You'll have a "working" product that suddenly fails and drives you out of business, or otherwise diminishes you. Or, if you're the engineer or programmer, you'll give your customers a poor quality product that doesn't actually work for them, it only seems to. Until it doesn't, because you gave them a fragile piece of shit.

Don't be the problem.
As a consumer you are voting with those corporations by buying from them or using their services.

It might not seem like it's a choice, because the plurality of consumers have made the choice to go along, so if you do otherwise you're in a small group.

It's still a choice though. You either live the modern lifestyle, which includes (though reducing) consumption based on what could be classified in many cases slave labor. Or you choose a lifestyle that doesn't.
Krugman is basically the economist's version of a whore. There is no decently left there - only room to claim new things for huge wads of cash.
Perhaps it says that HN readers believe bill gates’ personal wealth has little relevance to the story?
Perhaps he meant a fixed axle, so both wheels have to turn at the exact same rate. Still doesn’t make much sense though, it would be incredibly inefficient to have to lift up the statue every time the road changes direction ever so slightly.
> Let me play the devil’s advocate: you buying those products is measurably better for those disadvantaged blue collar workers, than you not buying it (on a 10 year horizon IIRC - There are some UN studies on this, on phone and can’t find them right now).

Maybe in some cases.

However, you then have labor in those countries trying to struggle for the same protections and advances in wages that workers in the US struggled for, but they are struggling against a far more powerful corporate entity that has the backing of a more corrupt/disfunctional government while also having diversified options to break and weather strikes.

Then you have to add to that all the non blue collar workers who have had their subsistence livelihoods destroyed through land seizures for resource extraction.

Most of the benefits of globalization roll uphill (richer citizens, especially in richer countries extract most of the benefits) the trickle down is minuscule to non-existent.
Municipal contracts to be the only provider while avoiding being classified as a utility. Nice combination that was allowed over and over throughout the last two decades.
I read an article once, that claimed when a Scandinavian country joined the EU, they expected significant job distortion as a result of free trade. So they literally moved government agencies from their current locations, to locations that they expected would be hardest hit. The end result was the shifting of thousands of government jobs from one location to another. Highly trained people in the old government centers were still in really competitive markets with significant government opportunities. But those communities that were about to be devastated by free trade (usually smaller backwater communities) suddenly saw federal agencies appear that required thousands of jobs overnight, and whom had a mandate to hire those affected by free trade, thereby saving the economy for those workers in the area.

My point is that creative solutions are possible, if we dispense with the notion that the only solution possible is the free market.
I've been suspecting PG&E is letting the chips fall so they can appropriate resources needed to modernize the grid in preparation for EVs charging in every home.

It's a lot easier to get a massive infrastructure spending bill passed in a crisis when the state is literally burning down.
> The new iOS UI/UX is horrible and it's extremely difficult to understand how the hell to navigate anything

Meta comment. It's interesting to see the debate on HN between optimizing for power users versus lay users. For the latter, we cryptic settings and/or hidden functionality. For the latter, we get a limited set of communicated functions.
Semi-related to the Cruise AV, but should we be worried about a sudden increase in LIDAR everywhere from the perspective of protecting eyesight? I understand there are regulations and such to limit the "power" of the light, so just looking for more info.
When you're about to get a message on your cellphone and it interferes with nearby speakers and makes weird chirping noises.
Medium voltage charging isn't a big challenge considering some mining equipment is already powered by medium voltage. Those mammoth draglines and bucket excavators are powered by an actual high voltage extension cord that is moved around with the machine. They even have plugs and connectors, saw one rated for 25kV and 600A, three phase. That's almost 26MW. Totally doable.
Worse, it seems more about whether they're men at all. I got to the end and stopped reading. I thought this article was going to get into specifics of what these so called "made men" did wrong, it turned out to be a ra-ra feminist piece. I've learned the hard way these sorts of people often have very wrong and warped ideas of what makes people successful or unsuccessful so that was a disappointment. Not worth reading really.
With a big enough hill, you could use the excess energy to smelt the ore on the way down.
Something I've noticed a huge amount over the last couple of years in particular - no one has any change for the homeless / those on the streets / those collecting for charity. Contactless has been a 'thing' for a while now, but it really seemed to kick up a gear when phones and watches had wallets and the buses and a decent amount of restaurants went 'card only'.
While originally created for a very different purpose, I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan and other logical languages would be a great basis for computer code.
From Wikipedia: "In a free market, the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government or other authority and from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities."

