skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a cascade of unsupported assumptions: have you really never heard someone complaining about non-native speaker's use of English, using it to say they aren't qualified for a job, etc.?

“most non-English countries teach children English in their version of middle school” in particular is really dubious unless you're cherry-picking a handful of small, affluent countries. I've known a number of people who moved to the U.S. from non-English speaking countries and the general trend is that the average is closer to, say, how well most Americans speak Spanish than fluency. It's easy to get this wrong if your experience is predominantly in high-level academic or professional contexts where there's been a strong selection bias filtering out people without strong English proficiency.
I need to use a MacBook Pro for work. Discovering that there is an option to make scrollbars always visible when there is scrolling to be done was, by a significant margin, the best QOL improvement I have discovered.

This happens to me so often it's ridiculous. Maybe because I'm just used to seeing a scrollbar if there is a Y-overflow, and people that grew up with this system know to -- I guess just like try scrolling every interface and see if it scrolls or something? I dunno.

For anyone else in my boat:

System Preferences -> General -> Show Scroll-bars -> Always
> I’d personally sacrifice a bit of my individual autonomy to live in a more functional society.

Well, you can easily sacrifice a bit of your own autonomy.

Did you mean that you also want to sacrifice other people's autonomy?
The Current War
I'm living mit multiple partners and they are also dating multiple people.

Since they tell me about their dating experience, I got more insight of how other men behave to women, then when I lived monogamous.

What I wanted to say is, after what I heared from my partners about men they dated, I totally understand these results.
To complain about and argue for changes in upstream water use.
nah, I don't buy this.

In a large company, most people _aren't_ making the big bucks and don't do it to make a fortune. They do it to make a living.

The "culture" of a place, especially at a bootstrapped startup where the higher ups _aren't_ raking in the big bucks is a huge draw to someone where money is not the main reason for taking a job.

For me, I'm paid well (probably 60th percentile for my location/position) but the flexibility I get from my employer which cultivates a nice culture and work-life balance is worth the cut in pay.

That said, if by culture you mean ping-pong tables, free beer and massages. I'm right with you.
In the early days of nginx non-russian doc was a link to Google translate, and that was good enough, it worked fine for everybody.

How do you think non-english speakers read documentation in english?
It always puzzled me why Firebird didn't get more popular. It was a great little RMDBS.
It's really not though, there are many candidates in a political election, many political debates, many topics, in order to make an informed decision it takes a lot more than just going to the ballet box and ticking a person's name. The fact that the mass media can't be trusted makes that getting correct information even harder. To make a properly informed decision to vote for a candidate you can truly say you believe in and whose agenda you know inside out would take days if not weeks of investigative research in my opinion, how is that easy?
So you're saying subject a fundamental basic need for human life and existence to capitalism? That's an absolutely terrifying proposition.
>Sometimes I wonder if the people of the 1960s (i.e the people who came up with lisp, multics, unix) had the right idea: to use a computer you should program it.There are many programs, each does a different thing, you program your final product by composing programs. Users of the final product are the programmers.

So if I have a computer and I want to access the internet, I should have to write my own browser first?

No... "to use a computer you should program it" isn't a philosophy, it's a technical limitation from when "programs" were simple and everything ran in a terminal, and no one but engineers and students would ever be expected to touch a computer in the first place, and it doesn't scale.

Should people be able to write software for their own computers? Yes.

Should programming be considered a normal part of computer use, and be far more common than it is, with systems and software being more open than they are? Yes.

Should people need to write their own software? NO.

>I think we as an industry made a wrong decision turning programs into products. We should have kept programs as programs - make them super composable, and then let the end user design their own products that fit them best.

It wasn't entirely wrong. End users don't want to write software, they want to use their computers do to things - and most of those things now require multiple thousands or millions of lines of code written by engineers with domain specific knowledge. Turning programs into products is a way of managing the complexity necessary for software that's useful to people in modern society.
I don’t think it’s fair to assume that there’s a higher incidence of autism on HN than elsewhere (bad social skills can also occur in neurotypical people), but hot damn does it really bug me that HN has such a hard time with snark.
Ah, I see, it’s a quote from the explanation of grammar, not one of the definitions. As the others mentioned, this is explaining grammar, gendered words, not people.
Hierarchical Transformers for Long Document Classification
Any article that congratulates hyoo-mons on their uniquely superior capacities instantly disqualifies itself from representing anything fundamentally correct.

Either (1) fundamental mathematical principles are universal, and every society that incrementally improves will converge on them, or (2) our mathematical principles are socially constructed, and other societies will evolve their own structures that may be closed to us. There is no middle ground.

