skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my (probably worthless) opinion, the two big problems affecting software industry are:

- Organizations, especially large ones, now trust their process over their people. In the "old" days, when a production problem was identified and the prime developer knew what the problem was, it would be fixed, as directly and immediately as possible if there was high confidence. With less than high confidence, maybe a quick test in a test environment is done. In many places, this is now a multi-day, or even multi-week process now.

- Developers are not all doing it because they love it anymore. It's a high-ish paying job with lots of hiring being done. Many of the people writing code these days are awful programmers that in the long run cause a lot of damage. Many take away more than they add. In the earlier days, people coded because they wanted to.

The second problem is actually a big part of the cause of the first.

Perhaps I'm just bitter, but given the abundance of technologies, frameworks, libraries, services, etc, small teams of good coders can put together amazing pieces of work in a very short time. This almost never happens. It seems like complexity of large software projects has exceeded the ability of the current level of general expertise to maintain. It sure seems like we're close to that point.

I should add that I don't have the same opinions on most modern techniques. Agile can work very well. Code reviews and unit tests are a must. These are all tools that boost the quality and in the end, save time as well.
SF wants startups to behave, so why did it reject the ‘nice guy’ of e-scooters?
The American political right faces constant scrutiny from left learning news in America. The simple fact is that somehow labor unions seem to be turning against the political left, which means someone messed up big time.
IoT-Shops – One Stop Shop for IoT
I've finally bought my house, its pretty scary how much is designed to last 10 years. Kitchen Appliances, HW heater, HVAC, matresses, furniture seems normal to have a steady stream of stuff heading to the landfill.
Why we fall for cons
This is incredible. Imaging growing up and discovering your mom swore that if it weren't for the SC state government giving her services she would have aborted you. Hey mom how did we get this college savings account?

These pro life laws are unfair, because this can happen to a woman and not to a man. That's obviously unfair. It doesn't make them wrong. Government money would be best served incentivising adoption. After such human tragedy of injustice as rape that's the only possible path forward.
New Zealand Drugby Awards
2019 Miss Universe Live Stream - Newswe
> But it doesn't really cost more - it just costs more in monetary terms because waste (both in manufacturing and disposal) is externalized.

And actually making the environmental impact and waste recovery part of the price won't happen, because the masses will then vote for the populist party that promises not to take away your daily steak and cheap appliances.

We're kind of fucked — although I would love to have some glimmer of hope to hold on to.
So, he doesn't disagree with claims solar can get to 100%, but somehow thinks it's not enough? This is not making any sense.
What does it mean when they say there’s a 30% chance of rain?
As far as I remember it all openai 5 games were not following standard DotA 2 rules of the time. Things like one courier per player instead of players fighting over a single one and the same heroes on both teams. Even I can win a game if I get to set the rules beforehand.
This is rampant in Europe too.
Differentiable Rendering Is Amazing [video]
It seems to me if the physics engine and whatnot is deterministic I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to record input sequences and keep those and their effects as regression tests.
Won’t the user just be prompted for a password? Best you can do is wipe out documents on macOS.
This sounds like EXACTLY what Sun's SunRay thin clients used to do, back when the rest of the *nix world seemed completely oblivious to this whole "hot-desking" concept.
I love how inmates get a better education and more support from tech companies than the adults who live in the bay area. The bay area has the worst income inequality of anywhere in any developed country. Bootcamps are a scam and cost tens of thousands of dollars and yet inmates, people convicted of severe crimes, are treated to free education. From a business standpoint this makes more sense because inmates have no bargaining power and can flood the coding labor pool, thus lowering wages for businesses. How is a boot camp graduate supposed to compete with modern-day slaves?

By the way the W.K. Kellogg Foundation is a eugenics group. What are they doing here? This program is so fishy.
These things all depend on the country and state/province in which you are employed.

Whenever this topic comes up on HN, all these armchair lawyers come out of the woodwork and start making blanket statements about what they are "pretty sure" is allowed, but this issue is dependent on what's in your contract, and what your national and/or local laws allow companies to claim. "Talk to a lawyer" is the best answer to something like this.
You've got some rose-colored glasses on if you don't think people out in the country are ideological about how people should live their lives.
World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen Is Now World Fantasy Premier League #1
Amazon, FedEx and Ups See Drop in Cyber Week On-Time Deliveries
Global Solar PV installations are forecast to flatten out at 125GW (peak) annually throughout the early 2020's.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/global-solar-pv...

Figure 20% of peak for 24/7 power production (using nonexistent cheap storage) and you get 25GW capacity installation per year for solar.

Meanwhile: "Over 100 power reactors with a total gross capacity of about 120,000 MWe are on order or planned, and over 300 more are proposed."

https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-an...

