skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A fleet of self-driving cars will simply be more cost effective and reduce emissions.

How? I drive from point A to point B in my car. I'm there for a while, then drive from point B back to point A. Meanwhile, someone else drives from point C to point D, is there for a while, then drives back to point C. Total trip legs: A->B, B->A, C->D, D->C.

Now a self-driving car takes over. It drives me from A to B, goes to C, drives the other person to D, gets me at B, takes me back to A, goes back to D, picks up the other person, and takes them back to C. Total trip legs: A->B, B->C, C->D, D->B, B->A, A->D, D->C.

There is no world in which the second set of trips emits less than the first, given equivalent vehicles. It's simply not possible.

(Note that this is different from the have-everything-delivered scenario. The old way was you drive from A to the store at S, then drive back home to A. Someone else drives from B to S, then back to B. Delivery drives from S to A to B to S, which can be more efficient.)
I get that.

What I don't get is how nobody treats it as an issue when developers coming from Python or Java to C don't get pointers.

The assumption is that you learn.

But for some reason, people think it's "OK" to not get async, that it's the language's fault rather than the programmer's. That's what I don't understand. It's like a different cultural standard gets applied.
last time I looked at OpenCyc's knowledge base, the information encoded was all strangely specific academic stuff - like very fine classifications and relationships between species of tapeworms and of fungus.
There was very little daily-life common-sense knowledge, even though that's often the hook in interviews and articles about Cyc's purpose. I'm not sure why that's true - maybe it's hard to decide what the 'facts' are about normal human life, but the more academic something is, the more there's a consensus, rationalized 'reality'
Measuring Spin Tune with Coherent Spin Motion of Storage Ring Polarized Protons
Wow, I do remember flipcode (and phantom). Strange to see those names after so many years. It was from a different era of the web when it was full of niche, useful sites like these populated by domain experts. I miss those days :(
Depends on what your goals are. In terms of charities, the one I see most recommended by effective altruist communities is the Against Malaria Foundation[0,1].

[0]: https://www.givewell.org/charities/amf
[1]: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/charity/against-malaria-foun...
Oboe has a similar API, can't speak for performance though.

http://www.oboejs.com/examples
Voicing your concerns might make you feel better, but voting with your feet and your dollars is the only thing that matters.
So, I shared some of your impressions, but also some of what Vox is conveying.

Speaking from personal experience, the problem with large public institutions (maybe any institution?) hiring these consultancies is that there's enormous intrinsic pressure to accept their recommendations.

Say, public institution X spends exorbitant fees on consultancy Y. Now they're going to choose to ignore the recommendations?

If the recommendations are bogus, there will be hellfire about why the public institution is transferring huge quantities of funds to a private organization that is incompetent or sketchy. If the recommendations are not, then there will be hellfire about why the public institution is ignoring the recommendations.

As a result, a lot of times there's suspicion that these consultancies are just cover for administration or management making decisions that would be unpopular, controversial, or self-serving. At least in my experience, they're seen as a power grab for those already in positions of power. That is, the consultancy comes in, asks management/admin what they would like to see, and then they put it in the recommendations. Then admin can say "look, we didn't tell ourselves to [do incredibly controversial thing Z, like cut basic staff and give administration big raises], this fully independent third party said to do this."

As a result, I think hard questions about what you're getting from consultancies are actually apropos of the Vox article, and relevant to the perception that shady constituencies are somehow hijacking public services for their own benefit. When you pay large sums of money to a consultancy, whose methods are unclear, and have unclear scientific support, and assumes that, e.g., management of publicly traded for-profit companies and management of non-profit government organizations can be treated similarly, it leads to legitimate questions about whose motives are being served.

The WHO would have been better off imho convening a special strategy or reform committee made of inside and outside members than something like McKinsey.
Didn't Linus decide that he'd not been doing this well, and needed to change the way he managed conflict, though? Or did I dream that?
AT&T drops out of FCC speed-test program so it can hide bad results
My advisor (PhD EE MIT etc etc) was a town selectman for 30 years.

