skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> so that's where the focus should be.

See this a lot. You are using your own limited attention span to argue that others shouldn't be doing the work they are doing because you can only think about one problem at a time. There are 7.7 billion people on this Earth damn it, we can and should work on multiple different parts of a problem at once. The garbage which is in the oceans needs to extracted (and extracted now, before it gets ground into microplastics), and as others have mentioned, other people are working on catching runoff waste at river sources.

I never really understood people who shout from the sidelines that people who are actually working their asses off on the problem are doing it wrong. Have a little more respect.
The problem that the progressive tax solves is allowing small scale landlords while stopping large companies. An equal tax means that a person with an extra home they are renting out is just as unprofitable (or even more so, because of scale) as a large company.
There's some overflow happening if you feed it 0.0.0.0/0 and the like.
Is it hard to enact laws to prevent this? I remember reading some German towns buying properties from shitty landlording companies to control housing situation getting out of hand.

I am a first time buyer and I am finding it hard to buy, despite making six figures a year
Scott Allen has passed away
Most of us in tech have not only seen this future, we have coded and design it. Systems with little or no human interaction so when things go terribly wrong, there is no course of action that people can take to solve their problems. It's probably going to get worse with mediocre AI working on huge data sets, "don't blame our product issues on us, it was the AI that caused it... and we have no idea what the hell is was thinking.".
Without JS I just got a blank page. Enabled the main domain temporarily and I could see the article but then I was prompted to login with Facebook or Google. :D
The article mentions the use of "Juggalo" style face paint to avoid face detection. This type of countermeasure is effective against conventional HOG-SVM type face detectors such as [1], but would be inadvisable for daily use.

To deal with more advanced convolutional detectors, consider wearing a hat or clothing with adversarial patches [2], simple patterns that can be printed onto stickers. These patches work by feeding the detector inputs that cause an overwhelming bias toward a particular class (eg. toaster), which drowns out the real signal (eg. human face). Even the first generation of adversarial patches are effective against most detectors deployed as of 2020.

[1] http://dlib.net/face_landmark_detection.py.html

[2] Brown et al. https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.09665
Just go up to a married heterosexual man and ask,

"So tell me about the guy you married?"

And see how much sense that makes. "Guy" and "guys" as a catch-all is outmoded. As someone said, the plural reinforces the male-as-default.
Fascinating: in reader mode, their anti-adblock script does a ROT-1 of the text. I thought it was ROT-13 at first…but the DFT (CES) was a giveaway.
Perso j’ai choisit de publier avec une maison d’edition pour le premier bouquin. Je pense que ca aide.
Someone replied on one of those threads that with (made up number) 2 billion users, of which 0.5 billion probably lack basic computer literacy x $15 per hour x 1 ticket per year...
Etc etc ....it works out to be like 50% of Google's profit or something. And they end up employing 20,000 FTEs in call center.

Or you know....they don't.

Not really sure what the right answer is here but I don't feel it's my right to tell google to spend $X billion a year in service.

Maybe a competitor comes up with service, and google gets beat.
I think the problem is the people who don't understand the difference between "obviously dumb toxic stuff" and "features".

This thread is all about the difference between $* and $@. The difference is explained in the man pages for most shells, but since most programmers don't read instructions, they often need blog posts to explain to them how a documented feature of a language works.

I highly recommend the dash man page (http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/dash.1.html) as a concise explanation of portable shell syntax. From the dash man page, under Special Parameters:

* Expands to the positional parameters, starting from one.
When the expansion occurs within a double-quoted string it
expands to a single field with the value of each parameter
separated by the first character of the IFS variable, or
by a ⟨space⟩ if IFS is unset.

@ Expands to the positional parameters, starting from one.
When the expansion occurs within double-quotes, each posi‐
tional parameter expands as a separate argument. If there
are no positional parameters, the expansion of @ generates
zero arguments, even when @ is double-quoted. What this
basically means, for example, is if $1 is “abc” and $2 is
“def ghi”, then "$@" expands to the two arguments:

"abc" "def ghi"

It turns out we didn't need a blog post to explain it, because it's in the manual that nobody reads. But we should definitely complain about how this crafty, unusual piece of obviously dumb toxic stuff works, because how were you supposed to know to RTFM?

To answer your question "why still in 2020?", it's because these are independent features people needed. Sometimes people wanted the $* semantics, and sometimes the $@ semantics. So both exist. It's up to you to learn how the system works and use it properly.