There is, however, a third possibility: some of the universal fundamentals may be inaccessible to humans because of innate limitations in our savanna-evolved monkey brains, where aliens need not be so restricted. In other words, we (and everybody else) have access to the basics, but not everybody gets beyond the basics.

We can reasonably conclude that we have thus far only touched on the basics, because we have only just started looking. Whether we will progress beyond those basics has yet to be demonstrated. If civilization collapses as the natural world breaks under the strain put on it by industrial society, we might stop at this level. Or, if the number of people with mental capacity to comprehend increasing levels of sophistication declines, eventually it will reach one, and then zero.

Our only hope might be inventing machines that can progress beyond us, but they would then supplant us. The aliens might see no value in talking with us, but only with our machines, and we would never understand what they were saying to one another.

All of the above is the natural progression of the Copernican revolution: any assumption of specialness is flawed in exactly the degree by which it flatters us.
Scrum, which is "Agile" repackaged in a way that's in favor of management at the expense of engineers and the work they're doing and, ultimately, the stakeholders.
especially given Mohegan Sun is a singular place?
>Off-screen indicators/functionality is a problem everywhere.

Yes, but an iPhone 8 costs at least 450 dollars, and Apple products pride themselves in the "premium experience" they provide.
Please, that's not what gatekeeping is. You might as well start throwing around accusations of racism.
"I myself personally can't stand politics get in the way of work!" rather suggestive that they're thinking about it...a lot.

"why don't you be the team leader, but let's not tell anyone..."

Hmmm
There are very few government policies in the Western world that would have any noticeable impact on climate change.

I believe that Climate Change is mostly caused by deforestation, but how would any government stop 7B people from cutting down trees?
From a sociological standpoint: Because you're doing bad social science. When you're talking about values/cultures, those things are inherently rooted in a culture. Saying "all men X" is almost entirely useless because there's almost always going to be a culture or subculture that makes it "most men" instead.

This specific article was based off a study conducted in Austria with mean ages of men/women involved in their 20s. IDK what this says about world cultures as a whole, or even the culture of Austria as a whole. I would assume that the possibility of people late stages of life might have different feelings on the matter exists and they don't mention it as a variable they accounted for. Never mind all the other variables that one could suggest might affect this matter that aren't specifically mentioned in the abstract. And, in fact, they mention that this paper they're presenting is the first to really delve into the subject of ex-partner feelings, so their results might be completely disproved as more people look into the matter.
This fee inflation seems to be more and more prevalent. Whenever there is pressure to keep the base price low, fees are invented.

For utilities, it’s regulatory pressure.

For hotels, it’s competition on advertised prices. Airbnb is particularly bad about this.
1. Refusal to accept that task estimates are subject to change.

2. Managing people purely for their outputs; not as individuals with lives, career goals, interests, strengths, weaknesses.

3. Insisting on process but not participating. E.g. scrums with no management present.
There are a lot of interesting things to discuss in the Murray-Darling basin, the water market and associated system of dams and waterways is one of Australia's subtle-but-serious national achievements.

However the article is a puff piece and is at best alluding vaguely to those more interesting issues. It is only inspiring discussion of them as people are trying to find lenses to interpret it that aren't climate related. It'd be lovely if HN suddenly decided to take a deep interest in irrigation systems but I'll wait for a few more articles on the subject to hit the front page before I start believing it. The comment threads look more like we are playing a game of finding links that aren't climate related.
Windows Phone 7 was really interesting because the OS UI very intentionally did "bad crops" of items to indicate scrolling was possible

https://www.google.com/search?q=windows+phone+7+ui&tbm=isch
I used to give basic computer courses for seniors when I was still in highschool to earn a little money.

One would always let go of the mouse to click. He would position the mouse, lift his hand a few centimeters above the mouse button and then press down on it fast. Sometimes worked, mostly didn't because the mouse would move during the click. Now imagine him trying double clicks..

Another guy would make extremely detailed notes. I would show him some setting in a dropdown menu of Word, and he would perfectly draw these menues in his notebook. By the end, he probably hat 20 pages of beautiful notes, it was actually quite impressive.
SUVs second biggest cause of emissions rise, figures reveal
Unilaterally setting unreasonable deadlines in order get engineers to "work harder".
Well, I don't know what the big Scenarios are, but I would be interested to know how humanity could keep on with the impressive technological progress and increases in productivity while simultaneously remaining true to our biological roots. That is, gathering together in urban metropolises (with all their advantages) while still integrating the best parts of our ancient environment: living in nature, forging deep relationships, meaningfully engaging in small communities etc.