I think most people stop reading at "government" and don't realize that for a free market to exist, it needs to exist in a vacuum. There is no frictionless market, and every market has it's share of cost externalizations (plastics, energy, etc.), or leverage imbalance (healthcare, labor market).
Again, unrealistic attitudes like that are why I laugh at the article.

You can't do 20 miles in an electric bike in the rain, or in the cold. It's just absurd.
It would be a massive annoyance, but would still work better than a differential gear made with the materials science of the time. I personally think that the story is fantasy.
ॐ Relaxing 360° Meditation Music Positive Vibrations and Isochronic Alpha Waves
Twitter Stock Plunges After Earnings Are Worse Than Expected
When Reality Becomes Fiction
I didn't flag it, but it's a weird jab at millennials.
The regulator could say "do a better job"

Then PG&E would say: "ok, let us raise rates so it does not impact profit"

If they disagree on that, it's a long administrative and legal process to work it out.

Also, many of the employees of the regulator are either:

- former (and future!) energy company employees

- owe their jobs to politicians who take $ from the energy companies

It is a complex, opaque process (to decide on require maintenance levels) that ends up controlled by the people who care the most about it.
There is a clear connection.
Want to know what's crazy? I've stood up a bunch of services and stuff professionally over the last bunch of years, it's just that internal company tools always take care of deployment and security and authentication and exposing them to the world. Yay for efficiency and specialization. Boo for blind spots.

Any recommended reading for biting the bullet?
Like social networks breeding political stupidity, mob rule and demagoguery?
It means firing those who don't want collaboration - it's poorly worded by not necessarily oxymoronic.
Just out of curiosity, are you moving off of Firebase because of technical limitations, or because of pricing?
I was so fascinated by this invention as a kid that I tried to build it with Lego.
I've felt this about Microsoft hardware, for what it's worth. I really like their mice, keyboards, and the Surface line.
At least not those people who install proprietary software on their systems.

Also, non-ASCII or non-Latin is just a step on a continuum: obfuscated code, machine language, spaghetti code, non-documented code... Actually, it may be perfectly workable to run the Arabic code through Google Translate and understand the result.
The charity people here border on harassment, have card readers, physically try to stop you or block you, and apparently none of what you donate actually goes to the charity, it's mostly paid out in commissions to rent seekers.
And yet not using it is still far more dangerous, than not treating cancer at all.
A giant sucking sound
Making blanket, vague criticism against "millenials" isn't particularly great discourse.

Edit: And after your edit just now adding a reference to Germany is _so close_ to being Godwin's Law? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
Captain Forever
Have you seen the reactions to the billg AmA's on reddit? They love this guy. Obviously it's all super-engineered by some very crafty PR firm.
Other idiots also made the scrollbar thinner, harder to see, and hidden unless you purposefully move your mouse cursor to the side of the page. With a mouse and good eyesight, it's not that big of a deal, but I would imagine it's an accessibility issue looking for a place to happen.
Maybe a better way forward is for labor cost disparity to be just small enough to encourage jobs by being cost effective after shipping with a hint of extra profit rather than a make-several-one-trillion-dollar-companies cost disparity.
What id love to see more is blurring the line between user and designer. Too often software gets in the way of the user and simple tweaking to an interface etc. can make a world of difference. Unfortunately this is usually either not possible or involves a user navigating endless configuration options or worse configuration files. Maybe that’s not a big deal to us in the software industry but it is a huge problem for your average user.
This sounds like something you read about in the undeveloped world.

Something is very wrong that this is happening in the USA, let alone a state with the 6th largest GDP in the world.
The tech sector as a whole is in a period of massive expansion. It is basically assumed that any well-run tech company needs to be perpetually hiring anybody sufficiently qualified for the endless business opportunities that lie just on the horizon, and there's a small number of expensive cities where it is prudent to do so.

Some day the business climate will cool and the realm of new tech growth won't seem as limitless. When this time comes, big profitable tech companies will continue their drive for bigger profits, and they will turn to cutting costs rather than driving new growth.

When cutting costs comes to tech, plenty of established companies will decide it's time to head off to a smaller city with lower rent and lower wages - or atleast some of them will, and eventually wages and rent in silicon valley will start heading downwards from its current place in the heavens.
The one I have a hard time explaining to my friends is the Martian Potato Paradox. It's hard because I actually cannot wrap my head around the truth, even though I can explain why it's true.

https://medium.com/i-math/matt-damon-s-martian-potatoes-1bcd...
Was about to upvote you until your last sentence.