It's not like Python doesn't also have weird edge cases that you won't know until you learn the whole language. I've seen people spend hours futzing about with lambdas and list comprehensions to try to fix a bug, which I addressed by just rewriting the expressions as regular-old loops and data structures. Bash isn't uniquely bad, it has warts like everything else. Take out the warts you don't want and someone else will complain that they're missing.
I pay my $5 for linode (expanded swap to 2GB, it's SSD backed) and just run Caprover... I'd rather not deal with AWS's billing (even their billing dashboards are delayed by 24 hours)
Why do you think work in and of itself is important? Being useful to your community is absolutely important, but our definition of that utility is absurdly narrow in this market economy. In fact, sometimes what we value and what is useful are totally orthogonal (again teachers are probably undervalued way too much, because we are poor long term thinkers).
You can set up alerts if you exceed a budget, and you can program a response to turn off billing on a project. Google has a guide for doing exactly what you want. It's not a particularly clean fix, but it is fairly easy (copy paste) and can be done. It also allows for fine grain control eg you could kill an expensive backend process but keep the fronted running.

You can also rate limit some APIs.

https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa...

> You might cap costs because you have a hard limit on how much money you can spend on Google Cloud. This is typical for students, researchers, or developers working in sandbox environments. In these cases you want to stop the spending and might be willing to shutdown all your Google Cloud services and usage when your budget limit is reached.
Unless a huge number of websites cooperate, they will all think it's useless for them individually to "fight the power".
McDonald's already uses touchscreens in some locations. I'm guessing the rest comes down to tradition and the availability of cheap labor preventing the motivation to turn existing technology into a packaged franchise of automated restaurants.
Yeah that + consistency/quality. Depending on the market you’re in, there can be such a variation in finding good trade talent. Installing stairs is pretty specialized so if you can lower the bar + increase quality, seems like a win-win to me.
What's your definition of ageing? Does "prevention of organ failure" fit the goal of defeating aging? I'd bet the answer would be 'no'. I find the idea of advanced prosthetics and cybernetics to be more plausible, but they are mitigations not preventive solutions.
Google does tend to be at the leading edge of stuff, both good and bad. This one, as a 'nobody user' sucks.
Ask HN: What software of the 2010's significantly changed how you program?
I was just spinning up a NodeJS Docker on AWS today and it occurred to me that just 10 years ago I was still installing LAMP images behind an Nginx LB on physical servers... I was amazed at how radically different being a full stack dev is today compared to back then (...in fact my first corporate project was a ColdFusion server in 1996, which I've mostly forgotten about intentionally).

I'm smitten with the big compute cloud providers and Docker, one of which was in its infancy in pre 2010, and the other did not exist at all.

What tech really made your life easier in the 2010s?

Bonus Q: By 2030, what big software disruption do imagine will have occurred in the 2020's?
This is great. Using the traits as the interface is clever. That means as along as a DB specific driver implements the traits, it will work.
Not as bad as the plastic.
I can relate and would completely agree with you if I haven't lived in Europe. But it is not just a matter of population scale, it is also a matter of urban design and the scale of the communities.

Take Berlin for example, a city of ~4 million people, and you can still find on every neighborhood smaller businesses, shops, bars and cafés where the owner actually knows most of the patrons for years, etc. You can find the big-box movie theater, but these are the absolute exceptions.

In a way, in the resulting story from OP the consumers are to blame just as much as the managers/business people: people want maximum convenience, minimum price and minimum person-to-person interaction? It should be no surprise that this is what they are getting.
> And, it pains me to say, software development is the first (and still only) career in my half-century of life where I’ve NOT felt crippled with Impostor Syndrome. Because the impostor, I realized, was everyone else.

Can you expand on this?
Is there a hacker news type forum for people not in the liberal bubble but interested in computer science and entrepreneurship?
That's a sunny view of the software of yesteryear.
Unlike every other alternative shell, Oil runs existing bash scripts to avoid this problem.
It is a terrible thing going to the movie theater and not even being able to watch the movie you paid for. That's the ONE THING you need to get right, if you run a movie theater. Also, in a lot of situations where tech goes wrong, even normally intelligent non-technicians can solve issues given the proper resources. Sometimes a troubleshooting checklist is all you need.
Nicely done. Another alternative albeit without the calculator part, shamelessly self-promoting:

https://cidr.xyz/
That's why I love using sql query builders on top of code generation from the migrations. Helps with writing new, type-safe queries and if migrations break the queries, we will know at compile time, its truly amazing.
I ordered a phone from Google that's been lost in delivery. I have Gmail/documents/photos/music... Should I do a charge-back? Sue them in small claims court? I should never have done business with them.
I'm really struggling to think of an example that doesn't involve py2 --> py3. Can you share a few?
Careful! FFMPEG has an infectious license and the authors WILL publicly humiliate you on their Hall of Shame if you get caught misusing it by not open sourcing your whole application:

https://ffmpeg.org/shame.html
For some reason Docker is struggling to download the image right now (lots of interested parties? :), I just wanted to trap writes to the database file and look at what's actually getting written there.

