skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This got me to thinking how my stuff uses User-Agent. I'm not in a datahoovering biz. Still, we've always believed, rightly, that we need User-Agent to help us troubleshoot users' problems. Mostly, the questions we asked of it were "Internet Explorer or not? If so, what version?"

Let's throw down this challenge to the browser companies: MAKE YOUR STUFF SOLID ENOUGH AND STANDARD ENOUGH THAT WE DON'T NEED User-Agent.
I don't use Facebook any longer, but I believe the web app's home page is still addressed as /home.php. It's been 10 years since I worked with a LAMP stkac where the P stood for PHP but even then using .htaccess to rewrite to pretty URLs was commonplace enough to be an explicit requirement from clients. One might wonder if there is an ocean of tech debt underlying that ".php"
GenX here: we were raised with the assumption that if we didn't die in the looming nuclear holocaust, it would be AIDS that gets us.
I live in the US but my closest long haul airport is Calgary, so I've done this a few times. I don't remember there being a stop on the US side when going north. Canadian checkpoint guys want to know that you're not entering to work. On the return however we usually receive a semi grilling from US CBP about random stuff: did we collect seashells on the trip, for example.
To stop bullying is a dog whistle for corporarions censoring opposing opinions.
And you'll notice that they're new accounts. Probably the same person creating multiple accounts

Best course of action is destroy them ideologically and let other sane people downvote them to hell
I have written interpreters in python and god help me lex and yacc. The point is that writing one in scheme is so easy you almost think that the language was designed with that in mind, it was in case the sarcasm doesn't get through the text.
Ah, but your claim of parsimony just isn't. Assume that Renaissance has employed ~500 individuals over its existence, most of whom have become fabulously wealthy. You believe the simplest explanation is that none of those people would have "defected" by telling others about their dirty secret of insider trading?
I personally think this is just another step in a series of many reminding us that Google has become just another US corporation. And a way those grow is by finding 'efficiencies','doing more with less' and leveraging their size. It is an end of an era.

Then again, Jimmy Johns was always pretty bad for the workers and attempted to have kids working there signing non-competes.

Maybe we should be happy it took google so long.

edit: 2 more paragraphs
Original title "One million ought to be enough for anybody".

The proposal: https://lwn.net/ml/python-dev/93cf822c-4d67-b8f7-1d91-7d8053... ([Python-Dev] PEP proposal to limit various aspects of a Python program to one million. )
Dont like where they state shit (code, programs, processes etc.) isnt comprise of anything.

Everything is comprised of something.

Please, if you compose something many people could potentionally consume, at least dont be all esoteric and/or mystical about it. This is not a campfire, where everyone tells a story of fairies and shit.
They maybe even more so eager to learn a typical umderlying layer/architecture.
> I wonder if any of our current practices will be viewed as barbaric.

Here we go again, everyone posts their pet not-actually-barbaric thing under the moral authority of people from the future.
It's about time tech giants take responsibility for the blood minerals they use.

You can save people's lives by using the Fairphone already. It's free of those.
Show HN: Serverless CRUD API with Node.js 12, PostgreSQL and Kubernetes
Why Smart People Aren't Happy
The current world doesn't even smile on it
In the original publication that’s the subject of the article, it was: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
Numerical Linear Algebra for Programmers Book Release 0.5.0 (CPU, GPU, Clojure)
The Mad Scientist Who Wrote the Book on How to Hunt Hackers
My all time favorite: "How nature says: 'Do not touch!'"

Though, there are so many favorites, it's difficult not to come up with a long list.
I don't see a benefit of the built in DoH in firefox since it is shifting the trust from my existing DNS provider to cloudflare[1] (based in the US).

Today I discovered that I couldn't just kill the disqus.com requests with my usual method by sink-holing them in /etc/hosts because for some reason firefox ignored the /etc/hosts file. While Chrome seemed to work fine and local dig requests also returned

disqus.com. 0 IN A 0.0.0.0

I was left dumbstruck.