He didn't exactly enjoy it; he merely saw his skills as bringing an obligation to service along with them, and acted accordingly.

Never forgot that...
qemu/kvm is linux only
This is an awesome article but if your egress costs are so high that you're deciding which HTTP headers to exclude, you should probably be moving to an unmetered bandwidth provider, or at least one that charges a reasonable amount for egress.
The fact that they even have internal discussion boards is a cultural choice of Google. Most companies don't have such a thing. But culture is always implicit, not explicit. If Google had traditions of encouraging those types of discussions and Damore engaged with that, it's still on Google for promoting that atmosphere. The fact that it got leaked and then there was blowback and the leadership reacted to that blowback in the way they did signaled a cultural shift to Google employees and prospective Google employees. That's okay. Corporate cultures change sometimes. It's unknown whether that will be good for Google in the long run or not, but just because some companies think that such a discussion is not ok does not mean that it wasn't implicitly acceptable at Google when Damore did it.
A Supercharged Automatic Emergency Braking System
Developing for the Web: Why It (Still) Makes Sense
Not trying to set myself to be a target of hacking with this comment, but what's wrong with that? Why does a password that wasn't hacked need to be changed a lot? If someone is going to try to break into my account my password being similar to one I used 6 months ago increases my vulnerability how?
New Spaceship Sail Self-Centers
Show HN: Distraction free writing of scientific papers or complex blog posts
So I brought up OIM because I have some personal experience with it and similar software. It’s main selling point is that it is extremely performing and scalabale, and it is so big (and supported by such a large company) that it has ready-made integrations with most other enterprise apps (and can be extremely flexible if you have a custom apps). These are pretty attractive qualities to giant, global companies with hundreds of thousands of employees and hundreds/thousands of apps to manage.

Competitors like SailPoint are typically more user friendly, easier to implement (as long as your implementation only integrates with common apps and doesn’t require deep customization) and comes from a generally friendlier software company, but it isn’t able to keep up performance/stability wise once you start moving above 100k-ish managed users.

The performance landscape is changing slightly now that other IdM providers are taking advantage of clouds as well for better scaling, but it’s taking some time for them to rearchitect applications to fully do so.
As a PhD candidate right now, after having spent seven years with an M.S. and doing "independent learning" and thinking that it was giving me the same growth- I can tell you right now that it isn't the same. This may vary for different fields of study, and it may vary for different people, but I think my experience will hold true for most people.

Spending time doing independent learning, even if you have given yourself some structure, misses some of the important things you get in a PhD program. Your advisor guides you, but they also challenge you. They hold you accountable. Some people may be able to challenge themselves, but most people don't have the necessary experience to know the difference between a "cool hack" and novel research. Your advisor has more experience and can tell you what is worth pursuing. Plus, to complete a PhD you have to do all the requirements- even the stuff you don't like. A self-structured independent study program is probably going to be light on the stuff that you don't find fun.

There are a lot of downsides to doing a PhD, and I'm not saying that it's for everyone. Independent study is fine. But I'm going to look skeptically at anyone who thinks their own independent study program is the equivalent of a PhD. I would probably be less skeptical if their independent study resulted in publishing a few peer-reviewed journal articles. The title of PhD doesn't just signal that you are capable of learning, it's also a signal that you can work within the current research environment, have your work accepted by other experts in the field, and in general just do a bunch of "intangibles" that aren't signaled by you working on your own.
You're right! 2012 is definitely too late... it feels weird to be old enough that things I vividly remember happened ~15 years ago
There's a built in method? I've been using virt-manager/libvirtd/qemu for a while now and haven't run across it...
Interesting how the Windows download went from (VirtualBox 6.0.14) 163 MB to (6.1.0) 107 MB. Wonder why...
So .. add them? They can even be added automatically, as we do for Perl and Tex packages in Fedora.
GMaps driving directions failed HARD for me last night.

