skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> there's no reason anyone should need to target Java 6 bytecode and APIs in 2019

Java 7 byte code was a big mistake. People complained but Oracle didn’t listen. As always.

http://chrononsystems.com/blog/java-7-design-flaw-leads-to-h...
Show HN: Crypt, manage secret store locally and generate passphrase (124 SLOC)
It's not a good thing, only a bad thing with a good side effect ;-)
Sucker Bet (A Thought Experiment)
The commute to work helps me as well. I think this is something that can get lost for people who work from home. Too many people are so focused on heads down LOC/hour and forget that the software is art. I've worked with good engineers that can't touch type. Designing effective maintainable solutions is hard and should be the thing that people focus on.
It arguably is.

A good SRE needs to understand systems, as in automation of n computers. Focusing on and prefering single system tools where you have to take manual action points to an immaturity in dealing with complex distributed systems.

However, it's a common problem and most of the folks buying complicated distributed tracing systems don't have particular skills in using them either, so your skills are valuable, even if there could be better ways to do it.

Similarly if you focus on hiring SREs who know shell commands well, you might lose more pertinent skills such as knowing what terraform is actually doing, general programming skills, CI/CD and an understanding of cloud APIs.

Horses for courses; the more we know the better. Look for both sets of skills in your teams and cross train as much as possible.
I utterly fail to see the point. In all likelihood I would take offense and cut short any further communication, should someone attempt to talk to me through Google [or whatever] Translate (but then, I can barely stand plain Gmail).

For what it's worth, Danish actually is my native language.
Or just open it in another container.
Looks slick! I've used Google Calendar to achieve something similar in the past but this looks better.

Minor suggestion would be to remove the unlimited text messages from the plans. It's harder to change later when this takes off, is ripe for abuse, and (to me) makes it feel unsustainable: everyone know unlimited is not actually unlimited. I'd reserve that for for the "call us" enterprise pricing options.
Does Red Hat have a solution for using Kubernetes (or OpenShift) in development? Something similar to Skaffold or Tilt? AFAIK, those tools depend on DOcker to do builds.
When they're well into the double-digit percentage of the population, I guess. (Not just technically tetrachromats but actually able to discern a 4-dimensional color space).

Since they can perceive more colors, it's never an accessibility issue, so it's far more important to accommodate dichromats, and that's already very hard because we can't tell how a person with a different set of cones would perceive a particular color just by looking at it.

Also, we already have a color model that can't reproduce true cyan as perceived by "regular" trichromats, and so far that hasn't been a real issue.
An MLIR Dialect for High-Level Optimization of Fortran – 2019 LLVM DevMtg
Hofstadter is trying to draw a conceptual distinction between "understanding" (generating language by drawing from a full interiority of human subjective experience), and mere "translation" (based on looking at words).

But analyzing how words are used is a great way of working backward into something that gets closer and closer to human subjectivity. Some neural net trained on how words are used would start to model concepts that reflect "under the hood" human experiences that generate language.

Maybe it's not 'enough', and a robust translation engine would have a sense of irony, jealousy, favorite foods, etc that it would need to rely on to translate things, and maybe that set of concepts to be obtained via something other than training on words. But I don't think there's a clear conceptual line to be drawn. Studying the way we use words can get us a loose approximation, maybe even a good one.
If I were to build a box out of these, I'd do immersion cooling and place the chip(s) across the front of the machine behind laminated glass.

Keeping the fluid cool would be left to the ugly parts nobody would ever see.
Let's Encrypt certificate issuance was down
Yep. technically, Apple doesn't force Firefox to use WebKit. They could still use their Gecko WebRenderer and use Apple's JavaScriptCore to run page scripts. Same goes to Chrome: Blink + JSC instead of Blink + V8.

In practice in seems like both Chrome and Firefox have their renderers and JavaScript runtimes so tightly integrated that it's very hard to replace the later.
> As for digital comics, it's worth checking out this fascinating experiment in trying to making comics more than just static pictures: "Protanopia is a digital comic for iPad and iPhone. (...)

Very nice.

Also check Bottom of the Ninth, by Ryan Woodward if you are interested in creative use of the digital medium.

http://ryanwoodwardart.com/my-works/bottom-of-the-ninth/
The return of clippy?
Screw that, I'm not going to install Docker just to read NyTimes articles.
Still no benchmarks, so this doesn't add all that much to the earlier coverage, unfortunately.
Yes. As a very happy Windows user, both server and desktop, I'm always scratching my head about the FUD comments I see here about Windows. Most are simply untrue, else they're vast distortions. It makes me wonder whose behind them and why. Is it just ultra-fandom, or is someone trying an orgranized attempt to manipulate markets through mis-information?
I dont agree. Skyholk is infrastructure, so you want it to lift smaller payloads daily, rather than a heavy payload once a month.