I was able to override this in the about:config as described in [1].

I really don't like how mozilla ignors what is defined in /etc/nsswitsch.conf because this breaks all the blacklisting rules a user had set up themselves. At least they should have produced a huge warning telling users that this ignores any local blacklists that are in place.

[1] https://ungleich.ch/en-us/cms/blog/2019/09/11/turn-off-doh-f...
$3k a month thanks to you guys
Where is 'here'? Curious
Indeed it's sex education. You get jocks and nerds, school lockers, the school canteen, all that, which is very american. It does irritate me a lot, but I have to say it's a really good show otherwise.
You're just doing work on your personal laptop? That doesn't mean you own the work you produce so I think it would complicate ownership of the non-work you produce. Best to use the work laptop for work and the personal laptop for personal stuff both for IP and company policy reasons.
History of Modula-2 and Oberon (2006) [pdf]
US residents have to compete with prospective students from other countries. Some of those countries rank better than the US when coming to STEM subjects. They end up getting admission ahead of US residents.

Solution is to improve teaching of STEM subjects at primary and high school level. The problem will sort itself. Second option is protectionist in nature. Favour US residents ahead of international students, even when international students are way better. Second option will only drop the quality of PhD graduates coming from those colleges.
Actual “Medical necessity” is extremely rare, but since it must be stated on paperwork a strained excuse is normal - giving an official need where none actually exists.
Huh? Are these sects of a religion or are they an independent entity?
Sometimes with fatal results. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
An Immodest DNS Proposal (2000)
The niche of people who actually care about privacy is vanishingly small, and I would hazard a guess that it overlaps strongly with the niche of people who would buy a raspberry pi to tinker with.

At this point, we're better off rolling our own with cheap CMOS camera modules, IR LEDs, 3d printed enclosures, arduinos, and rpis. Perhaps there's room in the market for a few people to do this as a side hustle, and sell completed boxes with software for those who don't have time to build their own, but likely not much more than that.

Alternatively, any decent A/V store will still sell you wired cameras and base stations that don't connect to the Internet at all. Then your inconvenience is fishing coax or cat5 through the walls of your house.
> banned third-party merchants from using (Fedex)’s ground network for the rest of the season

I read elsewhere that this ban is for Prime deliveries only.

So there are 3rd party sellers for Prime? I thought Prime is only for products fulfilled by Amazon.

Do these 3rd party Prime sellers get a cut of the $119/yr Prime fees?

If they don't get a cut of the Prime fees why would they offer Prime deliveries? Shouldn't they be offering 2-day free shipping to everyone Prime member or not?
Factor is a good example of what the writer of the linked article considers:

>...what just ends up being some sort of Lisp with a funny notation.
My Winter Album: a tiny, cozy, winter themed puzzle mobile game
A single person can make an hugely complex piece of software, and a relatively large team can make a conceptually simple system.

In practice I think you tend to hit Conway’s law -- organizations build software that mirrors their own organizational structure. So it’s hard for large teams to make simple designs.

I’m very skeptical about that line count metric; in my observation bugs tend to sit between modules due to bad interface design. But I could certainly believe that bad modularisation is correlated with line count (in the form of excessive boilerplate).
Uses open source library Neanderthal https://github.com/uncomplicate/neanderthal
Years ago I used to run a few such small mailing lists. As far as I remember, I used minimalist [1] and mlmmj [2] at one time, maybe others. Over time they became major pain to maintain due to spam. Not so much in preventing spam messages from reaching subscribers but because various broken spam botnets were constantly hitting weird corner cases and were constantly breaking the lists in various wondrous ways.

That was before the whole "server reputation" became a thing. I'm not touching any kind of automated mail sending these days. I'm not giving AI any more excuse than it already has to randomly blacklist me out of the SMTP world.

[1] https://github.com/madroach/minimalist (?)

