skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a strawman argument. And I wish people would stop relegating this type of system refactoring to some idiotic attempt to institute order for the sake of order.

Tidying systems up so they are organised "from my perspective" is not done, "for my benefit". It's done to make things easier to change.

Yes, it can make things less performance, no, most of the time that is irrelevant.

Refactoring is not optimisation. They are different things and both need to happen.

They both require you to make trade offs against future difficulties.
A) I've been on HN for 10 years, I'm not "coming from" or "struggling to adjust" anywhere and B) I didn't mean "other message boards" I meant literally every other community I belong to, both professionally and personally. Online and offline.

HN isn't special, dang is the problem, specifically dang. He needs to go. If he goes, I can thrive just fine. During the times he leaves me alone I thrive in here. When he attacks me, that's when I struggle.

This addiction to HN being a special place is complete and utter nonsense, and if that's the koolaid you're drinking, we have little to say to one another.
The Bacterial Surprise in This Bird’s Smell
There are tons of very talented prototype builders. They are usually called model makers
1, CYA it's sad that I have to say that, but yes, cover your ass, politics plays a big part in jobs and (good) managers generally shield you from the pressure so until you're in that position you've no idea how bad it can be

2, don't be too friendly with the people reporting to you, they won't take you seriously as a manager and will happily go over your head

3, encourage personal growth of your team and be there for them as a mentor and friend (which contradicts 2, there's a balance to get)
My buddy has and is using a cnc service at a local metal tech business. He spends 90% of his time waiting for the company to fit in his projects. If he owned the machine he could move forward a lot faster.
To use Amtrak I have to take a bus to Chicago.

edit: My mistake, Milwaukee.
Samsung farms out more phones to fend off rivals
In the field of education, I believe we're not that far off from having basic teachable AI agents.

As the maxim goes, "The best way to learn is to teach". My vision here is that for any new topic a student learns, they (or the instructor) would be able to instantiate an AI agent with relevant preliminary knowledge, for the student to practice on. The student would try to teach the agent facts and/or how to perform basic tasks, and the agent, with some basic metacognition would be able to query the student regarding any unclear or conflicting points.

It definitely won't be anywhere near Turing Test level in 5 years, but I believe that by then we'll have something useful. And beyond that, I think there's real potential here, both for revolutionising education, and further down the line in terms of AGI.

This is slightly tangential, but this article from a few days ago strengthened my belief that we're getting closer -
https://reiinakano.com/2019/11/12/solving-probability.html
And it's very easy to administer all of them at once. With PowerShell scripts. There's nothing like it on other platforms.
To be clear, the html5test.com numbers for Firefox are for Firefox on Android.
Roughly.. If I recall, a quarter-wave monopole will be 37 ohms
TIL when civilization gone asunder, reading this felt like I can rebuild the house
Padding Oracle Attack Tool
The counterexample needs a huge caveat. Outside of one-off registry discounts and occasional manufacturer end-of year/model/design sales, the Target trade-in deal is one of the best deals you can get on baby/child gear. Parents in my local groups will hold on to seats from accidents and more, just to get or give away these 20% coupons.
Genuinely curious why do you hate Markdown with a passion?
I miss this as well - I had totally forgotten about ordering distro CD's online. I would also get them from the book store - a book about RedHat would include a copy in the back, for example.
Ah. Alan Kay himself said that he feels they got the boundaries/sizing wrong when designing OO, so there really shouldn't be any mention of 'blind worship'. As far as I am aware, Kay has never been caught up in his own hubris.
Yes, but Hacker News rules are to use the original headline. It's amazing how useful tampons are in a first aid kit!
Living in DC as a consultant, reliable Amtrak service meant I could make a 9:30AM meeting just about anywhere between DC and NY. 2-4 trips per month.

Those early morning / early evening trips are packed with other business people doing the same thing you're doing. Full train of people quietly working/reading, maybe talking to a colleague. Very civilized.