If you typical rocket lifts 20T, you would built a small sky hook to lift like 1T, and use it to lift fuel and other consumables cheaply. That would bootstrap you to build larger one in the future
I think this is the same idea in another comment, above, about Pascal's Muggle. I think there's a bit of a confusion here though. I can adjust the probabilities of any event given new evidence.

For example, at this point in time I believe that the probability that I can fly if I flap my arms up and down is zero. I have no evidence that this is possible and I understand enough of the relevant physics to know that this is not just improbable, it is impossible.

However, if tomorrow I flapped my arms and found that I could fly, there would be nothing stopping me from re-evaluating my belief and assigning a higher probability to the chance that I can fly if I flap my arms.

But I think the problems begin with the misguided ambition to be able to predict the future even when there is no evidence to support any prediction. You can't know what you can't know. You can assign any probability you like to what you can't know, but even if you end up assigning the right probability that will be the result of blind chance, not the result of correct reasoning.

Anyway this is why I prefer logical inference to probabilistic inference. I understand that I'm in a minority on this, but for me it makes a lot more sense to maintain a state of provisional belief with an absolute value (in {0,1}), provisional in the sense that new evidence can always change your belief, than to live in a perpetual state of uncertainty which never resolves itself no matter how much evidence you see, because there is always a chance that you're wrong. There always _is_ a chance that you're wrong but it just seems cumbersome to have to maintain a ledger of competing probabilities for everything that has happened, and everything that hasn't yet happened, just on the off chance that anything can happen, including mutually exclusive events.

In principle, anything might happen. In practice, not everything will. There must be a sensible way to figure out what we need to prepare for and what we can safely ignore. And the whole Pascal's Mugger paradox, while it's meant to attack Pascal's Wager's logic, ends up for me as an illustration of why proabilistic inference is deeply borked.
Yeah, only problem is you could in fact, change it.

And then they removed that feature, long before it ran on a separate low power IC.

That's for Android phones. I'm actually not sure they run it from a separate IC anyway, like the iPhones.
Ask HN: How to mentor from an open source life?
I've been a software developer for more than 30 years. I've been involved in the open source movement since the mid-1980s. At my age (nearly 56), if I worked for a conventional corporation, I'd like to imagine that I'd be the curmudgeonly old guy that younger programmers simultaneously viewed as awesome, intimidating and irrelevant. In short, I'd be a mentor!

But I'm not that person, because for the last two decades, I've been writing Ardour (an open source DAW that gets started somewhere in the world every 3 minutes), along with JACK (a cross-platform framework for inter-application routing of audio and MIDI). I work at home with an amazing (though small) team of folks who coordinate on IRC and very occasionally meet up in person. Before that, I was the 2nd programmer at Amazon, and before that spent 4-1/2 years in the CS&E department at UWashington, as a staff programmer working on parallel systems and OS research.

So why not mentor more contributors to Ardour?

Ardour is not the easiest project to get involved with: it is massively multithreaded, incredibly complex, has real-time code and a complex GTK GUI. It is written in C++, which only the most dedicated developers these days seem willing to get into, perhaps due to the complexities of the build process. We have a long list of people who have contributed over the years, but we're not a port of call for most developers these days for whom things like React, WebRT, JSX and webasm are more "their thing".

I was a mentor in each of the several years that Ardour participated in GSoC. Recently I've been wondering what to do, if anything, with the knowledge/skills that I've accumulated. I am very grateful for being able to live a self-directed life, entirely from an open source project without any corporate backing. But at the same time, this unorthodox career path leaves me lacking in opportunities for mentoring, either informally or formally.

So what to do? Relax and enjoy being an old fart?
That's a bad comparison.

They're not forks. Firefox's is a separate implementation. The equivalent would be asking BSD to merge with Linux.
Ask HN: How do you meet experts from other fields?
An interesting side-effect of having awesome tooling. When you have a service that is taking too much memory and can see directly on a Grafana dashboard that the reason your service keeps getting OOM'd because of too many Goroutines you can avoid even having to go into a box to debug.

When I used to be on call, I remember very distinctly an incident where there was a ton of restarts on containers for a set of nodes (This was on K8s, so not immediately obvious). The operations team mentioned to me that in the logs (K8s logs here) there was a lot of errors being generated along the lines of "Discovery failing, restarting".

I asked if we had a tcpdump if we could see what was happening, and the answer I got was "There is no tcpdump in our container." Meaning that we didn't have the binary in the actual container image.