[2] http://mlmmj.org
It obviously depends what the company rules are. Many are fine with you using a personal laptop so long as you follow rules like encrypted disk, etc.
I have no knowledge of this, I am reacting purely to your comment and the Twitter thread:

But 'duty to report' is not the same as 'everything you do is ours'.

The duty to report sounds more like "you are not allowed to have another job next to this one unless you get approval". Which in some cases is logical: an employer wants you to be on your A-game, but if you work 2 other jobs you might be tired all day and not deliver any good work.
If you want something structured like a math book, I learned from Walter Piston’s “Harmony.” I can’t find a place to pirate it (actually I did find an incredibly low quality scan somewhere after a week of searching) but it’s not an expensive book. I found it used (signed by “dean Howard” I think) while wandering around in my favorite book store in Lynchburg (Lynchburg and Charlottesville both have amazing small bookstores if you live in VA I would totally recommend checking them out.)

I think the only thing you’ll need to know going into it is how to read sheet music.

It doesn’t really go too much into counterpoint or melody if I remember correctly, for those there are couple YouTube channels I ended up watching that are pretty much just a narrator analyzing other people’s music:

1) 8bit music theory

2) Richard Atkinson

There are others but those are my favorites.
wow, you've just opened a pandora box :) from the school system, to vegan diet, to parenting, to immigration...
...which is likely proxy for complexity of the task - the more difficult the task, the more likely it'll have bugs - not an exciting revelation.

Their "code complexity" means nothing. If you compare simple "todo web app" it'll have orders of magnitude more "code complexity" than, for example, sha256 hash implementation.
Ideally you reduce the hours you are on call. Even though I'm just a writer most of the time I was forced to be available on Skype, Slack, Flock etc. all the time as a remote worker.

Guess how that impacts creativity and productivity. Exerting control is actually harming your business not the other way around. Create a distraction free work environment.
I simply picked the timeframe over which the accusation of illegal activity was leveled. (I'm not arguing that those are representative long-run returns; I am arguing that those are returns which are directly comparable to [and easily explain] the growth of AUM for the time period cited.)
What's so difficult about clicking buttons on a web form?
In the US this title seems to be held by Quest diagnostics.
This already happened 20 years ago. During the dotcom boom of the late 1990s, many non-CS university graduates were retrained as programmers, which led to a lot of questionable code from people who knew the basics but lacked the underlying theoretical grounding.

The industry survived. It will also survive a new batch of people getting into it for money. Of course a larger supply of labour may depress salaries somewhat in a free market, but I don't think salaries are really a free market; it's more about who has enough power to leverage a higher salary.

In any case, there's plenty of new stuff to be done with computers, and I think someone doing it for the love of it has a bigger chance of finding those things than people looking for the well-trodden, well-paying path.
You've spent days, if not weeks searching for any lead on the obscure problem you're facing. You might not even be certain exactly what the problem is, but you're by now intimately familiar with its manifestation. It's clear by now you're probably the first person in ten years menaced by it. Ancient forums with broken CSS, archived mailing lists, dusty blogs; you scrape together enough relevant information to finally craft the search query that will save you, the one that will finally lead you to the result. There. It's done. The results page consists mostly of entries with nonsense text and languages you can't read, but at the top is your answer. You click it. Scanning the original post it's clear you've found your salvation. You scroll through, quicker and quicker, impatient to end it all. Almost there, to the last post. The answer you seek. But, in a flash, it's gone.

"PMed you the solution"
What you are most likely to see is more corporate deployment of middleboxes that MITM https requests and an overall reduction in privacy for those on corporate networks.
"The niche of people who actually care about privacy is vanishingly small"

You could market to adjacent fears, like "being hacked", "your videos go to the police", etc.

Companies like Lifelock seem to do well.
At my prior company we explicitly disclaimed copyright interest in employee contributions to a long list of standard open source software which included by reference the entire OIN Linux system definition, specifically to avoid any complication related to employees contributing patches back to the open source tools they used in the course of their work (and accordingly this covered not just work done on their own time, but also contributions made the course of their work). Employees were also invited to nominate additional pieces of software fairly liberally, particularly free software that didn't overlap with the organization's central business.