Is there any possibility e.g. of an FD reuse issue in the code somewhere? It might even be possible to spot it with strace (although you need to start the container with the right caps to try that). An example where this can happen is programs closing 'stderr' fd 2, only for e.g. SQLite to open its database reusing fd 2, then some library code calls fprintf(stderr, ..) etc.

Would love a copy of the DB 'sometime before' and after to look at. There are tools around for inspecting SQLite databases on a page-by-page basis
Sure, those that have their own culture do exists, but a lot of times, it's not even that.

It's a weird mindset, and it's definitely tied in to the toxic streak of white supremacy that runs through all of American culture.
My heart says OpenBSD; but I belive it is better to use Linux in a company (not yours) usually because you can get more people to use/embrace Linux because it is commodity.

If you are building your own product/service; then OpenBSD security could give you some kind of unlawful advantage that Linux won't.
> In the game, fantastically rich people never contributed to the public pot; in real life, most fantastically rich people toss piles of money at public goods like hospitals, schools, and charities.

It's easy to make an argument that this is negligible, and far more experienced people can make this argument quite well. The money should trickle down, but I think it might help if we had more wealth to trickle down in the first place.

Many contribute to charities do this to avoid taxes, I've had first-hand experience with this type of "charity". The people who actually want to help tend to want to pay taxes, in my experience.

So who is really donating to the charity ultimately?

I'm not saying these benevolent people don't exist, it's just that if you distributed all of Bezos's wealth to each person individually it would only be ~1000 per person once or less, a meager stimulus package. How is that wealth going to trickle down fast enough to have any meaningful effect? Money tends to accumulate towards those who value it the most, but perhaps more wealth could be accumulated if more of it could flow through the system without being trapped only in the wealthy hands.

It could be a win-win, or a win-lose, but it's not a lose for the rich at all if they can now select from a much larger workforce--charity money rarely reaches those that need it most. Just like how many homeless on the street aren't in a desperate situation, and those that are probably can't monopolize those good street corners.

Ultimately there's a feedback loop between supply and demand--any incentive to increase either helps the majority.
It'll all work out overall - that's the defining concept of the system.

Whether it'll work out for individuals though - well the system doesn't care (and that again is a defining concept)
Can you provide the link to the broccoli sprout smoothie?
I really miss the times when these articles were a .txt file with legit tips on how to improve anonymity. Did not matter that it was written by a random high schooler, instead of a paid journalist. Now this article title will rank highly on search engines (authoritative website with paid-to-write expert content), and people looking for privacy will buy Juggalo face paint to not look conspicuous when shopping groceries.
Is this not typical for...literally every use case? No one has an unlimited budget.
This is really cool technology, should get more advertisement
I absolutely, positively, must echo this. Don't think "Oh, we'll do xxxx later..." because you will likely miss your chance.

My subjective perception of time has accelerated _so_ much after having my daughter.
“You guys”, not “guys”. If you still think that can only refer to men, that’s certainly the first time I’ve heard an American say that. Indeed, I hear this phrase from women as much as I do from men, to address audiences of any gender makeup. And I’m in the southern US.
See dmwallin's sibling comment for more info.

It's standard for all data, but must be enforced more strictly in social sciences where controlling for all variables (let alone knowing what they all are!) is impossible, and your correlations are more likely to be pure chance.

See: reproducibility crisis in social sciences
What about some sort of complexity checking more precise than lines of code? What about trying to write one thing you would normally write in shell with something else per unit of time.
I think Amazon is a bad example. First, because the Amazon problems are fairly recent on the scale of human reaction, let's see how it will go in 3-5 years. Look at Facebook drop in users after the scandals like Cambridge Analytica, it is real and this is where Amazon is heading to. Sooner or later, the market is fixing problems, even if sometimes it's slow and painful.
One of these documentaries was claiming that bees aren’t that excited about almond flowers and they will choose anything else to pollinate over them.

This to explain why you see almonds growing essentially in dirt. Other flowers would outcompete.

Personally I suspect there are plenty of plants that don’t overlap much with almond flowering that you could use.
Worldwide first-line of technical support at $15/h seems an order of magnitude off.
>Jason, you're part of the problem you're complaining about and you don't even know it. So it goes.

I'm sorry, I don't understand. Do you think you can clarify this a little bit for me?
Agreed.

The California desert is a foolish place to be relying for agriculture, period. That it’s been effective historically (by diverting or draining water at higher rates than we can replenish it) is a poor reason to continue to invest in it.

Switching to desert-native crops is a good start. (I mean, seriously, it’s absurd for California to be our agricultural center for almonds, when each individual almond takes a gallon of water to produce!)

For the rest, if we want to keep consuming them, perhaps we’d do better to turn our attention to areas that have more reliable water supplies and whose climates are or will be better suited to those crops in coming decades.
The Deep South? They use gals as a replacement. It is gender neutral in much of the west where I live now, though a few will still take offense.
You're outlining all the reasons why Cloud Run is the successor to App Engine.