I had to make a trip during rush hour. I was already going to be cutting it close on timing as this is a 12 minute drive that can take 15-20 minutes at rush hour. I plugged in my destination and GMaps routed me a way I would rarely take but didn't seem too odd. One block past my last alternate route, I saw the lights ahead. There was a 4 car crash with at least 5 emergency vehicles on scene about 1/2 mile ahead. GMaps had no clue and I had no choice but to inch through about 10 light cycles to reach the turn Gmaps wanted me to take.

The 15 minute trip took me 35 minutes. Thanks for nothing.
Only 49%? That's way lower than I would have expected, I wonder if there were people in the survey that weren't willing to admit it?
Even routes increase from south to north (e.g. I-10 runs through Arizona, I-90 runs through Washington).
In this post the author speaks a lot to how inaccessible Google is for any kind of support. This is one of the under appreciate reasons NOT to use services provided by the big cloud providers: AWS, GCP, etc.

I recently started a small SASS project for a client and decided that Heroku would be a good fit for the situation. That led me to use smaller independent service providers like Mailgun for email, Mapbox for maps, Transloadit for video encoding. I haven't needed much support but when I have I actually talk to real people (and developers on the other end). It's a very pleasant experience. I get much more of a feeling that they actually care about developers using their products. Plus it feels "good" to be supporting independent shops, instead of giant tech monoliths.

Consolidated billing can be annoying if you decide to go with many smaller, independent providers. At least Heroku covers that well.
Hopefully people don't say snapchat/instagram. Ugh I hate those. I hate the suggestion that we can't have proper social websites anymore because people only want to share pictures from their phones lol.
Linux only lags behind in desktop/laptop use. (Dominates servers and smartphones.)

Yes, absolutely, in the case of desktops, it is <60% as good as Windows or macOS. I say this as a nearly lifelong desktop Linux user. The userspace desktop software gets almost no attention compared to the kernel/systemd which actually matters for business. The major DEs like KDE and Gnome3 are full of exploits and memory leaks. The alternative to using a DE is to use a tiling window manager and spend hours a day re-implementing what would have been one-click operations on Windows/macOS. This is not to mention the lack of non-development-related software targeting desktop Linux.

Will this change in the future? I think it is very likely, but the time horizon is key. There are thousands of possible realities where Microsoft or Apple fails--political problems, economic events, bad management, some black swan startup out of nowhere. All it takes is for one of these to trigger for mindshare to shift to Linux (or BSD or Fuchsia--any free one for that matter) and bring it over the threshold.

(But this is kind of irrelevant to the point about data hoarding business models, since Windows/macOS is pure software.)
I think this is what the parent means by "just use X". You are saying to someone to change their whole development environment to Qt. (I like and have developed a commercial product in Qt)
50% write their passwords down in a notebook or sticky note near their computer[1]

1% use a password manager[1]

[1]%100 of these stats are assumed
Pretty funny how you translate names like "Jytte". The translator chose "Debbie" while moksly chose "Karen"
Not sure where you live, but I was able to volunteer two years with the Code Nation organization, helping underserved students learn the basics of web development. https://codenation.org/

Some of the students were first-generation children of immigrants or came from neighborhoods with chronic poverty who never owned a computer and are now earning scholarships and pursuing CS degrees, so I felt we were making an direct impact.
But you're not getting paid. Your company is getting paid, and then you're using credit against your company's assets to pay your expenses. You, for all intents and purposes, are volunteering.

Maybe your company has to sell something to be legit? Okay, you sell the people who are paying your company toothpicks. They pay your company for the toothpicks, the labor is just incidental.
I think you're exactly right. It has become a HN trope that every cost optimization story gets a response like this: your infrastructure costs are trumped by the cost of your developers, so why spend the expensive resource (developers) on optimizing the comparatively cheap bit (infrastructure). I'm tired of the trope because it's such an oversimplification.