For anyone with any knowledge of Kubernetes, you know that you can easily just SSH to the machine running the pod, get the current port it's being ran on and then run a tcpdump on there. However, the fact that all of this couldn't be tied together to come up with a tcpdump to understand that caused this issue to persist for an extra 3 hours when the issue was a flapping NIC that was misconfigured.

Without understanding how your systems actually work under the hood, you will be running them with your hands tied. It's not good enough to understand one abstraction, you need to be prepared at anytime to peel back the layers of abstraction and get your hands dirty in a different layer.
I don't accept the assumption that "ability" equals "education", "IQ", "age", and "personality traits".

1) I've seen too many well-educated co-workers who wont work
2) I've seen too many people with high IQs who can't lead
3) I wish I could report an HR violation for the inclusion of "age" on this list
4) The use of personality traits seemed like an interesting start but left me wanting

For me: it was a swing and a miss
There's a more or less linear relationship between the number of carriers and how much time you have them deployed. They require an awful lot of maintenance.

Which I'm not weighing in on whether more are necessary, just that more carriers does mean more time deployed.
Hello! I use Cortana. Nice to meet you!
Rods and cones are in the retina, which is the inner lining in the back of the eye. You see the retina when looking into pupils.
What they said but also:

Big monitor(s).

I have a 34 curved and a 27.
Both are high res.

That way I don’t need to wear glasses.
Sync of passwords, tabs, history, bookmarks, etc. as far as I know Firefox is the only browser which allows me to run my own sync server.
Yes, but the software to drive those (4 color SPR) subpixel rendered screens is limited to an RGB color gamut at the compression and transport levels (DSC / DisplayPort, HDMI). Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if their weren't optimizations most of us can't see that could be jarring for a tetrachromat.
The law cut the corporate rate to 21 percent from 35 percent, and allowed companies to deduct the full cost of new equipment investments in the year that they make them.

The key takeaway of the whole article is right here. So to reduce its tax bill, FedEx made some equipment purchases and decided to deduct the full cost bringing down its tax liability to zero.
However that means that next year, FedEx would not be eligible to depreciate that equipment. So next year it should be back to paying regular taxes or trying to find another strategy to reduce its tax bill.
Am a big fan of this approach, I've slipped into this intense focus / distant reflection practice over the years without knowing why or how it worked.

It's wonderful to see it formalised and be able to communicate its value.

Naps, walks and gentle bike rides hold the answers to so many puzzles.
Foundational tools for analytics and machine learning
I suppose this is a fair point, it's pretty bad often times. But at least they don't turn you away off the bat.

FWIW I just contacted Google support with help with an issue with their Play Movies on a smart TV. Turns out what I needed to do was in the Smart TV general settings, not even the app per se, and they still helped me with that. The phone support person wasn't able to help but the chat support was.
Show HN: Autopilot written in Keras for Self Driving Cars
The commute is one of the only thing I don't miss from working home, if I want to clear my mind I have plenty of better options, I can walk through the neighborhood, take a shower or do some house chores.
Show HN: ContentShowcase – Increase conversion rate by 300%
This crossed my mind. It would be nice if options were linked.
German Church Tax
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_tax

Apparently even if you list any religion, Germany will collect a church tax from you if you list ANY religion. So people moving to Germany, when registering yourself at the city, tell them you are an atheist or it will cost you dearly. Also if you want to get out of it, you fill up a form which costs 30 euros and it takes another two months to go away.
How do you know she's really seeing things others can't see and not just imagining them?
Depends, how much are you willing to pay me to do it?
If you absolutely, really need @Data, why not consider making your fields public? I mean, if the only access semantic is going to be exactly the same as public field why have getters and setters in the first place? It just seems dumb to me and not how Java language was designed in the first place. For me it is trying to fix problems of one bad pattern with another bad pattern (now you have two problems).

Readability depends on how large work you do and how much experience you have. Readability is not just how much code you have, it is about using consistent patterns to solve your problems. Readability is how fast and how safely you can move around the code to understand how it works at any level of complexity.

I have 17 years of experience working with Java commercially.

I am blind to getters, setters, builders, and bunch of other stuff. It does not bother me, I can recognize patterns immediately and just ignore them.

What bothers me is when I don't trust my IDE to find all uses of something because some jackass decided to add Lombok to the project and now my IDE does see all code exactly as it will be running.

This is much more of a readability fail.

When you make global refactorings on an application that has over a million lines of code it is absolutely crucial you can trust your IDE to find all uses of something.
I think the easiest way is to "upgrade" powerusers to contributors. The users of your soft "understand" how it is use, so it's easier to help them to add the features they want.

