skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you! When I was looking for a printable format for encoding games I stumbled upon HCCB but I was in a hurry and I didn't managed to find anything stand-alone, opensource, JavaScript, and easy to integrate that could encode/decode HCCB. I've noted your suggestion on README.md, just to not forget your good idea. If you've found some technology that may help, feel free to suggest.

Right now the only built-in assets are default fonts, that can be overridden by on-cartridge graphics. I decided to keep out game-specific assets (even generic ones, like arrows, circles, squares etc.) from the console code, keeping only what's usually considered "on the machine ROM". Some 8-bit machines used to have symbols built-in in fonts (like the C64) but I reduced the number of valid string symbols from the usual 256 to 64 in order to spare few bits in long texts :)
Thank you for this very practical advice. The thought of trying to dynamically decide whether to render on the client or server side, as the author of this article did, seems so over-the-top complicated to me. Taking your advice is something doable for us mere mortals.
"It turns on when the shower door closes."

I guess this comment is going to be a defining example of a useless HN comment, but I've been sitting here aghast and trying to express what I feel about this.
I would love to see a real deep dive on what happened with Ghosn. All I've heard about is snippets of Japan being unhappy that the alliance looked likely to end up with Nissan being a susbidiary of Renault rather than vice versa, then there's all these accusations of corruption - which probably aren't completely unfoundeed, but could easily just be a pretext. It feels like someone could write a full "Bad Blood" style piece about all the twists and turns and it'd be really interesting.
Switch off Javascript for nytimes.com and you can read articles. Not all of the picture will load though.
Working from home is not really "close to not working", that's really bad to say for all remote workers
My biggest failure for 2019 is not starting. Overanalyzing ideas to the point that I forget about them and then doing that same process again on another idea. So my new year resolution is going to be 12 startup mvp's in 12 months!
Wikipedia has the quotes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_optimization#When_to_o...

We shouldn't reinvent a phrase. Premature optimization has always been about programming efficiently, ie. a newbie programmer or even expert "elite" programmer could easily fall into the trap of optimizing prematurely. That means: Spending too much time on very little gain performance-wise, thinking it's important to eke out every little drop of performance. It's a programming lesson only. Experience even show that premature unproven tweaks can both reduce performance and make code harder to read and maintain.

Then there's the business lesson: Since for the last decades we've had Moore's Law and then more, it's been very hard to make the effort pay off by programming for performance. So businesses have learnt to focus on reducing programming time. Coincidentally, it's been shown that quick lead times are beneficial in the competitive marketplace as well. This is a business lesson (not about the programming phrase "premature optimization"!).

We're seeing a reintroduction of optimization and performance, because meeting a ceiling in CPU cycles and the need to utilize more cores efficiently. So we have Golang, Rust, WebAssembly, etc. Having a snappy website and not annoy your users will pay off as well (hello there multiple choice agreement-notices!).

But the programming lesson still stands: For many types of workloads, it doesn't make sense to spend too much time optimizing, performance wise, unless you see proven benefit outweighing the costs. In most cases, it's actually better to optimize afterwards (ie. prototyping and iterating), unless one has a specific algorithm or solution in mind beforehand.

The business lesson is similar, with the added twist of being a criteria wether you make it or break it. For programming, you could just do it for fun or a hobby, and can premature optimize to your hearts content if you like. But it'll be harder now to fall into that trap instead of making something more worthwhile! ;-)
Medium size and big companies have workplace rules and policies directed to managing the worst 10 - 20 percent of the workforce. They apply to everyone because you must be fair.

Surprising number of people just need more rest (mental health is big issue) and start thriving when you cut their hours.
TFA, second sentence: "no other popular languages support it (or support it well)".

If there's no intention to use other languages as a comparison, maybe it shouldn't use other languages as a comparison?
A Year of React – 2019 in Review
The scene from Minority Report comes to mind where he takes some kind of pill that painfully distorts his face so as to not be detected by FR cameras.

Is the technology currently good enough to detect the same person if they have different color eyes, different sized lips & eyebrows, abundance of lack of facial hair etc, downturned mouth vs smile etc?

If you take someone who hasn't slept for 3 days + hangover + flue their face will look substantially different than when fresh as a daisy.
Temple Grandin does talks about this stuff but it's more along the lines of awareness raising. Join that mailing list...might be a good place to find people that are trying the same thing.