App Engine was the very first PaaS, came out before Docker, and did things very uniquely in order to try to only allow scalable apps. App Engine standard has to explicitly create special environments for each of their runtimes, and that's slow and expensive. Services like Datastore and Memcache were tightly coupled.

Cloud Run fixes all that. It's just a Docker container that listens on the PORT env variable. Use whatever runtime you want. Run the same container locally, or on another cloud provider. The other services like Firestore or Memorystore (Redis) are truly optional and external.

Cloud Run is what lets you avoid single-vendor lock in, but still get from 0 scaling.
I disagree with the notion that large firms owning residential property is necessarily a bad thing. I remember it being surprisingly hard to find single family homes to rent in at least two metros I’ve lived in- you had a much larger variety of options if you were buying. Additional professionally managed SFH properties would have been appreciated in those metro areas. I see no reason to punish scale in and of itself.

The anonymity is a major issue though, as is the practice of having large numbers of properties sitting vacant (presumably because they were really bought to launder money.) The article suggests some solutions to the first. I feel like some form of “unoccupancy tax” could address the second, all though designing it to not just punish distressed areas seems tough.
I feel like "busy working on a different programming language" is one of the better excuses for not doing this.
You can certainly go too far in either direction (talking or not talking), but to the extent talking matters when it does, it's not about "ego", it's about 1) "What did they know that I don't" and 2) Building shared understanding of the context and decisions and architecture.

As the OP says "A healthy engineering team is constantly building trust." Sometimes you already have enough trust and shared understanding to not need a discussion, other times a discussion is good.
> The California desert is a foolish place to be relying for agriculture, period.

Water is a lot easier to move than sunlight/temperature & soil.
I wonder how different this story would be if the “manager” wasn’t ensconced in the office? The mechanism works something like this:

* The “manager”, mostly not giving a shit.

* Employees, under no meaningful oversight, goof-off.

* Problem occurs, nobody notices. Customers can’t find staff...

It’s all downhill, from the top-down.
Right. Systems are only getting more complex. What happens when a wildly complex AI decides that you should not be sold a ticket to this movie or train, and there are no attendants around because why would there be? They haven't been needed for years, "the system does not make mistakes". What if it's an AI that has lethal measures to protect an area (etc etc)?
> Is it possible for a world to exist where an objective test showed different performance for different racial subgroups?

Maybe. But I think that world would be very different than ours today.

> What is the racial bias encoded in the SAT?

I can't find a source for this now, but I recall reading that if you give versions of reading tests to black students that use AAVE instead of common English, the racial gap in reading performance mostly disappears.

In other words, something like the SAT measures, at best a sort of confirmative intelligence and not an objective one (if that's even a thing. I'd suggest that intelligence is always relative to society). So institutions looking to influence society can't simply use a test that measures in part how well one conforms.
For this and many troublesome sites, selecting reader view as soon as content loads evades the paywall.

Or for Wired, which apparently doesn't offer reader view, hitting escape as soon as content loads.
You have to accept surveillance, as it increases security of everyone.
Endgame: Can literary studies survive? [pdf]
From the OP: "This is the future, I’m afraid. A future that plans on everything going right so no one has to think about what happens when things go wrong. Because computers don’t make mistakes. An automated future where no one actually knows how things work. A future where people are so far removed from the process that they stand around powerless, unable to take the reigns. A future where people don’t remember how to help one another in person. A future where corporations are so obsessed with efficiency, that it doesn’t make sense to staff a theater with technical help because things only go wrong sometimes. A future with a friendlier past."

This reads eerily like the world depicted by the classic film, "Brazil," by Terry Gillian -- a world run by impersonal machines and processes beyond the control of most human beings. The plot starts with a fly getting jammed in a printer, creating a typographical error, which results in the incarceration and accidental death during interrogation of an innocent man; and that's just the beginning. People in this world are powerless, unable to take the reigns, unable to help other human beings. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)

Let's hope humanity finds a way to build a different kind of future.
How Anyone Can Overcome Monumental Challenges
> Private systems aren't outcome orientated, they're profit orientated

Based on what I've read about the US education system (primary schools), one of the main problems is the "no child left behind" policy, which makes the public system not "outcome oriented" either - kids simply have no incentive to even try (and are disruptive instead), as there's no valuable outcome to achieve - the (fake) "outcome" is the same for everybody (finishing school), regardless of their actual level of education.

It's a hard problem.
What data on myself I collect and why?
When I had my little ISP in Phoenix way back in 1993, I would give a copy of this book to every new customer (along with a copy of Trumpet Winsock).
Ooh, that looks nice!

Though it doesn't seem particularly maintained