skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
only really useable as an auditory messaging system

What? When I was a kid, it was common for camping flashlights to have pressure buttons on the side, which was intended for (and we used for) morse code. Ships used bright, shuttered lights for Morse code, soldiers used it, scouts used it, kids communicated with friends in the neighborhood at night.
Yep. And the commenter sticking up for google not allowing a simple passthrough of the OAUTH through the IMAP password is just bizzare. Not allowing this will mean unnecessary coding and changes by thousands of projects, instead of one simple allowance by google.
In the 90s in Germany there was a TV-show with luggage auction. The contestants had to bid, open them, then dress up. Audience voted for the best cat walk.
YAGNI ?
I think you're right generally, but not universally. There are cases where it makes sense to use a one size fits all dependency and cases where it doesn't. I think the author is right that at least some of the time, it's better to DIY certain features at the risk of needing more work later than to pull bloat into a project. Responsiveness matters for how polished an application feels. Someone web browsing with an i9-9900k computer and gigabit fiber won't notice at all, others will to varying degrees. Some people rely on Hughsnet satellite because no one will run cable to them and cell service is crap. It's my experience that people like that with slow connections or slow hardware have to frequently endure garbage-tier UX because developers preferred overwrought 3rd party tools to rolling their own features, to no apparent benefit. (Dev time included in some cases) Even in the middle ground, 300ms vs 150ms matters. While "disadvantaged users" may not seem like a low hanging fruit to go after, If you impress someone like that in your audience, standing out as having more polish than usual on your product, they'll assume the best about your engineering ability and maybe even turn into a grassroots marketer for you.
Check out this library for forms: Fork
Use usb for power but also spin up an access point
Why do those engineers even need a cofounder? Why should they share a big chunk of equity with someone without the skills needed to launch?
Three Simple Rules for Storing Secrets in Git
If that is exactly you point then why do you have an expectation on outcome?
And to think that I bought my child a bicycle for his birthday. I should be arrested for attempted murder.... /s
Partly, yes. Still, parent paints a picture that in today's economic climate is not practically true.

I have (single living) colleagues from abroad who learn it now the hard way. Hopping from one airbnb to the other, moving al their stuff each time. Doing this for months and they start to despair now. Even local youngsters cannot afford a home anymore.
Show HN: Visual UI to create auto-remediations for AWS
The most interesting people are the ones who get in early and stick with it, growing along with the company

It’s pretty rare for this to actually happen in my experience. Generally an early engineer will grow and be ready to take up the role of VP Engineering or even CTO and instead the VC’s will parachute in one of their cronies once the hard work has already been done.
I really don't know enough about this: why, in general do people step down from the board of directors? Is is as simple as him not owning enough stock to justify it anymore, or are there considerations like whether he's running a competing business? It seems strange for him to leave - since as far as I can tell there's no cost to having him on the board and as the founder he brings a certain level of trust to the operation.
Last time I checked, this year is 8 fold of normal.
You are right, i took a look - apparently i was mainly considering luxury rentals because that's what caught my eye.

Anyway, (tech) salary vs rental in the Valley isn't so bad. Life sucks there for other people though - who's not in tech.
Why It’s So Hard to Change People’s Commuting Behavior
> 3. Don't need a JIRA task for everything

Genuinely asking: how so? Tickets are not just some bit of bureaucracy, they are also a living log of what has been done and why that thing was done.
Modern tech companies can't even seem to do relatively small updates without fucking them up. Just look at Windows Update for fuck sake.

I think modern developers just make a whole lot of bullshit excuses for why they are crap at their job.
What the actual fuck are you talking about?
To me science is more than a tool to make predictions - it's a way of trying to figure out what's going on using experiment, reason and the like. Maybe there are multiple universes or not and maybe we'll be able to test it or not. Who knows, reality is what it is.
I'm solving my problems, quite effectively I might add.
> Minimalism

Ah, but what's really discussed in the article is speed

How fast a page loads. How quickly a tool can be understood. How quickly a tool can be used.

How quickly the user can understand the product. How quickly they can figure out what they're doing wrong.

Speed is the one true killer app.

It's one of the few things that, when it's better than user expectations, will illicit stunned vocalizations of "bullshit, do it again. Oh shit, it's really that fast" from nearly everyone.
Props to you for citing ISO 8601. Most folks don’t care :(
Thomas/Rosa/Toussaint. Horowitz's book is way better though.
I think everything is relative. I have met and I know many indians that have a lifestyle that we (Europeans) would never follow or think about. That's probably the "luxury" that the parent comment is talking about. As usual, this is where two cultures tend to diverge. For "them" we live a stressful lifestyle, etc., etc., because we need to make money. For "us", they have a laid back lifestyle that we can't understand: how do you want to provide for your 4 kids, when you have so little money? Etc etc.