So, globally I think nuclear can give solar a run for its money, although in some countries nuclear may not be an option due to public opposition or access to the technology.
Even if there was agreement from the beginning that this is the company's IP, and you have to transfer control over it, remember you are under no obligation to continue to do what you are doing. If you were to stop now, no one else is going to support and maintain the code-case.

You have two other options:
1. You can stop immediately. Just say you are no longer maintaining and supporting it for free. You can work on it on company time. If anyone wants to pay you for your personal time to work on fixes and bug-fixes they wan, they can, at which point you can do that work, and release it as either part of the open-source project you have, or as a private fork for that customer.

2. You can quit your job. Go work somewhere else who is willing to work on your own open-source projects on your own time and maintain IP. Then, abandon the project since it no longer belongs to you. Your current company is the copyright owner. Start a fork, which will now be yours, and you're the copyright owner of any new code, including changes you made to the old code. If the original license is permissive, you are under no obligate to contribute back.

Having said all of that, this is not what I would personally do. I would be happy that the company I work on wants my work so bad that they're asking for the transfer of ownership back to them. I would tell them that shouldn't be a problem but you'd like something for it, such as being able to work on it on company time, etc. Otherwise it sounds like they just want to own this thing you created and have you continue to work on it for free on your own time indefinitely, which I don't believe is what they're asking for -- you weren't clear about that.
I thought we’ve established that we’re all Keynesians now.
A website can't be non-profit. It's currently owned by a nonprofit, who could sell it to a VC at any time.
Group Chats.
> So there's a startup right here in the US doing exactly what we accused a foreign government of doing during the 2016 election.

The core accusation with 2016 isn't "fake news", it's that a foreign intelligence service deliberately targetted a senior campaign staffer, stole his email, and selectively leaked it at the direction of the opposing US campaign.

The fake news stuff was bad too, but that's not generally considered criminal. The remedy to that was universally considered to be better gatekeeping on the part of the content intermediates (Facebook in that case, Google here).
Recently Behringer, a musician's audio equipment manufacturer, teased a clone of the Wasp, a historic synthesizer. They copied the design language down to the original wasp icon as can be seen in this image.

https://media.sweetwater.com/api/i/q-82__ha-fc89e45000b982eb...

Seeing this announcement immediately reminded me of this article. A strange wing position for a wasp. So far as I know, that wasp is dead and mounted, for the same reason that the butterflies are dead.
Many components of Firefox are.
No DreamScape? https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/231038/dreamscape
1.5 MW is the output of a medium sized wind turbine. Of course, the "battery" has controllable, rather than variable, output.
That is a nice anecdote. Is it good policy?
Like this is anything new. Monte Testaccio is an artificial hill in Rome composed almost entirely of broken and abandoned pottery. A huge amount of effort and cost went into creating amphorae elsewhere to ship stuff in (often olive oil) which was then worthless for reuse so it was tossed out. Today we have a lot more things to toss out, but the economics is similar. It's often cheaper to throw away than to ship it elsewhere. I always wonder how much packing material alone is tossed out.
The Kremlin’s Creative Director
And the presence of bismuth means the coolant becomes contaminated with polonium, a very nasty alpha emitter.
This is pretty much the same scenario as the Grapes of Wrath, except with food.
If you are a Ruby or Javascript developer I'd recommend checking out Ruby for Good. We build projects for non-profits who really need folks with our skill sets but would never be able to afford us -- places like diaper banks, women's shelters, animal rescues, and other great meaningful organizations.
Our projects are on github at https://github.com/rubyforgood and you can join our slack to get more information here https://rubyforgood.herokuapp.com/.
The important thing to note is that these projects get used! Our diaper project is being used by about 100 diaper banks around the country and is helping over a million children per year!
While we do work on our projects all year round, we do have events! Our next event is in the SF area in April that everyone should definitely come out to because they are a TON of fun! They are all inclusive (lodging and food are covered,) they are absolutely NOT hackathons (which are toxic events that burn folks out!) We have a hard stop everyday at dinner time so we can spend our evenings socializing, playing board games, singing karaoke, and having lots of fun! The website for the April event is here: https://rubybythebay.org
There are others that do a good job on clothes. Not for returns maybe, but long term support.

Nudie Jeans have repair shops in quite a few cities. The repairs are free. If you don’t like to keep your jeans then they give you a discount (20%?) if you trade your old Nudies in. The sell them second hand after they fix them up. I got a recent pair repaired (unusable before the repair) and bought a second hand pair for $50. So effectively I got two pairs for $25 each. Never buying any other brand jeans again I think. https://www.nudiejeans.com/repair-spots#stores

Trippen shoes in German repair their shoes. I have had shoes from them for at least 20 years. I wore some for 12-15 years with a good refurbishment in between. They are not cheap, but comfortable, sturdy and refurbishable. They mailed them back to me when done.
https://en.trippen.com/reparaturen

Houdini Sportsware recycle their old clothes. They also buy back used and resell. https://houdinisportswear.com/en-us
This was like the archetype of a partisan argument.
You two managed to go through why the sides don't like each other's worldview or the way it's expressed, and then stopped the second it came to discussing any real world issues. And I mean both of you as well, you could've given examples and data about why your system might be in anyone's interest but you didn't and it would've been the perfect time for him to reply with examples and data in favour of his, and neither of you even tried, it just stopped.