While promoting permissive approaches like this with other organizations I've encountered employers which seem to have a some confusion about the purposes of different parts of their agreement. E.g. an IP agreement is essentially unrelated to making sure an employee is doing their job-- so a "I don't want them spending a lot of time on that" isn't a valid reason to impinge their rights, after all they would be perfectly able to slack off by staring blankly at the coffee pot regardless of what your IP agreement says.

An IP agreement should be about having a clear boundary on company property, it's not a replacement for effective management. Unless you're an operating system company (which to some extent google is, but very few of the innumerable companies that copy google's practices are), trivial fixes to widely used open source software are not good candidates for company property and are not at all candidates for it if developed on the employee's own time.
A fun and playful way to teach children about online privacy
That was a deliberate choice by the creators.

>”It’s definitely set in Britain, but we’ve made a very conscious choice to have that American, throw-back nostalgia, John Hughes feel to it.”

https://www.radiotimes.com/news/on-demand/2019-05-17/sex-edu...
You can be skeptical, but this has been tested empirically. Defect density per lines is relatively constant (this is a well-known empirical result, which you can also google), which means more lines predict more bugs. When researchers contrasted line count vs bad modularization, line count was the better predictor (precision & recall).

Maybe it's anti-intuitive, but it's what reality shows :)
Hal Abelson thinks that javascript is Today's Scheme. That is is carrying the flame of the ideas of Scheme forward.
Thanks for the recommendations! I haven't watched many Scandi shows since binging through Borgen, Forbrydelsen (The Killing) and Broen (The Bridge) few years ago. All highly recommended.
> that if 3 ppl is good the 6 is twice as good

This 6 person development team is promoted by the Agile Industry. They say 6 people is a sweet spot, so that if someone goes on vacation then some other developer can "cover" them.
I second this. Great beginner's resource.
> Google has become just another US corporation

There are many other U.S. corporations who manage to do business without betraying their employees like this.
Have you? This is only relevant if your invention is in direct competition to the business at hand.
Some interesting/applicable results I read about dictionaries lately:

- dictionary can sometimes cause rather than prevent lexical errors. (Ard, J. (1982). The use of bilingual dictionaries by EFL students while writing. ITL Review of Applied Linguistics 58, 1–27.)

- user tends to select the first meaning they encounter (Nesi, H. & R. Haill (2002). A study of dictionary use by international students at a British university. International Journal of Lexicography 15.4, 277–306.)

- bilingual dictionaries are more useful to lower-proficiency users, monolingual is better to advanced users (Lew, R. (2004). Which dictionary for whom? Receptive use of bilingual, monolingual and semi-bilingual dictionaries by Polish learners of English. Poznan: Motivex.)

- different people have different lookup preferences and that the use of multiple dictionary information seems to reinforce retention (Laufer, B., & Hill, M. (2000). What Lexical Information Do L2 Learners Select in a CALL Dictionary and How Does It Affect Word Retention? Research Report.)

Interesting meta-study: Nesi, H. (2014). Dictionary use by English language learners. Language Teaching, 47(1), 38-55.
This assumes people vote on election manifestos, which is far from the truth, at least in India.

How many people who voted for the current government do you think would know what NRC meant when they voted? Infact, does the general mass understand it even to date?
Exonymy. Here's a lightweight survey of it in Europe:

https://www.citymetric.com/horizons/which-european-cities-ha...

One fun fact in there: there's a town in Bulgaria called Plovdiv, but the Italians call it Philipoppoli - and they've been calling it that since long, long before it was called Plovdiv!
> Intellectual Property and Copyright aren't quite the same thing. The IP is the idea, whereas the copyright is the specific recipe.

No. Intellectual property is property.