Unfortunately, this sort of thinking is very persistent in people coming from such countries that tend to see us as "weak" or "luxurious" people, because such a lifestyle is light years away from where they come from. I don't say this with the "white mindset". It's just that we Western people are talking about reducing the working hours to 30 per week, because we want to spend more time with our family, want to live stress-free, etc. etc., and possibly keep a good salary. This clashes with the old traditional capitalistic way of doing business: let's hire cheap labor from abroad, so we make more money. The main parent comment is right about it. It's proven that this doesn't lead to anything than more cheap labor.
I'm curious, do you have any theories as to why the job ads don't elicit this negative reaction? Is it just because there's no comments, so people have no place to complain?
Well yeah. So long as the federal government keeps classifying cannabis as a tier 1 controlled substance (cocaine is tier 2), no research money will flow to academics to do the relevant research.

In the meantime, we will continue seeing claims like RSO curing all cancers and other diseases (http://www.trueactivist.com/this-is-the-cannabis-oil-recipe-...). Being able to research effects of cannabis is reason number umpteen to decriminalize/legalize it at the federal level.
> I mean, who is following these bots? Would people really listen to a bot?

It certainly helped get Trump elected
Not taking a position on this case/article, it seems a complex situation which I can't fully evaluate.

However, research reports are written for their results, not their conclusion. The conclusions are often less formal and somewhat prone to bias. The scientific method is to consider results in aggregate to successively form a better understanding of an issue, and as such the individual conclusions in an individual report is really the least important part in a meta study or review report.
He was ousted from his own company. Might be as simple as him just wanting to move on.
Radioisotope Positron Propulsion [pdf]
This applies at all levels of the stack, even hardware. I realize the author is talking about javascript, but I can think of several hardware projects where minimalism is clearly superior.

At a previous employer (whom I cannot talk about), we were working on an ASIC. The ASIC team was new, brought in for the job, and was eager to include every possible feature that stakeholders wanted. The stakeholders seem to view this as a "its my birthday" kind of scenario, and so asked for lots of features (it wasn't going to cost them anything, after all). We had one senior hardware engineer, who was not on this ASIC team that was asked to sit in on meetings, and he was the "no" man. Somebody would request a feature, and he'd sketch out on the whiteboard what it would cost in chip area, power, and verification time. The ASIC was delivered more or less on time, and was wildly successful (I think, I'd left the company by this time). If it wasn't for this "no" man, I think they'd still be trying to verify all the features other teams had asked for.

I never worked at Intel, and I don't know the inside story, but I'm guessing the same thing happened with their server NICs. The original 10G and its respin (82598, 82599) were simply brilliant in their simplicity, and they were one of the first full speed 10G NICs in terms of packet rate. Flash forward to the 40g / 10g xl7xxx series, where you have a kitchen sink worth of features, and the host has to do crazy things to deal with limitations in a basic core feature of an ethernet NIC (no more than 8 DMA s/g segs per emitted TSO packet). Flash forward again to the 100g columbiaville, which seems to be more of the same -- with the same TSO bug!
> It's hard to square these articles with the reality I see on the ground

This is not a new phenomenon: back in 2000, the IBM System's Journal had a special issue on Java. Most of it was filled with articles detailing how amazingly awesome performance now was and getting better all the time.

The last article in that issue was from IBM's San Francisco Project, the only one with real-world usage. Which reported much more, er, "mixed" results. More accurately: atrocious performance on their real-world tasks, and a lot of extra engineering effort to get it to work at least half reasonably.

(I write a little more about this in "Jittterdämmerung" https://blog.metaobject.com/2015/10/jitterdammerung.html)
As much hate as the British get, the British Empire is one of the great forces of advancement and progress in the history of the world. It's unfortunate on a global scale that the US nor anyone else was able to effect a decent handoff when the Brits renounced all their possessions. Untold misery has been the result of that failed transition.
I mean this as constructive - reading through a lot of the website, it appears written by someone who is not a native English speaker/writer. There are many phrases and grammar oddities which feel/sound wrong or foreign as a native English reader, I highly recommend hiring a native speaker to rewrite your content in order to provide a better presentation.

Interestingly, if a website has multiple languages with a selector at the top, as a native speaker I am more forgiving "aha, they are German and this is just a English translation, OK" but when the only language presented is English (or German, or Vietnamese), it needs to be correct linguistically in that only language or it looks unprofessional.
Buy an Arduino clone, install the crappy GUI and see where that leads you.

Forget simulators. IME, software devs obsess about simulators. I think they're mostly a waste of time: at the beginner levels we're talking about here, signals are slow (after 30 years in the business, I can't believe I now think a 16MHz signal is "slow" :-) and parts are cheap. Just dive right in and blink a few LEDs or something.
> US itself is quite special case in its imperialism which happened much later than the others's (Spain, Netherlands etc).