Reason being, yes, I agree that a huge problem with globalization is that, while developed countries have spent many decades building things like labor rights, environmental protections, IP protections, etc., globalization essentially allows an out for companies to undermine all of these base-level rules.

But there is a very good reason people are blaming "free markets" and "libertarians" - lots of the cheerleading behind globalization was based on people espousing their love for free markets and libertarianism. The fact that you may disagree with their definition of free markets and libertarianism doesn't change the fact that their definition is the one that is most widely acknowledged.
Apple at least kept the minimal UI design where it belonged -- mobile. They also have a history of getting it right - the sole reason for the iPod and iPhone's success was it's beautifully simplistic design, especially on the software.

Microsoft in a panic, went overboard and started the trend that our 26" desktop monitors didn't need much on it. At least they corrected most of the issues by now, but many other companies haven't.
It is, to be sure, an immensely difficult problem. But my argument doesn't hinge on anything; IMO, it's simply a statement of fact.

It's sort of like saying that if we want to avoid global extinction we need to acquire space travel and populate distance worlds. Not knowing how to get to space, let alone travel to distance worlds, doesn't change the logic. The alternative is that we accept extinction.

We're exceedingly myopic about what strategies like re-education imply. We associate it with a small number of particular programs and are quick to conclude they're ineffective. But re-education can mean many things, things we haven't even explored yet. We could look to German countries with a stronger history of apprenticeships and union labor programs, though that only scratches the surface. And maybe it does require incentivizing or even mandating age-based affirmative action. And maybe re-education (and education policy more generally) will ultimately prove to be relatively limited and constitute only a small part of a larger constellation of strategies. The point is that we have to stop pushing back and earnestly move forward.

There's simply no choice in the matter; we have to be open-minded. Unless we're comfortable continuing to roll the dice to see how many more generations the United States can go fecklessly chasing fantasies. What someone like Trump and the cast of opportunists across the spectrum he has ushered in have shown is that we're not immune to the political pathologies that have afflicted so many other countries in the Americas and around the world.
Free market only works when everyone follows the same rules. When you have a player like China who is dead set on taking advantages of the rules but never taking the responsibility, you create an one-sided situation.

Trade is not just an economic issue. It's a political issue when you have China in the game.
Reactive Elements: a tiny JavaScript lib based on observables for building UI
Neutral, in your case, probably means that there is not enough volume coming from your server, and as far as I know the reputation of your /32 does not depend on your block (of course, providers may still decide to filter your block). Did you set up the PTR record and SMTP banner?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_HARP

"On November 18, 1966 the Yuma gun fired a 400 lb (180 kg) Martlet 2 projectile at 7,000 ft/s (2,100 m/s)[4] sending it briefly into space and setting an altitude record of 180 km (590,000 ft; 110 mi)"

If my math napkin correct the projectile lost less than 1.5 Mach of the speed when it reached 30km height, ie. where air is just 2% density of the sea level.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon

"The second supergun, "Big Babylon", of which a pair were planned (one to be mounted horizontally, at least for test purposes), was much larger. The barrel was to be 156 metres (512 feet) long, with a bore of 1 metre (3.3 feet).[1] Originally intended to be suspended by cables from a steel framework, it would have been over 100 metres (300 feet) high at the tip. The complete device weighed about 2,100 tonnes (the barrel alone weighed 1,655 tons). It was a space gun intended to shoot projectiles into orbit, a theme of Bull's work since Project HARP."

what a pity :

"The project began in 1988; it was halted in 1990 after Bull was assassinated, and parts of the superguns were seized in transit around Europe. The components that remained in Iraq were destroyed by the United Nations after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. "

one can dream - put such a gun on plateau at 4km altitude, half sea level pressure, somewhere in Bolivia or Peru (it is even close to equator) or may be Tibet, and shoot the fuel, food, water, etc. into the orbit to build up the Moon, Mars, etc, missions. If only we could find a few tens of millions dollars :). I'm waiting for Musk to hopefully get to it as he has a business case and money.
I'm miserable and all the tech that has "enabled me to do anything" has made everything seem arbitrary. If you can do anything, why do anything?
Do Deep Generative Models Know What They Don't Know?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnac_the_Magnificent
Paywall bypass: http://archive.is/oyimo
Ditto. I found it awful.
This is how I imagined the situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4CizzE-zZo
Are you sure they are spam? Google's engineers consider annoying things like recipe pages with 20 paragraphs of stories before the actual recipe not to be spam.
Losing Confidence in Quality: Unspoken Evolution of Computer Vision Services
It's a little surprising to me (not necessarily bad, just unexpected) that Google is researching this.