What matters is the return on investment, and as you state, one of the great things about cost optimization is that its returns come largely risk free. By my math the optimizations described here return $100k a year. On a risk-adjusted basis, what task could this developer have performed that would have returned more?
...you should probably read the article since it covers that.
The thing that slowed my usage of Quora down to basically once every few months is so many of the answers to sincere subjects are promotional for some product someone's pushing—even if it's actually off-topic but some damned keyword aligned!

I liked it before that kind of activity proliferated the space.
> And okay, generally East/West interstates use even numbers representing what % of the country lies to the South while North/South use odd numbers representing what % lies to the West.

The idea that the highways are designed and numbered to represent the proportion of land area of the contiguous US seems specious. Source?

Edit: the interstate highway going north from Kansas City is 29, but obviously much more than 29% of the US is west of I-29.
This is the same reason spammer keep spamming too: it works. The pursuit of profit by means that work regardless of the external costs seems evil.
Show HN: No Code Quickstart Guide
The one that hurts me the most, search for a location I know is in town, Google decides the best match is somewhere across the US and zooms me there.
I don't think Anand Giridharadas will be invited back at Google Talks.

https://youtu.be/d_zt3kGW1NM?t=2900
Gab is a good site and has been vilified by the rage mobs that only want to hear one side of any issue. And like many sites, there will always be the fringe lunatics, but that is what free speech is all about.
lol, reminds me of the image search I did last week to find some earrings for my mom. "celestial earrings threader -amazon -etsy -pinterest -aliexpress -alibaba -dhgate"

The internet is becoming a friggin pain in the ass.
If I look for bus stations, select United States of America as country (would have been nice if it geo-located my IP address here) and try to pick the 'locality', for 'San Jose' it offers only "San Jose/Northern Marina Islands", "village Hacienda San Jose (Puerto Rico)" and "village San Jose (Illinois)". Wonder why people think the Internet centers around the SF Bay Area ...
virtio-fs should fix the problems with 9p. It offers better performance and conformance with POSIX.
Guidemaster: Nine gift ideas for the tech enthusiast in your life
Suppressing Innovation: Bell Laboratories and Magnetic Recording (1993)
I moderate a rather popular programming subreddit (whose users you would expect to be more conscious of newreddit vs oldreddit), here's the eyeballed breakdown of our stats:

--- Monthly uniques (200k total):

New Reddit: 55%

Mobile Web: 20%

Reddit Apps: 15%

Old Reddit: 10%

--- Monthly Pageviews (3M total):

New Reddit: 30%

Mobile Web: 10%

Reddit Apps: 30%

Old Reddit: 30%

So in our case, while the ones using Old Reddit are the fewest in number, they are also the most engaged.
>do not leave quietly lest you end up in jail.

Are you saying that an employee might be convicted of a crime in the US for not speaking out as he or she quit? If so, I disagree.
It vastly reduces the key space for a brute force attack, e.g. if an attacker has access to old passwords, they can brute force ~50% of them by iterating through A-z0-9 fairly quickly.
I know this is a fluff comment and meta, but I know many of us came here from /. years ago. This article was put on /. and comparing the comments of /. and HN on this article really highlights how far /. has fallen.
The things you need to do to succeed may not be different, but how you go about it obviously is. So I don't think it's fair to say that it's "no different".
The point of changing your password is to prevent a password leak from affecting your system. If an unauthorized user has a password they have access until it's changed.

If the change isn't meaningful they can continue using credentials.
This should not be a surprise, as this supports the NIST's revised recommendations (from June 2017!) that passwords should not expire [0], because it actually leads to less-secure passwords for this exact reason.

Furthermore, many corporate systems do not integrate well with password managers, such as when first logging in to your system in the morning. This means that the password is likely to be one of the few that must actually be memorized.
If you ask me to memorize a 32-character random string, I will, but I won't memorize a different 32-character string every 6 months!