This happened because the US emerged and differentiated itself from a colonial power. Also, the imperialism of the US was there from almost the very beginning. A call-to-action of sorts for the colonies was when their British metropolitan counterparts attempted to limit their western expansion. There's a weird belief where people think the US only turned to imperialism around the time of the Spanish-American war, but this was only due to running out of western expansion within their own lands.
Given the site name, I wonder if he is a fan of Kurt Schroeder's books.
Sometimes algorithms dream of electric datastructures
Have the ability to distinguish causes from symptoms.
How are Australia's lithium resources? What is your stance on climate engineering and the role it has to play?
You can look at hard data and form models about groups (e.g. perhaps to best market to them), but I don't think that's what we're talking about here.

And of course, it is often important to group and categorize people to think about them. I'm not disagreeing with that. I don't think anyone reasonably intelligent could disagree with that.

Let me put it this way: I'm a classic overanalyzer and I've found while I'm very good at analyzing and theorizing, if I do not have a rock-solid foundation for my premises my theories can be shockingly wrong. If someone snubs me in public I can create quite elaborate theories about why they are the way they are, but if I simply check with them to see if my premises are true I find that maybe they just didn't see me.

of course, that's kind of a silly example, but the same goes for any kind of analysis.

That's why you talk to people -- to test out your premises to see if they're really true. Because otherwise, when you analyze people, what are you really basing it on? A completely neutral, objective assessment based on data with an understanding that it paints multiple pictures? Or is it a passing value judgement when the data can be interpreted many different ways?

To understand a subculture, you have to first understand that subculture. You don't only have to talk to people -- you can also read and think about their beliefs in good faith.

But if you don't do either, you are essentially arguing with the title of the news article without reading the explanation!
Scientist: “I’ve created [new medicine]!”

Manager: “Perfect. Let’s sell it!”

Scientist: “Well, we’ll need to test it first. We should run some trials —“

Manager: “We definitely need to test more often! But I already agreed to have it out by next Tuesday, so maybe we can just release it and aim for more testing next time.”
This sounds like the right approach, and it’s similar to other companies I’ve worked at. The time limited nature is nice and presumably there is a audit log of some kind tied to that.
Very interesting. Thanks for posting this... I had wondered what happened to openclipart.
Ever wonder what Eddie Munster was up to after his family's show got canceled?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFMuNkseruo

How's that for a topper?
This is brilliant. I’m an embedded systems engineer by training (and interest - I still occasionally solder things to bend them to my will!) and absolutely love the implementation. It’s aesthetically pleasing and functional in both interesting and fun ways. Very slick.
Bonus points: put up an RTL-SDR and feed them ADS-B data you receive. They will give you a free business account! ($50/mo value!!)
Presumably those "opinions" were based on the data the scientists collected. All of the following cannot be proven to be 100% objectively facts, so we better just throw them out out science:

- Theory of Evolution

- Big Bang Theory

- General Relativity

- Global Warming/Climate Change

- Cell Theory

- Germ Theory

- etc etc (Just look up "scientific theories" or similar if you want more)
Black Spider Memos
In case you missed it his publicized history with the company isn't exactly doing their reputation any favors by being on the board.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travis_Kalanick#Criticism_of_K...
There is definitely a cost.

For Travis, it's his time and possibly something that prevents him from creating another company.

For shareholders, it's a cost of an advocate and vote. They want someone there who will represent them the best.
The censor is only on the picture.

Clearly you've never been called 20 times a day for 2 weeks straight during looming deadlines about Extended Car Warranties!
He is competing with Uber Eats, in a way https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/01/the-next-big-bet-for-forme...
This isn't true. As time goes on, places that were non-developed become more developed. China's already started to outsource its production because people there expect higher wages than they did 10 years ago.

It's a gradient from country to country. Overall, for individuals in absolute terms, things are getting better- although for certain subpopulations in relative terms (e.g. blue collar americans) they've gotten worse.
If you believe this—truly—is it safe to assume you support open borders for Israel?
> and as the founder he brings a certain level of trust to the operation

He wasn't exactly portrayed as a symbol of trust in the media. I guess you could say, for PR purposes, his active involvement became a liability. I don't see Uber having trust issues as a result of him leaving.

I'm guessing he just wants to move on.
California Launches Data Geoportal
I call myself a scientist, not an engineer, so I conveniently rule myself out of contention. But I think the best engineers...

* Multidisciplinary

* Quantitative

* Scientific

* Curious, skeptical

* Thorough

* Willing to abandon a bad idea

* Willing to advocate a junior colleague's good idea

As an add-on question: Which of the properties mentioned in this thread do your organization actively drive out of people?
In practice forks change the name anyway. Trademarks don't exist simply because they're intellectual property; the market is quite confused by differences.