One cannot "own" an idea, but one can own a copyright; copyright (along with trademark and patent) is a form of IP.
Nope, its more or less in the same vein. There are big protests happening in India and they're trying to control/silence it as much as possible.
"Music Theory Everyone Should Know" by Rick Beato and many additional videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9d26tpvA4U

He also publishes a book on music theory, but I've not reviewed it.
> Maybe we should be happy it took google so long.

If you read the thread you'll note that this policy has been around for a long time (at least the ~7 years I've been with Google). The author also notes that, in terms of open source, things have become dramatically _more_ permissive over time.
C-section babies are missing key microbes
Allow me to reply, I think you've misunderstood parent's point:

- there is a spectrum of "importance" to software: a shopping app crashing is generally less critical than medical software crashing during surgery.

- there is a spectrum of "importance" to the news: surely the benefit and damage of reporting on Netflix's latest show is lesser than reporting on an incoming tsunami.

If you are warned upon fast release of a piece of news of "lesser impact" that it's "unverified", "untrusted source", etc., then you get to choose the impact: you either wait for further confirmation or act now, that's on you.

Conversely, for the "important" part of the spectrum, then we all agree that like critical software, it must be vetted and validated before release. There's no question about that.

As for where to draw the line, it's anywhere each particular new outlet feels it should be; but the mention of where we are on that spectrum should be at least industry-wide ethics for the Press, and enforced by regulation if necessary (see other comments for great suggestions about how to indicate trustworthiness of information, extent of research, sources, etc).
This logic on JRM seems rather flawed. Have you any non-secret evidence to offer to back this story?
Note that I'm not arguing about underlying reasons, just saying what the empirical results show. That's reality.

So if you try to predict software bugs using modularization (or lack thereof) or "if-then-else" branches, or whatever complexity metric you can think of, you'll get one result. If you try to predict them using simple line count, you'll get another result. The second one will have better precision & recall. So no metric so far has been shown to be better than simply counting lines. That's not an obvious result, but it's the truth.

Sadly, you'll have to believe me because I cannot find the studies right now.
The developer diaries for Cogmind are also a treat: https://www.gridsagegames.com/cogmind/
> What if we see viable $200 gaming rigs in 10 years?

Games, like websites, seem to expand to fit the available space. Today's smartphones would beat a ten year old mega-powered gaming PC.
Food is ineligible for copyright, in any event.

This is the default for employed persons in Canada, to some extent: anything you publish could be considered the property of your employer.

In the U.S. I believe this is typically done by agreement, and most companies include it in employment contracts, that I've seen.

The special thing here is how long Google has waited before springing this behaviour on their employees, Google seems to be scheduling all the betrayal into one year, maybe so they don't have to address all of it properly.
Why no simply reset the passwords and enforce 2FA?
Thank you - enlightening and disturbing.
Probably because the title was originally extremely linkbait-y.
Post history indicates Germany.
All Software Sucks – Harmful Software and Alternatives
Top 10 Python Libraries of 2019
The context of equipment here is (or should be) "all the expensive equipment in the lab that the employee couldn't possibly outfit themselves with." As you say, a generic laptop is awful close to being a pen and paper these days.

That said, if this sort of thing is a potential issue for you, you're probably better off using a purely personal laptop or desktop that isn't used for work purposes at all.
A universal property of state run schooling is that schools are literal prisons for children and for many people is the only place they'll experience violence first hand. The finer details will vary by location.
Canadian here. I asked my federal MP why there are no criminal consequences and my provincial MLA why BC is not terminating their contract.
> That doesn't mean you own the work you produce

Of course not, it does however eliminate a host of problems resulting from using company equipment including additional complications from efforts you would otherwise own except for using company equipment, or the extraordinarly reduced right to privacy you have on company equipment.

Using separate equipment is also good, but isn't always realistic particularly if your work requires frequent travel.

Obviously this only works out if your employer is okay with you using your own system for work. Years ago almost all were, and I believe today outside of few industries it's still commonly fine.