Compared to what our living environment was for hundreds of thousands of years, it has changed so rapidly lately that I suspect that the human psyche has troubles keeping up. This results in unnecessary stress, anxiety, depression, feelings of meaninglessness, loneliness, drug abuse etc. "modern" problems.

Humans are very adaptable and I kind of enjoy living in a city, but I still wonder how much of the human experience we are missing because our biological blueprint was molded by thousands of years of natural selection in a totally different environment, and the modern experience just might fall short in some ways.
This still requires xmake to be installed. CMake does that too, as does Premake and a bunch of other tools, but they all need to be installed - except Autotools.

What i'm talking about is generating a script for something that is part of the OS itself (like shell script, which is what Autotools does) that itself generates the Makefile which uses a widely available standard tool (Make). So a user (i include library users - as opposed to library developers - as "users" here) wont need to install xmake/cmake/whatever just to build the program/library, they only need to have shell and make which are available everywhere. On Unix at least, on Windows it'd need to generate a batch file for MSVC (this is where Autotools fall short since they're made for unix only).
Then where are all the folks dying today from the high power Tesla Supercharger incidents? 2MW or 250kW, either way you'll be dead if that accidentally lights you up.

If you set the system up right, you can't do that in a meaningful way, and if you do... well there's 2MW of deterrent. It only takes one workplace incident like that to make sure the bosses put some measures in place to make sure it never happens again. And keep in mind: at that kind of power level, you aren't just zapping one person... it's probably going to destroy a LOT of equipment and infrastructure... so there's a hefty monetary incentive to make sure that never happens.
20 years on, the tragic loss of Payne Stewart
C was (and still is) a fairly obvious choice for programming when you need full control over the memory layout of an application (which is becoming all the more important with the growing CPU/memory gap). I choose C 15 years before I got into contact with UNIX (first on the Amiga, after that on Windows, and only fairly recently macOS and Linux).
This has nothing to do with cars, pedestrians are just as selfish, if not worse (at least in cars they mostly follow basic rules/laws). I'm a fast walker and get annoyed every day with people who are ignorant of their surroundings, don't care about blocking all traffic (e.g. 2 slow fat people walking next to each other and taking up the whole width of the sidewalk), rudely bumping into other people or standing right in the middle of an obvious chokepoint (bloody tourists usually).
This is true, too, but I meant users, too. It's all too common for users to screenshot things, etc. I see it a lot of the time on Twitter for example. You can delete tweets, but oftentimes it's pointless. But I also regularly see my gf taking photos with her phone of various apps she uses on her notebook, just to have the info around on her phone. I suspect it's pretty common, because it's much more low-tech then saving pages or API scraping.
The poor design described in the article is really bad.

But

> Whenever I touch one now, I feel like a idiot and dinosaur. It can take me minutes to figure out the most basic things, and often I end up searching on the web.

This is exactly how I feel when I pick an Android phone (even with stock Android). Finding apps and launching them quickly seems like an art to learn. And don’t even get me started on how settings are organized. So I conclude that both platforms are a matter of getting used to and learning how to use them, since both makers have crammed a lot more on to smaller screens than can be intuitively deduced.

Funnily enough, among all the Android users I’ve seen, everyone has a habit of force killing their apps every time they close it! I wonder how they learned that and why they even do it (I can understand killing rogue apps or buggy apps).
This rings true, but I imagine the difference is higher if you can't read the Latin script or if your keyboard doesn't have Latin characters.
Microsoft finally built a repairable Surface Laptop
I honestly can't tell if you're joking. If you're serious, do you not believe there's a meaningful distinction between a person's biological sex at birth and the degree to which they self-identify with social constructs of masculinity and femininity?
CGP Grey did a really nice, concise video on the topic of traffic and he addresses your point in the first 30 seconds.
Coordination, not cars, is the problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzzSao6ypE
Yeah, did not expect to see a link to RA when I checked HN this morning
This reminded me that I've been putting off trying sourcehut. Gotta get on that.
Management's idea of who "top performers" are tends to get skewed towards sycophantic or dishonest people, vs. the type that quietly gets the work done and doesn't care much about credit. But multiple times I have heard assurances, not to worry, they know who is really getting things done, and they know who is BSing them. When they say this, they never do.
No, not in that game. People would cut into each others line all the time and generally behave stupidly. Also, if you have a traffic line where the behavior of the car in the front affects the cars behind it you already have bad traffic, which wouldn't happen with properly designed roads.
light pipes do exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_tube
and I think people do use them.
"common sense" isn't the best justification, as plenty of studies provide empirical evidence of exactly that. Iirc there's near parity in general IPV but something like a 2:1 ratio in grievous bodily harm, with even higher ratios when it comes to outright murder.
Those are bad examples because they didn't need huge unprofitable upfront investments. Unreal engine, for example, was a side benefit of creating a game that was itself profitable, and then they realized they could make additional money from licensing the engine, and did so. It simply doesn't take massive upfront independent investment to develop game engines, and the market is already crowded with all sorts of good options some of which are even developed on a volunteer basis (like Minecraft which originally used the open source LWJGL).
First off, as mentioned in other comments, ISPs tend to not enforce the rules about not running Internet-visible servers.