It's fucking amazing.
Clothing - I'm not getting excited about this. Every year, every big game, there're T-shirts printed with the winning team, before the game. So they print two versions. The team that doesn't win, their T-shirt is bundled up and put on a cargo ship in enormous bales and sent to someplace overseas where they sell for a penny or two. Or for fuel, or for the cotton to recycle.

Clothes are often made in large automated factories. Insisting some human beings manually examine, clean, press and repackage clothing to avoid 'waste' is the opposite of a good idea. Its enormous cost to the economy, and indirectly to the environment.
The entire story fits in the subhead: Cheaper for businesses to just toss returns than check if they can be resold.

The easiest way to change that would be to make disposal more expensive. Start a land filling tax (and/or a carbon tax, which would hit incinerators), and suddenly a lot of these businesses would run the numbers and say “never mind, let’s actually process the returns.” Or alternatively they’d say, “hmm we can’t make free shipping free returns work anymore,” which I think is also fine.
> But now I've just polluted my once-pristine grammar file

What's bollixed up your grammar file are the users who absolutely insist on not writing syntactically perfect programs every time.

Your 2nd example is still cleaner than writing a hand parser that does the same thing, surely? A slightly mucky DSL has got to be cleaner, clearer, shorter and so more maintainable than a handwritten equivalent, no?

What would you want the grammar language to look like that handled errors 'properly'?
Is there a difference between the two?

Capitalist analysis tends to favour material progress as if this is the zenith of human existence.

Markets are useful but they only cover a third of human life, the physical (although money is abstract it represents the ability to command material goods and services). The emotional and intellectual are reduced to second class citizens in service of the master munching market.
> they brainwash you into thinking that Google is the second coming of Christ

Never once have I heard anyone describe Google in such high regard while working there. We're encouraged to be autonomous, self aware, thinking people, believe it or not. There are many things I agree and disagree with that Google does and expressing that is perfectly fine.
Western Electric Speedy Cutover Service (1984)
Clothing is the bottom of the heap for donations. Our church rumble sale, we ban donated clothes. Nobody buys them; they go to the dump.
Yes. And that is what they are - conspiracy theories.
Will the equatorial countries have the skilled workers, raw resources, logistical infra (roads etc) required to run the plant? Energy is not the only thing you need to run a plant.

I doubt prices will never reach $0.01/kWh. At least here in Finland transmissions fees are a larger part of the bill then the energy itself already. So unless every plant builds an absolutely massive solar farm next to it (and never plans to sell its overproduction from the day) the network fees alone will be much more then that.
A Sobering Message About the Future at AI's Biggest Party
37-Year-Old Mom Spent Seven Days Online as an 11-Year-Old Girl
> The laegest solar plant in Arizona produces only 10% of its peak summer power in the winter.

Daily insolation in Arizona varies by less than a factor of 2 from June to December, so I call BS on this statement.
You may be right but I remember both of those things - supporting 64-bit apps on 32-bit kernel and loading kexts that didn't bit-match the kernel. Long time ago so not sure.
Two different mechanisms for forming five-fold twinned nanoparticles
Great reads. My first hunch on the former is that the barrier to entry is higher in biotech than tech in general, but the barrier to exit is lower in biotech. I'm sure that's a gross overgeneralization, but would you be inclined to agree?
First of all, there are zero hard numbers here. Are we talking about 50% of returns being sent to landfills, or 1%? How does it compare with unsold merchandise? Or against waste from packaging, or disposible products in general like plastic water bottles? And even if a lot of returns aren't resold -- how many are still donated vs. discarded? It's completely unclear if this is really a priority to focus on or a distraction from bigger problems.

It's certainly not universal because where I shop online, I often see a size+color briefly come "back in stock" because it had sold out but one was returned. I've snagged desired items a few times that way -- and seen it go back out of stock after my order went through because it really was the only one left.

But second... the article isn't suggesting a clear solution here. You can't tell people to just keep the items they don't want, because there's no way to verify they're telling the truth, so you have to make them ship items back. For high-value items that are guaranteed to sell, it always makes economic sense to hire someone to inspect and restock the items. But for low-value items where it actually costs more to inspect and restock than the item is wholesale, it's just rational business.