The few times I had to travel mid-day on the same routes? Shit shows of confused tourists, kids who don't want to sit still for 3 hours (don't blame 'em), and all manner of "what can go wrong will" (delays, issues with the heat/ac, issues with passengers, etc).

Its like there's two parallel dimensions of Amtrak out there.

I'd choose Amtrak 100% of the time for business travel if its an option, 0% of the time for pleasure.
Gluelam and CLT (cross laminated timber) could be used in so many places.

I live in an area where trees are like weeds, but the logging industry is nearly dead because "we can't cut down the trees!!!".

So, environmentalists, which will it be? Concrete or trees? We have to build with something...
This is so true.

I went to visit my friend in Virginia. I took the AmTrak from Minneapolis out to the East Coast. It was basically hell until we got into Philly. Then it was just commuter rides and few switch overs until I was in DC. Then my friend picked me up and promptly got lost and dropped us into one of the worst neighborhoods in DC, but that's a story for another day.

Basically the long haul was horrendous. Bumpy and loud and people constantly bothering me for one thing or another. I didn't get a wink of sleep until we hit Philly. The commuter trains I took were like a library. Quiet, smooth and nobody bothered me at all. I figured if I lived on the East Coast, I would probably use the train to commute, but those long rides across the country were painful - I'll never do that again.
I still think what made Docker popular where other tools failed was its very watered down imperative style. I was always a little surprised that swarm and other tools for orchestrating containers look absolutely nothing like a dockerfile.
Excerpt from the article:

‘In October, Iowa Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Cady, who oversees the state’s judicial branch including all judicial officers and court employees, apologized for the incident before the state’s Senate Government Oversight Committee, according to the Des Moines Register, which has been closely following developments in the case.

“In our efforts to fulfill our duty to protect confidential information of Iowans from cyberattacks, mistakes were made,” he said, using the passive voice that’s so common in leaders’ admissions of responsibility. “We are doing everything possible to correct those mistakes, be accountable for the mistakes and to make sure they never, ever occur again.” He declined to comment for this story.’
Blind worship is always wrong. However, most admiration for Alan Kay's work is by knowledgeable people and for good reasons. Including the committee that decides on Turing awards...

I am quite certain that my admiration for the man and his work is not blind.

And do note that I described his construction as "brilliant" in my post, despite the fact that he ultimately got that part wrong.
I used to be careful to use Network Byte Order (defined in some RFC as big-endian) for everything. But for the last several years I use native byte order, and I haven't been sorry yet. It's significantly faster and simpler for x86, and big-endian systems are very rare these days.
I think they'll become ineffective, sort of like phising emails before it hits a tidal wave kind of storm and they would be limited to sketchy sites.
Spritely: Towards secure social spaces as virtual worlds
Trying to figure out what pipe to ask for when I have the physical measurements in hand is one of the ongoing mysteries of the world for me. "Oh that pipe is <some number you will not get with any type of measuring tool>" is one of the most bizarre conventions out there.

That said, this isn't even the only place it turns up - there are timber sizes which are specified as one dimension and just "commonly known" to actually be a different one: https://www.thesprucecrafts.com/why-isnt-a-2x4-a-2x4-3970461
JVM bytecode is significantly higher level, and comes with support for type reflection, garbage collection, etc.
Whereas WASM doesn't include any of that. Which makes it simpler and more lightweight, but means that anything which needs that functionality has to do it itself.
The comfort discrepancy between buses and trains isn't even close for me. Buses make me nauseous; reading a book on grayhound/bolt/etc is impossible for me and sleeping is only possible with drugs (e.g. dramamine.) Long bus trips make me feel ill, bored and tired all at the same time. I find the experience thoroughly unpleasant.