For example, ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick, or FFmpeg and Libav. When these things use the same name, but they diverge, it just means hassle for everyone downstream. So a different name makes sense.
So M it is then?
What are some great humorous blog posts in Computer Science / Programming?
Can someone recommend some humorous blog posts on computer science / programming / software engineering?

Eg: http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html -- A brief, incomplete and mostly wrong history of programming languages.

https://typicalprogrammer.com/introduction-to-abject-oriented-programming -- Abject Oriented Programming
Ah yes, NYC. Thanks! I seriously couldn't be more excited :)
Simler also co-wrote a book with economist Robin Hanson that delves further into the phenomenon of hidden motives and the social benefit of beliefs: https://elephantinthebrain.com
> 1. Don't bitch about legacy software

Bitching about legacy software is often necessary if you want something to change: pay off technical debt, additional time, migrate third party software to a newer version.
All of the above and more.

Certainly, being below a certain threshold would be one important factor.

He was a contentious figure, and Uber might want to see him off - remember that he got in a huge boardroom war with other board members - so this is likely something they want. His departure could have been part of the long term deal, or possibly in his contract somewhere.

Though there's definitely cred in having the founder around, I suggest this is not that kind of situation.

There's only so many board seats as well, there may have been angling for others to step in.

Personal choice matters a lot as well - he simply may not really want to do it for a variety of reasons.

To me it seems there are no hard rules for boards: it's not like hiring staff or even execs wherein you're generally looking for things, often, the board is just the 'gang of people with the power' duking it out for influence and control etc. so things can be very nuanced, political etc..
I deal a lot with white box networking hardware and software and have never encountered this bug. Can you point me to some more info? Thank you.
Banks handle balance discrepancies all the time all day long, all operations that cross a bank boundary are subject to reconciliation further down the line, with massive expert systems handling most of the obvious cases automatically and operators handling the flagged transactions
I guess, I should speak to my experiences only.

My mother alone, as a cleaning lady, was fully supporting me on 30 000 salary in Belgium, Leuven. But as a cleaning lady, earning that money was not easy, or stress free. She was doing 50-60 hours weeks. I know cleaning ladies, my mother colleagues, who as a single mother support their kids and sometimes even manage to spare some money to send back home. I know that there are also people exploiting western social programs to the extend that they manage to live exclusively on child support. My mother has a neighbor who was laughing that she is silly to work, because she has Belgian fiancée and she should live off social support. And, yes, this type of people should be deported in my opinion.

Right now, I'm studying now in Maastricht, Netherlands and I work 1 day a week earning 8k gross a year. I'm living with my fiancée in apartment with one bedroom and I spent around 10k a year.
> however, as a local citizen wishing to improve my country and the average income, why would I care about people coming from other countries? I mean, what do I get in return?

The main point of contention is not about whether this would improve the quality of life of the average EU programmer. It is about concealing what is just naked self-interest (i.e. concern about one's own wages) with noble talk of 'inequality'. I don't think there's anything wrong with concern for one's own interests, but trying to phrase it as a worry about something else comes off as a bit disingenuous.

Secondly, this just smacks of protectionism. If everyone thought the same way, we would have nowhere close to the diverse array of goods available to the modern consumer at such low prices.
How to handle downtime at a company as a “full-time” consultant
I'm wondering how other consultants handle billing / keeping busy at a company in which you are a "full-time" consultant but there is no work at the moment and everyone else is out of the office.

For instance, everyone is out of the office until after the new year and there was little to no work planned. However, as a full-time consultant for the company I still depend on putting in my hours to make a living. As well, I don't want to take time off now because I have vacation planned later in the year. Is it wrong to bill for sitting and staring at the screen? Is it wrong billing for watching training videos?

I'm stuck between taking days off or refactoring the same code for a 10th time.

What are your thoughts?
Ask HN: Do you sell to your friends?
My product is featured on BitsDuJour today, and early in the morning I got a purchase notification with dramatically familiar name and email. I refunded the order right away and contacted the person with anger and frustration. I always give away free licenses of my product to people I connect with personally, so it was very disappointing to know that someone I know so well tried to buy a license instead of just asking for it. She replied that asking for a free license of a 299USD product was unacceptable for her self-esteem and the full price was too high so she took advantage of the discount. Oh well...

Now I am left with mixed emotions. Is it OK after all to sell to your friends? Given that it is not a physical product and it does not cost me much to give it for free. Furthermore there may be others who even felt uncomfortable when I angrily rejected their money...

What is your experience with situations like this?
You say all that like it's always bad thing, but as Pratchett once wrote "You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?".
Or t-shirts!

https://cdm.link/2019/12/tshirts-sell-spotify-doesnt/