Ironically where I worked, the person had it easy getting the Leadership position. They too had serious experience, expertise in a subject, had produced products that had benefited the company. So upper mgmt approved it despite internal objections being raised about interpersonal comms, a track record of dealing badly with others in stressful situations etc. They actually made the person report to me, because I had some experience managing the person in the past and I said no. Told the person what issues would arise, which resulted in a HR complaint against me. My case to mgmt was simple - if you guys think this is going to work, you need someone who is psychologically knowledgable about the condition for the person to report to. That's the healthiest option and we all knew there was no one around like that. So they made an even bigger mistake of giving the person a team and not having to report to anyone. It blew up in dramatic fashion and I did get an apology from the person later for mistaking what my point had been.

You have to be clear about what leadership is and why you fit. The answer shouldn't be well thats the next rung I see on the org chart.
When it's not 'hochwertig' und 'langlebig', dann ist es 'Schrott'.
I wrote this to make renaming multiple files quicker/easier:

https://github.com/ivanmaeder/vimv

Basically it loads up the output of `ls` into an editor, then runs a `mv` command for each line.

Not something I use daily, but still handy.
The author admits that he doesn't understand why Tesla succeeded, so I think it's not worth to even read the whole article. I suspect he gets money from gas companies indirectly.
There's one point that often comes up when I chat with my MD friends: All of them agree that more information is not strictly better while diagnosing. In fact, most support that unneeded information is actually worse because it confounds the issue.

My engineering mind just can't come up to terms with this. Why wouldn't you collect all information you possibly can? You can always ignore irrelevant data you have, but you cannot consider data that you don't have!

The closest I've been to rationalizing this: diagnosing is a stochastic process so complex (and with the search space so large) that the random noise in extra data is likely to point you towards wrong directions. Plus you can always collect more data afterwards if your initial diagnosis turns out to be wrong. This is of course very simplified, but it makes sense.

However, I just can't turn off my inner voice from screaming "more data is always better". I guess that's why I'm not an MD :)
Thanks for the description. The LRB has a metered paywall, so I didn't want to click through just to see if I want to read it...
I am a classical musician. my job is very much a job of delivering on a high level, because everything I do can be heard by at least 4 people (immediate colleagues) at best, and a couple of thousands (at "worst").

My talent has always been my ability to practice. I could spend more hours, more focused than most of my peers. I, frankly, have a talent for spending a lot of time in what Vygotsky would call the zone of proximal development.

Despite all that there are loads of better bassoon players. When I was 25 I had to take a step back and realize I wasnt one of those amazing players. No sane amount of practice would get me to their level (which they reached by practicing less than me!).

Whatever we read into the term "talent" I think we can all agree that it isn't fair. We all sooner or later have to chose between our own sanity and trying to push it further.

I have found that taking a step back has actually made me a better player. Getting a child and being forced to distance myself from what so long was a large part of my identity was all in all good for me. It just forced me to be a bit more fatalistic and accept that I won't become much better than I am today.
Ask HN: Search use cases no longer / poorly supported by search engines?
Hi HN,

I've been ruminating on the sad state of the Web's search infrastructure over the holidays. I'd love to hear which of your search use cases is no longer and/or poorly supported by the surviving search engines.

I'm aware of:

- searching for academic papers is getting increasingly difficult on Google

- Bing seems to be the only search engine left with an API, and it isn't cheap

- few fine-grained search operations are still supported by Google

- Google's widget to provide search for your own site looks increasingly like an inconvenient afterthought
It is also a bit less easy to throw hardware at a problem when your software is actually embedded firmware. Upgrading or adding hardware reduces your profit per unit.

But TBH in this particular field Moore's law still rules. Sometimes you are forced to upgrade to a better component for the same price because the component you chose five years ago has reached end-of-life.

Yet paying attention about optimization allows you to do more with what you have, or sometimes allows you to use less optimal but more convenient or simpler approaches.
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"Kids these days" never really goes away huh? Funny how smart phones and social media will be our version of that.
Sideways Dictionlary – explaining tech jargon made easy
Try hackintosh it’s great fun if you like OS X
Yep. And the sad thing is:

it’s rarely the CAR that kills you. It’s other drivers or your own negligence.

In the 737max case it’s Boeing that killed you.
> Usually they get put there because of it; a quiet residential street doesn't need nearly as much intervention to be good for cycling, so they don't really bother with it.

In my view (I'm Dutch), every road and intersection needs to be built with pedestrians and cyclists in mind. You might even consider another mode, as electric bikes and similar can be quite a bit quicker than bikes, but slower than cars.

Alternatively, let's say everything is built for pedestrians and cyclists. Then cars just have to "make do" and only in busy roads you make it safe for everyone. That's considered crazy but exactly the case in many countries for both pedestrians and cyclists.

Easy example: try walking a few blocks in various cities. How long do you have to wait for traffic lights? Now try the same in The Netherlands. The wait in other countries is often insane (1-2 minutes).
I think OP was just expressing delight and wonder at our surprising and elegant universe rather than making light of the findings.
Ask HN: Looking for an online / cloud backup solution
Hi HN,

I have sub 1TB of personal data (photos, code, personal docs etc) that I want to backup online. I am looking for a solution that:

- windows or linux client

- allows me to specify the folders to backup (both local and external drives)

- doesn't run automatically, is triggered manually by me

- ideally: deleted files are retained

- indefinite storage (as long as I continue to pay) no matter how infrequently I connect / backup

Basically something functionally equivalent to rsync.

I've looked at Onedrive, Backblaze and S3 and all have various issues.

Any recommendations? Thanks
To be honest I think self study can only take you so far (unless you are incredibly self disciplined). I’d recommend trying to get into OMSCS. If you have an undergrad degree you can do some nano degrees in algo/ai then you should be able to get in. If you don’t have an undergrad degree there are a few high quality online undergrad degrees you can do part time - then do OMSCS. It’s a long journey but will get you to high CS mastery.
I saw these comments on age's GitHub page before seeing this post on HN, so not to worry.

https://github.com/FiloSottile/age/issues/59
KDE in 2019: The Year in Review
An interpreted programming language https://github.com/benhj/arrow

(Ongoing)
I got tired of fighting SSR and implementing the same optimizations over and over again so decided to launch http://oya.to/ an optimizing cloud proxy - kinda like Cloudflare. The main feature right now is prerendering as an alternative to SSR, but there are a lot of things planned for 2020.

In a similar vein I found myself doing a lot of work that I think should be unnecessary just because I wanted to buy some fonts and not depend on yet another subscription service so decided to build https://woff.cc/ aka "Web of Fonts". It's currently in the planning stage but when launched, it will allow you to upload your licensed or (SIL) free fronts (including all Google fonts already built in), optimize them (subsets, css embedding, etc.) and either host it there for free or download and host it yourself.
> Lately I've been avoiding them, too, because pedestrians - especially kids - have a habit of stepping into them without warning.

Paint bicycle paths in red consistently, plus ensure there's a height difference (a step down from a pedestrian path, then another small section that's higher before you reach e.g. cars). Basically what's being done in The Netherlands. Do ignore Amsterdam experiences though, the city centre there is not a good example.
Would this be efficient in a mobile phone?
Using ground relays for low-latency communication with Starlink
Padloc – A Modern Password Manager for Individuals and Teams
I am twenty years removed from it, but I used to be well-informed on this kind of thing; I have a PhD in mineral physics.

Let's see how well I can explain this (haven't read the article, yet, sorry! Waiting for a plane...)

So you're no doubt familiar with the physics of a vibrating string; it resonates at wavelengths (length of string, 2 * length of string, 3 * length of string... n as n->inf). So you can express any vibrational state of the string as sum(intensity * wavelength); so you can represent the state of the string as a vector of intensities on a basis of allowable vibrations of the string.

Let's call these _vibrational modes_. Let's assume occupancy of these modes is quantized. It's (sort of...) the same as energy levels of atomic orbitals in electronic structure, if you remember that from chemistry classes; the way it's not the same is important (bosons vs fermions) but not at this level of handwaving :-)

So this is how solids store energy, and we call this energy "heat".

A reasonable approximation for a crystalline structure is balls – point masses – connected by springs, where the springs are covalent bonds, plus electrostatic effects between point charges. Intuitively, you can follow that the same kind of _vibrational spectrum_ will arise from this arrangement (in the same kind of way; the solutions of the differential equation of this system of forces under periodic boundary conditions). So materials have resonant frequencies in the same way guitar strings do.

Therefore, this vibrational spectrum defines the thermal behavior of a material; heat capacity, thermal conductance, etc etc etc etc. Each of these vibrational modes is also tied to a collective motion of the particles in the material, which (if sufficiently violent) will tear the structure apart – there's the solid-to-liquid phase transition – or, more subtly, if lost will lower the symmetry of the crystal structure, which gives rise to solid-to-solid phase transitions (an example would be alpha to beta quartz, which will crack your crockery if you leave it in the oven on a cleaning cycle; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_inversion).

There's a lot of depth here, as you can imagine!
It is my belief that there is presently a joint public relations storytelling campaign underway between the US intelligence agencies and the large US internet companies to restore faith in these companies abroad following the Snowden revelations that the NSA is spying on everybody via these services.
For professors' note: use PVS-Studio to get students familiar with code analysis
If you are a masochist, it’s for sure fun. If not, you really won’t like your installation constantly breaking, not being updatable without great trouble and just not being able to be relied upon in general.

Not to mention this is illegal.
The problem with this way of thinking is that those budgets can lead to pathological behaviors. Start time is a great example. Let's say you have 1 second to start, but everything you need to do takes 1.2 seconds.

Okay... We'll defer some work and show a dummy screen to be "started" in less than 1 second, except now we're loading/drawing the dummy screen, so we're usable in 1.4 seconds, and after a double-start flash, so let's smooth that out with a transition to the interactive UI and we're usable in 2.2 seconds, but we "started" the app in 0.4.

Yay?

It may sound contrived, but I've seen this very response to strict start KPI's before. People end up optimizing the micro-goal (KPI) rather than the macro-goal (better experience).

The flip side problem is, when you have multiple people responsible for parts of the work, people will stop optimizing when they hit their budgeted allotment, rather than working to better the whole. A Dev with a 400ms budget might sleep for 390ms to buy himself three years of squeezing out optimizations...

More likely, he'll stop when he gets to 350ms, even though he could have gotten to 250ms without too much effort.
That's what's often done in mission-critical software with critical latency elements. Problem is, you have to make sure those values are directly traced to either specific customer requirements, whole system spec or normative reference. It's too easy for systems engineers to come up with hard-to-reach numbers with no grounding on the Real customer need...

You also have to specify and measure exactly the correct element. Sometimes the latency budget is split in not clearly-cut parts, and on events or categories of events that are not clearly defined. Saying 'all requests should give a complete result in < 20ms' just isn't realistic and creates a world of hurt. What kind of request? Always, always? In what load conditions? What about error conditions? Fail-over conditions? Hot/cold start?... It's not simple like specifying a clear-cut feature.

Performance budget should often not be all black and white. Especially when trying to push the envelope of what modern PC hardware (with OoO execution, complex memory hierarchies, multicore CPU/GPU rapid-busy-bused hybrid archs) can do. It should probably be a risk law, and at least a critical spec, and thoroughly tested and regression-tested as such.

And here, sometimes premature optimization will be necessary. If someone gives you hard latency requirements, you'll have to say, very quick, 'I'll need a soft/hard real-time OS it won't do extreme high-throughput'. You'll have to bench...

Premature /micro/-optimization is a problem, sure. Make it work, make it right, make it fast.

But global optimization must start at the system design level. How much money do you have? What can you do for $X?
I have difficulty in letting go of engineering problems. My mind is always racing for a fix.. I have been in danger of burnout several times because of this. 2020 I need to learn to chill a bit more.
No, I have no citations for the claim that inflation is sometimes above 2% or for the claim that the inflation rate for government services (which includes the cost of buying local housing for government employees) is sometimes above 2%. If either of these were true, the tax collected on a given property would increase in nominal terms but decay toward 0 in real terms.

Unrelatedly, Brisbane found that they could raise 9 times as much revenue and provide 0 times as much additional services to residents by approving hotels instead of housing. https://brianlui.dog/2018/08/01/housing-shortages/#_edn4
does this imply an overall entropy reduction for a whole system comprising a device and support apparatus for reusing its heat as energy source supply?
Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom -- truly inspirational
'Speed differential' is a thing for any sort of traffic, be it cars, bicycles, and runners. 'Experience differential' is also a thing. It may be that one of the problems that you've experienced is due to the fact that you yourself "don't know what [you're] doing" and are riding far too aggressively amongst people who are learning or riding "casually" . . . as they have every right to.
> Like I said I’m not heavily invested in this argument but separated lanes aren’t a panacea

As mentioned, separated bike lines are way safer. Pedestrians won't suddenly step on bike lanes if you actually mark them properly and consistently, plus apply a height difference. Obviously there's exceptions to this but "right of way" goes in hand with "mistakes happen". Meaning, anticipate on what might happen. I cycle every day to work. There's something weird every single day. Sometimes a car, sometimes another bicycle, sometimes a pedestrian.

I live in The Netherlands btw, and those shared roads are _way_ more dangerous. What's way more likely is that the separated bike path was implemented in name, but missed out on the several bits that Netherlands has standard that other countries IMO completely mess up.
I've got a lot of things like this in C and C++ for debugging. Like how to make a macro print a macro, or stuff like that.