[0]: https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-FAQ/#q-b05
I’m in a similar situation, maintaining a project that’s used widely enough it should probably have a continuity plan, but not enough that it’s developed a robust community of other contributors who could step in.

Jazzband [0] seems meant to address exactly this: “a collaborative community to share the responsibility of maintaining Python-based projects.” And it looked promising, but it’s not entirely clear that the Jazzband project itself is all that active (only news status update is the launch announcement from 2015; last public Twitter activity was in 2017).

[0]: https://jazzband.co/
Companies should provide a password manager solution for their employees, if they care.

They make us change it every 30-90 days, tell us not to write it down anywhere, and don't want us to just add '1' on the end, but expect us to memorize it. I'm not going to pony up my own money for a password manager to use at work and try to make it work there. I pay for one for my own use and it stays for personal use.
By "fundamental premise" I meant something along the lines of "the reason any human is ever OK with another human having power". If we didn't assume some correlation between power and responsible use thereof, we would all either be hermits, or tearing each other to pieces.
HN absorbed the trailing greater-than sign into your URL.

https://www.vincentprouillet.com/blog/overview-package-manag...
They can still profit, but they'd have to open up their own code, which most are afraid of doing.
Rebooting Datastores into the Future
Another side of the same coin: anything "free" that you wouldn't use if you had to pay for it isn't providing value.
The company I work for requires a password change every 60 days and a history of 9 passwords. Every other password I have in my 1Password so its ultra strong and secure (I use a 5 word passphrase). For my login password I just change the last digit in a loop between 0 and 9.
Most of human knowledge are represented in logic. Semantic web is designed from description logic. A less powerful logic than first order logic.
not sure about the project but in a case like that the project management appears to be dead for sure, because releases should not trail vital bug fixes like that. Same for pipenv.
I think a more fair characterization of that process might be: Controversial decisions require extra convincing to get done. If you know your organization is bloated and you need to downsize by 20%, you could just do it yourself, but then you run the risk of your organization revolting against you for it. If, on the other hand, you hire a consultancy, and they come to the same conclusion, that represents corroborative evidence for your view.

That is to say, another way of looking at this is that tough decisions require extraordinary evidence. If a neutral third party comes to the same conclusion, a cynical way to characterize that is it gives you "cover" to do what you wanted to do anyway. But an equally true way to characterize it is that if you weren't sure before, it allows you to be more confident that that was really the right decision.

If I were going to say, fire 20% of my staff, i'd want a neutral third party to come in and evaluate that decision before I just went off and did it too.
Can’t personally vouch for this org but they were active in nyc recently and seem interesting:

https://www.catchafire.org
The userbase at the time was a few millions of computer users, unlikely more than 20 million and quite possibly closer to 10.

"Wordperfect" as a Google Ngram term peaks in the early 1990s:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Wordperfect&ca...

Microsoft Windows 3.1 was released in 1992, selling "over a million copies" in the first two months of the year. That would an annual sales track of ~6 million or so.

In 1980 there were 2 million computers in the US, doubling every 2 years. By 2000, there were 168 million computers, only 6 doublings rather than the 10 the 1980 estimate would have provided. That suggests about 16 million users as of 1990, possibly 24-32 million by 1992.

As of 1995, total worldwide Internet usage (then largely in the US, though also Europe) was 16 millions. As of 2019 it's 4.5 billions.

https://www.internetworldstats.com/emarketing.htm

That would have been the more educated, wealier, and generally professional class of users, for the most part. For better or worse, computer use has democratised tremendously. The capabilities of the typical user have all but certainly fallen correspondingly.

https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2004/DianeEnnefils.shtml

https://www.computerhope.com/history/1992.htm
We are... but they report the UserAgent properly (sort of). Here's an example:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 13_2_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/15E148
Notebook is a password manager