Does it have a GitHub repo? How do you handle bug reports?
But that’s exactly my point: if it’s low-cost and large upside, then it’s not exactly a risk is it? It’s just a smart choice.

Risky things are where there’s a large chance of failure while putting all your eggs in one basket, and/or failure comes at a big cost.

The only time starting a "risky" business is rational is when you’re an investor with tons of money so the downside is minimal, or you’re the founder and will enjoy the experience regardless and will lose someone else’s money, not your own. But then, while the “business” is risky, it’s not actually a big risk for either party.
Gitlab On-Call Run Books
If I have a problem I need to solve, I think about it before I go to bed, and in the morning when I wake up I will often find it solved. I am pretty good at remembering my dreams, and on many of these occasions I will recall a dream of writing code related to the problem. I never remember the code itself, but often the structure of the problem will be much more apparent to me the next day.

Thinking actively about a problem is often all we have time for, but if you can let something stew and let your brain work on it, especially while working on other problems that might turn out to have some similar structure, the results can be quite satisfying.
This has worked so well for me in the past that back in my undergrad Analysis of Algorithms class, I would take extra showers just to work through particularly tricky problem set problems. It never failed.
It still exists, and some groups do continue to have discussions.

For access to the textual groups, you can use Eternal September (https://www.eternal-september.org/) or AIOE (https://news.aioe.org/) with a newsreader (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Usenet_newsreaders) to see what discussions are continuing to happen.
You’re assuming correctly. Just finish your degree. If you feel ready for masters program, finishing bachelors (either business or CS) should be easy.
Notch released a video of the Minecraft development history, that's when I first heard of Gource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRjTyRly5WA
Early coauthorship with top scientists predicts success in academic careers
if the results were in favor of men this story and even the paper itself wouldn't have been published and probably the researcher would have lost his/her job too but now my comment is the one that is going to be buried. That's the world we're living in right now. The truth is considered one only if it fits the liberals, otherwise it is everything from Nazism, racism to the Russians.
>they continue to use the UK parliament to change what ought to be part of their constitution, that's how cowardly they are

What? That hasn't been true since 1982.
By that logic, white, black, grey or brown or pink does not exist either. The article confuses human color perception with wavelengths. It is not that purple doesn't exist, it is just that a rainbow does not contain all perceptible colors because it only contains colors represented by a single wavelength. Just like our ears can perceive chords as different from a single "average" note, our eyes can perceive combination of multiple wavelengths.

It doesn't require any pop-psychological explanation - you can easily make an electronic device which detect the color purple. It just needs to be sensitive to more than a single wavelength.
Blocking AdWords — sponsored search results — is very different from blocking display ads. I would be surprised if most users found that sort of blocking desirable in the first place. Some might, and I would not be surprised if it were an option, but also very surprised if proportion of Firefox users blocking AdWords ever approached even 50%. Anyone who doesn’t block is still valuable to Google.
You could conduct a double blind experiment. Ah ah.
"Things I’ve found don’t work... Playing video games"

Opposite for me, I go for easy problems and then let my mind wander while I play a mindless game of Chess or HoMM3, then when I restart work one hour later the solution writes itself in 5 minutes.
[edit: see ~gleinstein's sibling comment – it's what i was trying to say, but articulated much better]

> I’ll equate this to being critical of any early technology as if no further development will happen.

i read it as saying that the current approach to translation, while a useful approximation, can't ever really work, not because it's "early in its development", but because it's fundamentally not enough – the software needs some actual "understanding of what is being said" to accurately translate. from TFA:

> The practical utility of Google Translate and similar technologies is undeniable, and probably it’s a good thing overall, but there is still something deeply lacking in the approach, which is conveyed by a single word: understanding. Machine translation has never focused on understanding language. Instead, the field has always tried to “decode”—to get away without worrying about what understanding and meaning are.

[after showing some instances where Translate fails:]

> We humans know all sorts of things about couples, houses, personal possessions, pride, rivalry, jealousy, privacy, and many other intangibles that lead to such quirks as a married couple having towels embroidered “his” and “hers.” Google Translate isn’t familiar with such situations. Google Translate isn’t familiar with situations, period. It’s familiar solely with strings composed of words composed of letters. It’s all about ultrarapid processing of pieces of text, not about thinking or imagining or remembering or understanding. It doesn’t even know that words stand for things.

> Let me hasten to say that a computer program certainly could, in principle, know what language is for, and could have ideas and memories and experiences, and could put them to use, but that’s not what Google Translate was designed to do.
Look, as far as I'm concerned and as an SRE, server-side Windows is legacy. (With the only already mentioned exceptions being AD and Exchange.) And client-side Windows is ... well something I don't use personally anyways.

Bottom line is, legacy stuff gonna legacy.