Trains by contrast are actually a pleasure to be on; I'd rather be on a train than my own couch at home. Compared to buses, Amtrak trains have less shaking, less unexpected accelerations, more space to walk around, better scenery, and fresher air. In my opinion the only form of transit better than train is a ferry.
"Go well together" is different than "close together" if we are talking about matching clothes. Color matching effects is based on distances in the color wheel. Closest together is boring, largest distance is jarring. If you imaging a new axis only visible to tetrachomats, the color matching effects appreciated to a tetrachomat will most likely not have the same effect or even be visible to regulars.
Sure, but that’s the result of almost 4 billion years of trial and error. I don’t think comparing that to a couple years of engineering trial and error is quite the same :p
>Spacial memory and all that, she knew where everything was even though it looked messy.

This is something my wife and I have figured out over time - If it's your own space and nobody else uses it, it's fine to descend to 'chaos' because you can just remember where you last put something.

That model breaks if the space is occupied by more than one person, because where one person put something isn't witnessed by the other person. So, having designated places for things and returning them to their 'home' makes the space most usable by multiple people.

Personally, even for solo spaces, I still favor everything having a home because I don't have a good memory for where things were placed.
Well everybody has his own preferences, what are nitpicks for you may not be nitpicks for me, and btw I'm prefacing the list by saying that Joplin could have been my go-to app actually, implying: "if it only got some of the things I'm mentioning, which are relevant to me, right, according to my preferences".

I don't think it would have been right to make specifically a comparison between Joplin and Notable in a thread about Joplin, in fact my app also has some of the issues I'm mentioning, not all of them of course or I would be a Joplin user now, what does it matter what my app does to the points I'm making? I'm talking about Joplin as a person who tired it.

The link to my app is kinda there for people who might be interested in that, which is also one of the reasons I made the post in the first place, but I would have written something regardless if I'd be passionate about these note-taking apps without writing one myself.

Would my post have seemed fairer if I didn't mention I'm working in Notable? Or like am I disallowed to talk about other note-taking apps now that I'm developing one and I know something about them? Like, given that I develop Notable and there a few things I don't like about Joplin which didn't allow me to become a Joplin user, how do you think I should have phrased my post?
If you mispronounce this 1 word, you will sound professional: SQL
VC Catalyst Watch: Google’s TensorFlow and Quantum Gravity
And if an app decides to send encrypted/compressed/encoded data over the TLS socket you gave it then what? The assumption is the app is malicious, how are you ensuring the data underneath the communication layer you provide is actually clean?
> It's worth pointing out that the intent of transportation infrastructure isn't to turn a profit

It's also worth pointing out that transportation systems that do turn a profit are generally healthy and run well. It is difficult to turn a profit on a poorly run system.

> Expecting a profit is completely missing the point

On the contrary, expecting a profit is expecting excellence, which we should absolutely do. There is no reason not to have high standards and high expectations.
Still, our tools will need us to pick one screen size and only be able to handle either smartphone, tablet, or desktop resolution with such grace. Magically handling all 3 will take a bit longer.
It is also possible to build a model of Presburger arithmetic extended with infinity. We did that a few years back, you can try it out online here - http://loris-5.d2.comp.nus.edu.sg/SLPAInf/
Rise of the Creator Class
For those nostalgic over classic 90's websites, the RF community has you covered:
[1] rfcafe.com
[2] antenna-theory.com
A counterargument is that both highways and trains benefit from economies of scale. If you gave highways 1.8 billion in subsidies and Amtrak 75 billion, I would expect the miles per dollar of subsidy to look substantially better for Amtrak than they do now, and worse for roads.