Yes, it's good for companies to do some R&D, and sometimes the R part of the R&D gets pretty theoretical, which is usually a good sign that a company is trying to really innovate.

But usually also there's some indirect way to tie it back to some kind of application that could possibly somehow make the company money in the long term. Otherwise, you're just a for-profit company spending money on something because it's interesting.

So what's the application here? Are there novel ideas or techniques here that can be applied to other AI problems? Is there some kind of application for smell in a Google product?
swipe left 2x, or hold down the X and "clear all notifications". still not as fast as Android, but can't say I've ever been bothered by it.
It might be feasible to use a mass driver to substitute for a first stage, especially if the mass driver mouth is high enough up to substantially reduce air resistance on the things coming out - the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro say. But that would be at most a few km/s of the 8 you need to get into low Earth orbit.
Thank you, I will read and try it. Looks very interesting!
If the vendors are complying with known safe-power limits (sub mW laser power), it should be fine.

One should primarily be concerned with laser powers that unintentionally exceed design power, or if they're ultra-fast lasers, with the peak power.
Ah yes, unshielded speakers and cellphones. The terrible noise in the early 2000s letting me know my parents were calling the cellphone they gave me for college in order to force me to keep in touch.
> The Podcasts app might be the best example of a horribly designed product. I can't believe anyone at Apple is actually using that app.

Every time I start an episode I immediately just to the nice "jump 15sec" button that's in the lower right so that I can skip the lead-in ads. But I've found that button to be terribly unreliable. As I find myself jamming it over and over trying to skip the ads that I'm hearing.

What I discovered is the contact patch for the button is actually quite small, so you have to just delicately tap it with the tip of your finger so that it doesn't register touch outside of it boundary. Super frustrating when the clear boundaries of buttons disappears back in the dawn of "all things flat".

Note this may have improved in iOS 13 but I have yet to upgrade.
Everyone is oblivious to their surroundings. Whether it’s because they’re looking down at their smartphone or listening to a podcast or music on their AirPods, people aren’t paying attention to what’s happening around them, and they are walking out into streets without looking for cars, assuming no one is coming. I bike most places, and the number of pedestrians (and other bicyclists!) who can’t hear my bike bell is astounding.
In my early 30s I find the only useful thing about it is local gardening/foraging communities I participate in. Outside of that, there's nothing but fluff.
Somehow it's considered OK that the phone doesn't even sit flat on a surface

That's a feature, not a bug.

When placed on a surface, the phone becomes a tripod, so that any hard dirt or crumbs can't scratch the majority of the surface. It reduces the potential surface area and the parts of the phone that will most likely be scratched by being placed on a dirty surface are confined to the bottom edge and the edge of the lens protrusion.
iPhones as recent as the SE are able to lay flat on a table + be reasonably sized with a case. It really is a bizarre trend that I hope goes away.
Lessons from 5 years of teaching the world to code
I was just thinking on the tube how Steve Jobs wanted to put a computer on everyone's desks, but he ended up putting one in everyone's hands and now we're all crooked and staring down like Quasimodo.
For many people, "C" means C+{gcc/clang}+{x86/arm}, which has much more specific semantics than the C99 abstract machine.

They'll ask interview questions like "what's sizeof(int)" expecting a number, and will find "it depends on the compiler/architecture" evasive, unless you follow it up with "but it's always 4". To be fair, this is how 99% of people use C in practice, and x86/arm behave pretty similarly to each other in the scheme of things (vs, say, a LISP machine).

Taking into account ABI constraints, including x-{language,module} call safety, threading expectations, and more, a typical C programmer has to have a decent idea of how the machine works, relative to a Python/JS/Ruby programmer.

I don't love that someone "learning C to learn how the machine works" will think malloc()/free() are how the machine works, and will get have wrong expectations ideas about memory when using, say, V8's bump allocated nursery + compacting GC. But it's not a bad first step for someone who doesn't know what a pointer is to the machine.
Milestone: Bert Boosts Google Search
Don't forget that three finger swipe right does... "redo"!
Having been almost 100% cashless for the last decade it's only a matter of time before homeless people use contactless payments as an attempt to defeat my excuses.