I don't think the issue here is returns, it's waste period. The full environmental cost of producing and disposing of products needs to be included in original retail prices. Then, companies will be rationally incentivized to re-sell or donate items rather than dispose of them.
I dunno, to me it makes the most sense to portray an at-rest butterfly as it would appear by choice, when it is resting with its wings fully extended (whether for display, or to soak up sunlight, I don't know). And those seem to nearly universally have overlapped wings, as the author describes.

As for snapshotting a butterfly in flight, the wings are so briefly spread fully that it seems more problematic to show such a brief, flat angle all the time.

All in all, though, I kinda hate this post. I can't unsee it now.

I still find it to be a great, well-stated, and thought provoking, though.
No one would want to create content. So in a backwards way, we want content, so it's our will to have copyright law. If you can suggest another way we can have shows like Dexter I think you should speak up.
A bit morbid, but how does that work? That is, Bitcoin for murder? Is there some kind of escrow, or do people just send a bunch of money hoping they get what they paid for?
I try to do the same, and am usually happy, but:

- recently the price difference on many items isn't worth the risk (e.g. a saving of 5% off the regular price)

- sometimes you receive an item that someone has fraudulently returned (e.g. someone has an old broken item, buy a new one from Amazon, and return the old one pretending they just changed their mind); I had this happen once for an expensive item ($600), and the original return slip was still in the box. It was obvious that the item returned had been used for quite some time, and didn't work.

- the items don't seem to be checked too well: I recently received an item which was missing an essential part

Still, Amazon's return process is great when they're at fault, so overall it's still worth it.
A real gift is something handcrafted and unique.
Unless the harm isn't harm but is rather the fabled pain without which comes no gain.
The Japanese have always held to the notion that a good gift is consumable (in a small home a non-consumable, unthoughtful gift can become a burden fast). Think premium fruits, a nice bottle of wine, or edible souvenirs from whatever region you are visiting from (although these could do with a lot less packaging plastic). That's a mindset that ought to be embraced more widely — leaving the occasional non-consumable gift for when you know someone will appreciate and want it.

Also, books can be great gifts if you don't burden to receiver with the expectation to keep them (although they might). Nothing wrong with re-gifting books to friends, family, or colleagues. But again, only if you know the tastes of the recipient.
The kernel doesn't actually use IRC for coordination. There's a channel but technical discussion is rare.
Mathematica seems to have support for units: https://reference.wolfram.com/language/tutorial/SymbolicCalc...
Media in the echo-chambers emphasize the bogeyman/straw man arguments of the other side, ensuring that right-leaning audiences only sees the video and soundbites that reinforce the effete, ivory tower, condescending, detached-from-reality stereotypes. Similarly, the left-leaning population only sees the racism, intolerance, education-bashing, and fact denial. Neither represents more than 5% of the population, but each political leaning believes the stereotype represents 50% of the other side.
Discovery of Protoclusters at Z~3.7 and 4.9:Embedded in Primordial Superclusters
>Unless you propose that my test suite tests the libraries I am using, testing does not find code affected by API breakage.

I do find that well crafted integration tests give the best bang for the buck.

>First of all, I doubt it. Second, you just sound rather arrogant.

This was a mirror image response to your condescending assumption that I "just hadn't worked on large enough code bases"

It's a little sad that you didn't have the self awareness to recognize that my feigned arrogance was satirizing yours ;-)
I think that the society with no copyright law is better, so I'd give up Dexter for it.

It's erroneous to just picture the same world with paid media missing and nothing else sprouting up.
> I've developed it on my own time

Are you paid by the hour? If not, what does your "own time" mean?
Plugging in the numbers and running a linear programming model is not the same as building factories and installing generating capacity and transmission lines.
No company wants to admit they make junk, but you can measure this at the landfill. If there was some magic way to scan every product as the city processes waste and learn the product's manufacturer, then you could require that companies pay the cost of disposal of their goods. Suppose this magical scanner could tell the difference between products too: Then you could charge the company 10x more for hazardous waste, etc. I always thought this would be the most fair way to charge companies for this negative externality. When a company makes throwaway junk, the customer shouldn't have to pay for it, and society shouldn't either. In a perfect world, it would be billable back to the company.
You mean like H1B Visa holders?
Oh, right....
People who are competitive at one game sometimes jump to another based on market trends, and although the transition can be rough, enough make it through that it becomes a visible thing.

This is a mild argument for generality of competence.
Sure, plenty of stuff is unenforceable in contracts. Is there any evidence that this particular sort of extremely common clause is in that set?
This hit home for me when I was working in a factory that made drinking cups for the fast food industry. Millions of dollars worth of equipment to make plastic cups, and then a huge warehouse to store them. All for a product that has a useful life expectancy somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes.