skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not OP, but I work on an app that collects network data from various customer systems, and have run into lots of 'fun' time-related bugs. An instance of the app runs on a machine on the customer network (that we don't control), and this is very often "the one server" that particular customer has.

One thing I've been shocked by is how wrong the clocks often are -- to the point that our software tracks the offset from real time (our server) and adjusts all collected timestamps. It's often a minute or two off (which means the customer is not using NTP sync), but many times it's been several days or even years off. One of the things that led us to adding the time adjustment was a bug report that was initially something like "The UI says 'Data last updated in 5 years' but it was really a few minutes ago" -- that was a result of accepting data as-is from a server with a clock set 5 years in the future.

Another fun bug that sticks out in my head was caused by a system that was sending time strings using custom formatting, where the original developer either accidentally specified hours as 12-hour (instead of 24-hour) format or forgot the "AM/PM" (I am not sure which). On the receiving end, a fairly forgiving parsing method was being used and because there was no "AM/PM" it was being read as if it was 24-hour format, so what was really "7PM" was being parsed as "7AM". Worse, this wasn't even that obvious as a problem, because data naturally followed business hours (eg, <12 hours window of active time per day, usually without overlapping) and was being collected from many time zones. It was only visible if you really dug into the data, knew what was expected from the source data, and checked using data in collected in the afternoon of the client timezone.
Record-Setting Ocean Warmth Continued in 2019 [pdf]
You can't cast arbitrary things like that except through desktop/whole screen casting, which is not at all what the author is talking about (because it sucks).
Transforming MeToo into the industry's first investor clause
This is one of the best general-audience presentations of a study I've seen. The "What kind of research was this?" section, with a quick explainer on cohort studies, is by itself a lot more context than many media outlets offer, and the other sections add up to an accessible primer on how this type of study is performed, no scientific background required. Excellent science communication from the NHS.
Ask HN: How would you start something similar to Fast Forward Labs?
Fast Forward Labs (now part of Cloudera) was something like a research lab building prototypes "focus on taking technologies that are just becoming possible, and making them useful."

I've been thinking about it and came to the conclusion that it'd be a great fit to me to be working on something similar. I'm a Software Engineer working for several years as an AI consultant for several companies, but I don't want to directly code for money and also I don't want to hire a bunch of people to do the coding for me.

Do you know similar companies?

What do you think about this business model? How would you start with something similar?
Ferraris start at $215k vs Roadster at $250k. I don't think the comp is as bad as you suggest. More appropriate than GM/Ford.
I didn’t read that advice to mean you should drink daily. Rather that if you do drink, it should be limited to a certain amount per day.
It is a well written article for presenting facts. The lack of solutions is welcome to me; and I recall that the word 'crisis' is closer to meaning an unstable situation than an actual problem.

The big open question here is what exactly should these people doing instead? 'Getting a job' is meaningless in itself - it isn't an end goal like 'secure my family's future'. If someone can survive comfortably without working then that is exactly what they should be doing; work isn't especially fun unless someone is a bit lucky with what they enjoy. The obvious 'solution' to me is to find a way to make these men more attractive to women so they can all start a family too; but the big problem there is there might not be enough women and they might not be interested in families so that is another dead-on-arrival idea.

The only concerning part of the picture is the rise in suicides and the likely fact that the experience is lonely and unpleasent. The not-working part could be construed the silver lining in the story.
It's quite pleasing to see this here. As noted on the page, these were notes which accompanied a class. I wanted art students to be able to write code to create something visual, and wanted them to be able to do this in an open source cross-platform environment. Emacs was a perversely appealing means.

Keeping these examples working led to discovering an obscure regression in Emacs (https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=22490). I turns out that, excepting animators, very few Elisp programmers need to generate zero newlines.
Living a long and healthy life is simple, but it isn't easy.

Which is to say almost everybody knows this, very few people live it. The toughest battle isn't yet again telling people that 1+1=2, but rather figuring out ways to make it more accessible to people (read: cheap, low time commitment) and more sustainable as a lifestyle.

That's why ideas like HIIT[0] and IM[1] are interesting, not because they're superior to getting doctor recommended levels of exercise and eating the recommended nutrition but because people actually do them and stick to them, and they're "less bad" then doing nothing.

"Perfect is the enemy of good" is the enemy of people's health too, and the medical profession obsessed over what the Greek God tier lifestyle should look like while ignoring "easy wins."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-intensity_interval_traini...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_fasting
That's mighty convincing evidence you have right there.
Well the result is already pre-determined, typically -- the manager knows how he's going to review the team. So yeah, it is bullshit.
> This may be an unpopular opinion but the real issue (biologically) is that we don't need all the men. We only need a tiny percentage of men.

Biologically a baby may be male or female at similar probability. I think your argument is flawed, as it implies that the only goal of males is to impregnate as many females as possible and nothing else.
> Why stop at computers? Dewalt, Milwaukee, Makita, and every other power tool uses its own proprietary battery connector.

This is a good idea too. Lots of industries 'differentiate' only to lock-in users. There is no technical reason these connectors need to be different.
Most NAT still allows UDP hole-punching (STUN/TURN/ICE) unless specifically blocked (which a depressing number still do).
I love mercurial to death, but let's be honest, how many Mac/mercurial users are there? Very few, I would guess. Now, how many of those users don't install a version of python not included with the OS? I'd guess we are getting pretty darn close to zero there.
I've had a running buddy for ~4 years now (who was already a friend prior to running together). It just happened by luck; we were having drinks one night and I mentioned that my doctor told me to exercise more. We're also lucky that we agreed to run in the morning and could fit that into our schedules.

I don't look at it as sharing passion; frankly I don't like running or any form of exercise-for-exercise's-sake. For me, sharing is a way to motivate each other to exercise and to keep each other accountable.
Wouldn't most people just charge at home, overnight?
Rendering markdown client-side seems like a fine way to implement a web page. It's a cheap transformation, and it means you don't need any sort of server-side build process. Yes, some people choose to browse with JS disabled, but anyone who browses that way should expect that many sites won't work and will need to be manually whitelisted.
Yes, actually. Now that we've gotten through the pain of the first years of Python 3, if we could have a clean start and call Python 3.8 Python4, it would probably be well-received.
This feels like such a gameable/difficult system. Think of how many people at the average college can't even complete regular trainings. There's no incentive to pay, actually there's a disincentive, you have to give your salary to an office, something most people are very sensitive about.

Currently, if you don't pay for college, they just stop you from enrolling in more classes. You don't enroll in classes, you don't get a degree. Very clear cause and effect. In a future income system, the student doesn't pay their fee, and maybe the school files a collection action on them, if they can track them down...
It mostly makes me question the wisdom of implementing such a tool in Python in the first place - if you want low level access to raw underlying representations etc, using a super high level scripting language seems like a "wrong tool for the job" scenario. I am sure on the other hand they got a lot of productivity benefits from doing that, which is great, but having taken that tradeoff I don't think it is fair to "sour" on a language when you clearly applied it out of it's domain and then encountered problems due to that.
I disliked the “Racket2” name because it strongly implied that Racket 1 (the one with parentheses on the outside and few commas) was the past, and that something with a vaguely Algol-ish syntax was the future.

But Racket as a project was always about language experiments. I certainly didn’t bristle at Typed Racket or any of the other languages. And so, in changing “Racket 2” to “Rhombus” and committing to mainline support of Racket, I feel pretty comfortable with the direction. I find this fascinating that I feel this way given that nothing has really changed but the name.
Plaid is an incredible company and provides a valuable service to their tech partners. That said, their data collection practices are scary. They allow any developer using their software to swallow all of a users banking data - I would love to know how they police bad actors.

(Source: https://plaid.com/legal/#privacy-statement)
The report is from the NCAA and painted in the best way it possibly could be. And it still shows 20% of athletics income is from direct institutional support. That’s not tuition waivers showing up as revenue on the balance sheet.

Athletics is a money losing endeavor for virtually every college in the nation.

Whether money losing athletics is a net benefit for colleges is an attempt at reframing the argument. There are lots of ways to spend money that may be net positive but that isn’t what is being discussed.

At least 99% of colleges could unequivocally save money by getting rid of their athletic departments.
>There isn't anything else besides tradition.

It takes one person ignoring tradition to make it worthless.

>An independent judiciary, senators with long election cycles, and a population with freedom of the press are all resistant to the influence an intelligence agency has.

Intelligence agencies are made to control countries even if they have all those things. They aren't a meaningful resistance. Plus, the best resistance listed, a free press, is directly under attack in the Assange case.

>Did it? Nixon was forced out of office, he didn't win. Checks and balances aren't about preventing misbehavior, they're about fixing it when it happens. How it worked with Nixon was, as far as I can determine, satisfactory.

The CIA however had one of their own elected vice president in 1980, and the spying they did to get elected then was completely overlooked. Oh, and Nixon was only caught as part of a power struggle in the FBI. If that's "satisfactory" I don't think you care what the CIA does.
> Both of those are newer languages that happen to take a stance from the day 1. So not quite comparable.

Python 3 predates Rust and Go and I can tell you from personal interactions with people how much opposition there was against UTF-8 as either default or internal encoding. A lot of the arguments against it were already not valid then and they definitely are not today.

Python 3 launched despite a lot of vocal opposition against it. I think many do not even remember how badly broken the URL, HTTP and Email modules were when they were first ported to Python 3. There was a complete misunderstanding of how platform abstractions should look like.

All of this was known back then.
> Both rust and go decided to go with Unicode support that is largely based around utf-8 with free transmutations to bytes and almost free conversions from bytes. This could have been Python 3 but that path was dismissed without a lot of evidence.

Do you mean that if you have bytes, but you want to send them to a function that expects a string, then it would automatically interpret the bytes as UTF-8?

If so, that violates the "Explicit is better than implicit" part of the Zen of Python. Encoding/Decoding bytes to/from strings shouldn't happen automatically because doing so means you have to make an assumption about the encoding.
Until it isn't... and there are many, many cases of that too.

That being said, the funniest example aligning with the article to me personally, is how nearly all atheists "believe" in natural selection, but almost no atheists have more than 2-3 children. In fact, most seem to have zero or one. And many Conservative Christians don't "believe" in evolution, but yet trend towards having many more children / larger families.

It's just such a clear example of how a likely incorrect belief (AKA, "God wants me to have as many children as possible") can still result in a massive evolutionary advantage.
Indeed. I've "failed" interview screens because the reviewer's Python installation was broken, and rather than reading the traceback and realizing this, they just assumed the candidate's code was broken.

Last I knew, that position was still open almost a year after the fact.
haha, this reads like some abstinence only sex education argument or something. don't let that one beer turn in to a good time!

i think it's funny that having a good (if not optimally healthy) time would be so ridiculed, but maybe that's just me. FWIW i know a lot of people who work out at 4:30am in order to gain that time for after work social activities which often include alcohol, so not mutually exclusive.
That's roughly four times the number of 911's they sell every year, and they're all back ordered. Sounds like a successful test to me. How many Tesla Model S's are sold each year?
And when it does load, it's white Courier on black, as if specifically designed for poor usability and accessibility.
"What can we say? We know alcohol's a toxin. We'll never believe alcohol can be good for you. This is America, for chrissake! We're willing to die for our true beliefs!"
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/addiction-in-society...
Apple iPhone 11 Pro Long-Term Review (Updated with New Deals)
So perplexed, why did this get downvoted? Everything is factually correct.
Um, NetSol settled a $1MM class action suit over exactly this about a decado ago.

It absolutely has happened and quite possibly still does.
Or social benefits, depending on which country you live in. Way too broad to say that any alcohol is "bad for you".
That depends entirely on how you have your workflow set up.
> For many programs, yes.

For all programs, for the simple reason that:

> Various standard library functionality now wanted unicode str and didn't accept bytes, even though the Python 2 implementation used the equivalent of bytes.

Much of the stdlib works with native strings and will either blow up or misbehave if fed anything else[0], which means much of your codebase will necessarily be native strings, with a subset being explicitly bytes or unicode.

> Repository data is bytes, not Unicode.

It's also mostly absent from the source code, and where it is present (e.g. placeholders or separators) it's easy to flag as explicitly bytes.

[0] though some e.g. the encoding layers or io module want either bytes or unicode depending what you're doing specifically, and not always the most sensible, like baseXY being bytes -> bytes conversions where 95% of the use case is to smuggle binary data through text… oh well
This is why there are committees in both the US House and Senate that have oversight on the US Intelligence Community: the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Permanent_...) and the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_Select_Co...).
To the degree that some major motor companies are still investing in hydrogen for passenger vehicles, Tesla might actually be undervalued. Hydrogen makes no sense for cars. Zero sense whatsoever when we have decent BEVs.

Synthetic petrol makes more sense technically than hydrogen but has all the non-climate drawbacks of fossil fuels and is twice as expensive (with extremely low round-trip efficiency compared to a true electric car... like maybe a factor of 5 to 10 worse?) as regular fossil fuels.

Taycan is not a better vehicle "by all reviews," but it is a decent vehicle, the only electric car by a non-startup manufacturer other than Tesla that is compelling. Its very low efficiency strongly limits its mass market uptake (low range, expensive charge, slow charge even with the 800V, expensive battery, etc) vs Tesla's vehicles, although might be okay for high margin vehicles.
Quote "HTTP is the lingua franca of the internet. When you build stuff, please make it work with simple URLs."

Says the one who can't have a simple HTTP only site and I had to enable JS on NoScript in order to read his rant.
> If someone can survive comfortably without working then that is exactly what they should be doing

Sure, as long as they are able to afford this on their own dime. Why should others have to work so some can stay at home all day?
Previous discussion available here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21978004
> you don't need any sort of server-side build process

OP is already using a server-side build process to generate the static site. Inserting the HTML at the same time they built the site would add very little extra code to their build process, and nothing to their static hosting requirements.

If nothing else, would OP consider inserting a <noscript> tag in each generated index.html that linked to the raw Markdown in their Github repo?
"better in every way" ... except for 1) startup time (according to the linked-to article), 2) support for existing Python 2 code, and 3) support for Python 2 C extensions.

For example, https://blog.khinsen.net/posts/2017/11/16/a-plea-for-stabili... describes the "Molecular Modelling Toolkit (MMTK), which might well be the oldest domain-specific library of the SciPy ecosystem, will probably go away after 2020. Porting it to Python 3 is possible, of course, but an enormous effort (some details are in this Twitter thread[1]) for which resources (funding plus competent staff) are very difficult to find."

[1] The thread at https://twitter.com/khinsen/status/930749714567434240 includes "Lots of C modules written for Python 1.4 are waiting for enthusiastic code archeologists ;-)".

I don't think Hinsen is alone in that situation. I can well believe there are some people who, for example, plan to retire in about 5 years and would rather keep with with a Python 2 zombie than spend time to port working code to Python 3.
So I live in a Kibbutz in Israel, and well, it's just one giant green space for kids to run around in. I can't imagine living in a city.
As a counterpoint to the many people replying against your general point that men have a stronge urge to adventure, I will go ahead and say that I agree with you. Just looking at the outcomes of history, the number of male explorers, warriors, and adventurers strongly supports the case.

There are some psychological differences between men and women that are intuitively obvious, and well researched in psychology, but get people riled up. As a standard disclaimer- this is all on average, and individuals vary greatly. I would figure that men's greater aggressiveness corroborates an adventuresome nature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_psychology#...
I think THE problem in computer vision. And it's really an AI problem. May be video prediction.

Basically output the next N frames, given an input sample. It's trivial to estimate the error as you just split the video in two equal pieces. And try to guess the second half.

And it's so difficult because it's not mere rgb probability. It requires scene understanding. And the physical trajectories of the bodies in motion!

I had the idea that you could take a really basic video game such as pong, snake, space invaders or tetris. And not only predict next frames. But also infer physical quantities from laws of motion.

Being able to apply it to a bullet hell style shmup would very very interesting. As some projectiles use sine waves. And others follow rng random walk paths ;)
Not the author, but IMO the form should follow the content. So I would write the content first (e.g. in text or Markdown) and then if people read it, improve the formatting.

FWIW I wrote my own scripts to generate static HTML over 3 years, but people were reading it from the first day. So it was just gradually improved over time, Unix style. (It even works on mobile now, after I learned how to do that in the last week :) )

http://www.oilshell.org/site.html
Yeah, I was thinking that getting stuck on micro-USB for an years or decades would have been a less than happy outcome.

Not quite sure what to think of USB-C yet. Certainly feels more mechanically solid than micro-USB, but subjectively, the plug connection seems a bit slippery. Cables seem to disconnect spontaneously more than they do with e.f. Lightning.
There are set top boxes (Apple TV, Nvidia Shield, etc.) that offer a much better user experience with thriving app ecosystems and regular feature updates, if you don't want the rigamarole of trying to use desktop software in a living room.

I used to do the whole HTPC thing but having to use an actual web browser to access half my content felt obnoxious and cumbersome.

As for avoiding smart TVs, I found it pretty easy to just ignore the WebOS garbage on my LG. I don't see why I would want to pay more to get rid of a feature I haven't had to interact with since setting the device up.
Your average tech person shouldn't be considering angel investing in my opinion, and should only allocate a small portion of their portfolio to VC. It's under-performed the public market since the late 90s, and I don't think that's going to change any time soon, but it could in theory.

I think there's at least a kernel of truth to the "myth" about public/private investing that you mentioned. You won't become a billionaire working as a software developer and investing in index funds for the next 30 years, but you can if you invest in the next Facebook or Google early enough.

That said, most tech people I know are looking to work at the next unicorn, not invest in it.
In what sense? Because the article is explaining some problem, and the article itself has some other unrelated problem?
I'd agree if the Python core devs were still interested in evolving Python 2.x. But they aren't, so now no one else gets to do Python 2.8, either. It would be the best if the PSF provided a venue for Python 2.x development even if the folks who went on to do Python 3 weren't the people working on it.

Anyway, the core problem is a top-down effort to try to make a programming language of Python 2.x’s level of usage stop to the extent it’s stoppable under its license, because its creators wanted to do something else, as opposed to facilitating its user community to pool resources to continue its development. Does the PSF have a legal obligation to do such facilitation? No. Is the lack of such facilitation bad for parties who bought into Python when it was Python 2? Yes.
As an alternative to getting a smart tv and treating it dumb, I came across this dumb tv a few weeks ago: ironcast.tv
R+dplyr and trifacta (GCP Dataprep)