That said, I suspect we overinvest in both subsidies because of romantic ideas and status quo bias.
- In 5 years you will be able to easily write powerful programs through voice interfaces like Siri, Alexa, Bixby, and/or Google

- In 5 years you will be able to start and make 90% of the key design decisions for a new general or domain specific programming languages in a couple of days, a process that currently takes many months to years if not decades

- In 10 years it will be impossible for most software engineers to keep their jobs if they refrain from using program synthesis AI's providing "super-autocomplete"
I kept trying to upvote these.
I would assume it's obvious that schemas on the two ends don't need to match because solving that problem is usually a basic requirement of a serialisation library. Of course they need to be compatible in some way though e.g. in protobuf, don't reuse old field numbers.
> 3) OpenBSD adds pledge/unveil system calls from the browser, to prevent it from reading/writing files where it should not (plus I browse under a different user than I do other things with high confidence there will not be a privilege escalation; also they say the pledge/unveil support is easier to implement in Chrome/Iridium than in Firefox because of the cleaner separations of concerns in the code organization (my wording; though they have probably also put pledge/unveil in FF also for all I know),

Just FTR, Firefox is adding pledge/unveil support for OpenBSD in version 72, see https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=157325338020502&w=2
I just used Amtrak to travel across the US as I didn't want to bring my electric skateboard on a plane.

It is a very high quality service.
Technically HDD manufacturers are doing exactly the same.
Yes, kind kids will be much easier for my successful ones to take advantage of.
I built a website (and soon an app) for learning German, that has a focus on both grammar and vocabulary. We have a frequency list with the top 5000 German words. And we are a video-driven site, so each word has a video. And most words also have sentences (also each with a video). This is good for getting a feel for the spoken language, and hearing the vocabulary used in context. You can check it out here: http://www.seedlang.com
One of the better qualities in software developers is the ability to recognize when you’re being an apologist. And on top of that, learning not to fall back on that for everything.

One of my exercises that I ask others to do too is first, ask yourself if it’s really easier to explain the workaround than fix the problem. Second, ask yourself if it’s collectively easier for everyone to learn the workaround or fix the problem.

We have a really long run book for a process for a tool we’re breaking into pieces. Eventually we’ll have to run 90% of it three times, so it’s finally time to start automating the error prone parts.
Many of the big and well known museums have their most famous exhibits stolen or “bought”. These global heritage artifacts are kept under closed doors to generate revenue for the museums and not returned to the countries they originated from. The least they could do is to provide high resolution/detail digital scans freely available to everyone.
"seagull"
Can you elaborate on what you're working on with RTX?
True! That's a thing these days (I've been using this for longer than reader mode exists). Somehow I don't like it as much (I keep tweaking the settings and never find one that I like), but indeed I guess that is the more modern looking and easier way of doing this (no third party add-on needed).
I like the idea of having some standardized way of noting that. The indicator would have to be short and clear. Any ideas? Maybe "Music-only audio"?
A Blind Race: What happened to self-driving cars?
Yep. What this article skips over is maintainability in all of the things it discusses, and in most cases also flexibility.

The optimization it praises only has single focus (operational efficiency), whereas if you take into account all of the aspects of the things in question, suddenly you see that the way things are are usually a solid compromise between the aspects it's really optimizing for. That includes human interactions such as analysis, repair, modification, and so on.
Neat stuff! Have you thought about just implementing this as a bashrc file? Here's a snippet from mine:

alias gs="git status"
alias ga="git add .; gs"
alias gp="git push"
The biggest differences are that it’s not bureaucratic, the DoD has no interest, and some people really do love Go (for reasons that escape me).

Java’s also a lot less crippled than it used to be.
Did you get there on time?
The issue has been the power draw and heat on newer MacBooks with a Retina display.

Older Firefox versions are redrawing the entire window even if only a tiny portion of the window was changing.

With advent of high resolution windows, the amount of work needed to redraw the whole window for every frame became significant.

The last version of Firefox moved to breaking the window into large tiles and only redrawing the tiles that have changed.

This is still less optimized than Safari (which uses Core Animation to only redraw the items on the page that are changing) but it is still a large improvement over prior versions of Firefox if you have a high resolution display.
Caribbean Fashion
Hi. I'm a novice developer. Could you give me an example of a non cloud based hosting provider please? I'm not sure I understand the point the author makes.
While this article's tone is somewhat angry and personal, it makes some quite interesting points and takes a perspective that I've never heard before.