But let's go ahead and go with your assumption that they are. You can still have a secure connection from your doorbell camera to a mobile app anywhere in the world. Both your app and your camera connect to an intermediate server. This server merely acts like a proxy, passing packets between the two. Using a standard TLS handshake, the app can establish encryption with the camera without the proxy in the middle being able to decrypt the traffic. When the camera is initially setup, it can generate a TLS certificate that the app can download and pin (Since the app and camera will be on the same Wifi network), so that the proxy server can't try to present its own and intercept the communications.

If you need me to go into greater detail, I can. But this is definitely a solved problem.

EDIT: Another way to think of this...apps like Signal and Wire let people talk to each other by each client connecting to a central server to send and retrieve messages, but without the ability for those central servers to intercept the contents of the messages through public key encryption. The camera-to-app connection would work basically the same way.
Are you saying that fixing climate change requires poor life quality for people in Western countries?

Is poor life quality in the West going to stop worldwide deforestation somehow?
more details about that particular truck: https://hackaday.com/2019/08/22/electric-dump-truck-produces...
> In order to build a MOSFET, you need to know how do electrons react in the presence of thin barriers, and how thick should the gate oxide be to prevent breakdown while still keeping the field strong.

Here you are speaking using words like "electron", "thin barrier", "oxide" and so on. So you are thinking in a framework of our culture and our variant of STEM. Doing so you are trying to prove that there is no way to invent another variant of STEM. I believe, that such an approach could achieve nothing.

I mean, to speak "electron" you need to rely implicitly on a whole mountain of theories about reality. So even if you proved that one cannot build MOSFET without QM, it would mean that he cannot do it while relying on this mountain of theories. It wouldn't prove that there are no other mountains allowing to invent MOSFET.

> Can it be different, can you do QM without Schrödinger Equation? Sure, but it will still be QM.

It is a trivial proposition. "QM without Schrödinger Equation" is QM by definition. The question is if it possible to build some other models of reality that allow to invent MOSFET. As I see it you are trying to remove QM from the mountain of theories and to think what could replace QM. It is completely possible that nothing but QM could replace QM in such a setup. But what would happen if you remove all of the mountain of theories and start from scratch?

I do not know. To see what would happen I need to design an empirical research that would involve some millions of people and a few millennia. To be sure I would need to repeat this at least 50 times.
> Google's making us play by their rules

Yeah well, they offer a free service and you use it. They own their network and they can decide what they allow.
Yes, both are terrible.
Aaron Hsu’s talk on APL - I think this talk - https://youtube.com/watch?v=9xCJ3BCIudI - has a more radical interpretation; by the time you’re using lisp to compose lightbulb apis and Bluetooth stream hacking, you’re already past the point of divergence that you mention and are on the wrong side of it.

APL does the hard part of choosing composable functions and presents those to the user, as a simplified interface. Sorting isn’t a global namespace of thirty different sort algorithms so you can delight in picking the exact one you want, sorting is one character (⍋) so you can use it as a composable building block and not care about the details.

I might agree that the core issue is that programs have become less composable over time - but what you ask for doesn’t seem to address that at all. Part of the job of designers and creators is to make simplifying decisions on behalf of users; I don’t want the lightbulb raw interfaces to be exposed to me as an alternative to a crummy closed app product, I want a well designed composable app product as the api I use - all at once, so I don’t have to care about negotiating access tokens or header padding anymore than I have to care about LED heat dissipation or mains smoothing inside the bulb when I flick a light switch.

For composition I want Lego not a machine shop, and I accept compromises in ability to get that. I want grep not fopen().

When you say you want composition what you’re asking for is a machine shop; not a bad thing to ask for, but completely different from where you started out with Unix shell composing of finished product programs which you originally said you wanted.
This one is better than the other child comment, but you still need to show that the limit of a sum is the sum of the limits. Not as easy as you might think, and not usually done in high school!
It would be incorrect, but it would not be weird because we have unfortunately gotten lazy in our writing.
How I fell out of love with the internet