Before reading the article I was tentatively in favor of more expansive copyleft licenses such as Mongo's SSPL, for various reasons. But I hadn't considered something implied by that position, which this article says directly: The FSF and what one might call "mainstream copyleft" are aggressively defending corporate interests by attacking such licenses. Perhaps they (the FSF et al) don't do it intentionally, but that's nevertheless their effect...
Check out http://anvil.works
If we're going to quote science, we need to use it scientifically. It may be the case that all the changes in the decades since those studies are irrelevant, but we really can't just assume that. Even if we assume that the results of those studies are even relevant to real programming in the first place, since IIRC they, like almost every other study ever done on programming, did all their analysis on completely toy problems.
Found the related software for web access logs to be more impressive!
https://logstalgia.io
Depends on what do you mean by "Europe". The continent is slightly larger than the US.
I think that was the joke. I thought that's what the headline meant at first too. The headline could have been clearer.
I take Amtrak all the time between New York and DC for business. Why should people in Iowa subsidize each of those trips to the tune of $73 each way?
> today's teenage hacker is tomorrow's CTO.

We wish this were true, but this is not true. Not remotely.
so you basically spent around one full week of your time just to not pay 50$ of extra checked-in luggage?
I wish German was the language of international communication (rather than English; I love English but I don’t like it, and I am yet to meet a non-native speaker who wouldn’t have a horrible accent and who wouldn’t make a lot of mistakes). German is the modern Latin.
Funny, I read it the other way: he got to work on a sequence of projects based on very architectures (VAX, Alpha, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC), lead them all to significant success, then moved on to repeat the magic at a different company and a different architecture.

Doesn't that sound more fun than being the "VAX microprocessor" guy forever? (Assuming that architecture had stuck around.)
Java will be cool with me again when enough time has passed to get better OpenJDK 11+ support. Nothing is worse for my OCD than installing Spark and Hadoop and having to install an old version of Java.
Google only donates to Firefox so Chrome is less obviously a monopoly in the browser space (remember Microsoft and IE)

Google just recently said they're ready to talk business with did again. They said Maven employee upset was just a one time thing.
Linked[×] via that article is a similar story of obtaining access to the official scan of Rodin's Thinker. It's an interesting tale told in the form of email and official letters...

[×] https://cosmowenman.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/20190911-cos...
From the standpoint of privacy itself, I’m not sure how it’s different. The browser does not transmit any browsing behavior or history to any servers anywhere, which seems consistent with anyone’s vision of privacy.

That they figured out a way to still offer advertising despite this restriction, that’s just an orthogonal feature that doesn’t affect the stance of privacy.
American universities often have courses designed precisely for this purpose, intended for graduate students who need to be able to read scholarship in language X (often called "X for Reading Knowledge”). And the courses often stick pretty close to the textbooks, which are often written to support self-study. Off the top of my head, there are books intended for English speakers who want to read scholarly French (Sandberg), German (Jannach & Kolb, Sandberg again, and of course this site), and Russian (forget the author, but it was published a while back by Slavica). There are some similar books for Latin and Ancient Greek too, I think, that follow similar approaches. Most of the old ones are like this, obviously, but a few new ones also reject the trend of teaching them as if they were lively living languages.

BUT it's rare to find such books for languages that are very different from English. (Russian and Greek are already arguably pushing it.) Take Japanese, for example. There are courses and lately even some books (e.g. Josh Fogel's) meant for English-native scholars who know Chinese already to get up to speed in reading Japanese faster, but you don't have many (recognizable, at least, without knowledge of katakana) English cognates to rely upon, the grammar is drastically different, etc.
I love the idea of anki but immediately tire of the execution. There are naturalistic ways to achieve the effects of spaced repetition, fortunately, like reading the works of a particular writer or playing games of a certain genre in the target language.