skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read the Hobbit to my daughter when she was 4 and to my son when he was 6, both closer to 5 and 7. I aimed for 10 pages a night of a pocket edition we have, which meant 25-30 nights or so.

My daughter got really scared with the giant spiders in the forest and wanted to quit, but I managed to convince her to go on. She was happy we did because everything turned out fine in the end. She was bored by the battle at the end of the book, but we got through it.

It's hard to know how much of the story my son understood. I usually reminded him what happened last time every time we started ("They were walking through the forest, remember?" or "Last time, they just reached the mountain!"). The individual parts are easy enough to understand, I think.

They both loved the riddle game with Gollum, and it sparked (or fed) an interest in riddles in both. It's an excellent book when you want to take the step up from children's books.
The Apple Watch is more successful in terms of revenue and profit than the iPod. AirPods are either estimated to be more successful or soon will be.

On the other hand, the iPad only came into its own well into the Cook era. It was really just a big iPhone when it came out (I had a first gen).
This article says the other trains cover routes monthly.

https://rail-record.co.uk/guide-to-network-rail-test-trains/
>> What specific and concrete unjustified harm has ever come to someone as a result of public facial recognition?

The harm is to peoples' expectation of privacy in a public place, which is non-zero. For example, if I'm walking around town talking to my partner, I don't expect random strangers to keep pace with us and eavesdrop on our conversation, because, even if it's in a public place, it's a private conversation.

In the same way, I don't expect private or public organisations to watch my every move and keep track of where I go, what I do and whom I speak to, every single day, which is possible with facial recognition technology and is, by its indiscriminate nature unjustified.

You 're probably not happy with this reply because you have framed the question as "concrete and unjustified harm", which strongly implies either financial as physical harm. But there is concrete and significant harm that can come to persons that is not financial or physical and that is nonetheless recognised by law. For example, Article 4 of the European Human Rights Convention makes slavery and servitude illegal without any precondition that violence is exerted, or the person is otherwise harmed physically or in any other way than being in servitude, i.e. the harm is recognised as being caused by the condition of servitude itself. And you can rest assured that nobody takes slavery and servitude lightly at least in most European countries who are signatories to the treaty.
Ask HN: UK Developer Conferences?
I used to go to NorDevCon when I lived in East Anglia. Now I've moved to North Wales I'm on the hunt for some good developers conferences in North Wales or the Manchester/Liverpool area. Does anyone have any recommendations?
They’re a burden to work with regardless of whether they match how pipelines work.
In Australia now, the restriction that Visa/MC used to enforce (same price for cash or CC) has been changed by the Reserve Bank (AU equiv of the Fed) so that surcharges etc are visible. So these days most merchants apply a ~1% surcharge for CC transactions.

We also have an "EFTPOS" network that is independent of Visa/MC. It's a debit account network owned by the banks that give you access to savings or cheque accounts. It's charges are much lower than Visa/MC, so merchants like when you use it and don't apply a surcharge.
Yeah, but every time you use AirBnB, a would be first-time homeowner cries to his sleep.
You guys need Jesus... and some solar panels.
Depends where it happens. The speed of light is quite slow relative to the size of the universe. So Higgs field collapse could happen a long way away and take millennia to reach us. Perhaps as the collapse propagates across the in universe it meets some huge energy event which pushes the Higgs field up again and rescues matter.
I think that in certain things like the Mac and iPhones that might be true. However last year’s iOS 13 really impressed me, especially the direction the iPad is going.

But AirPods and Apple Watch are certainly from Tim Cook’s Apple and I think they are outstanding products.
So I spend a lot on ads, I'm a little bit familiar:

Most 'search' ads are 'relevant' to the search, but they're not necessarily relevant to me.

In particular, banner ads, which are very crudely targeted, tend to be of 'low relevance' in marketing lingo, but in real terms, extremely low relevance.

For example, I don't live in the US, and I see an astonishing number of ads for US-centric content, and for products that are not even available where I live.

Consider the ad in the article itself: it's for a special night at the 'ROM' (Royal Ontario Museum) in Toronto. But I don't live anywhere near Toronto!

Scrolling down I see an add for the IDS 'Interior Design Show' in Toronto. Not only do I have absolutely no interest in the subject, but I don't live in Toronto.

I don't know if those are Google ad displays or not, but the it's basically the same, ad nauseam: the ad market is an astonishingly inefficient marketplace.

Perhaps the greatest opportunity for 'relevance' might be on Facebook - because they have such a massive base, and a real means to captured nuance behaviour. I run ads on that platform which score way above average in terms of relevance and performance, but I know for certain I'm not getting the kind of material relevance that I want.

Honestly it's a strange paradox to me: Google has everything at their fingertips and can't figure out who wants to buy a lawn mower and who has definitely no interest.
What's making me suspicious about the whole question is the lack of significant decimals on a number that's supposed to be the average of a very large number of measurements.

What's the average of [15, 15, 15, 15, 14, 14, 14]? 15.

What's the average of [15, 15, 15, 14, 14, 14, 14]? 14.

Is that a big difference?
Pythagoras and the Mystery of Numbers (2011)
I remember life before Uber and I'd never heard of Seamless, until your comment. These businesses genuinely just used VC funding and exploitative contracts to undercut perfectly viable existing services.

Before Uber, I'd take public transport, phone for a minicab or walk to their office to get one. (and I still do)

Before Deliveroo, I'd call the local takeaway and get them to deliver, or walk there and collect it myself. (and I still do).

You can argue that they have improved the lives of people who find it hard to use the phone, However, that was already solved for food delivery before these new delivery services came along and I would be surprised if there weren't minicab firms that accepted SMS or web bookings.
Game 3 (All you can E.T.) which I just installed is 267.7MB on iOS, for what looks and plays like a flash game. The Android version is 39MB, so they should probably compress their textures or something in the iOS build.

Looks like it was built with minimal playtesting. Took me a couple tries to figure out how to play, for which I had to read the article.

On initial launch the game asks if the user is OK with their data being collected for research, but the 'No thanks' button/label is too tiny and too close to the large 'YES' button. I had meant to choose 'No thanks' but I think I clicked 'YES.
Better try to sell it/give it away, maybe someone else will be able to fix it.
Recycling should be last step ;)
Personally I think the line spacing in that article is too much.
Focus, but drop quickly if it becomes boring.
Friday: Further Thought – From Mystery to Revelation
You are already naming the problem here:

> Some restaurants have started paying their servers more and not allowing tips.

Service bad? -> complain to employer, employer punishes employee

Service OK? -> employer pays employee for work done

Service good? -> employer pays employee for work done and customer pays employee for good work (and employee shares it with all the other employees who are in the chain of service).
Finding an entirely new foundational problem and solving that by designing a generic, reusable solution is incredibly hard. Only very few people luck out and succeed in doing that.

The vast majority of modern technology are mainly improvements on past solutions. And the process is entirely darwinistic: only those improvements that come with the least amount of friction will be adopted by a large enough number of users.

The same is true for science. Few people get to crack truly foundational problems. Most people work on different ideas and approaches that refine existing solutions, until the scientific community converges around a new incumbent solution or idea. Then the cycle begins again when a new idea or solution enters the domain. Rallying our collective brain power towards a few or even a single idea or solution will slow that feedback cycle.

So, working on a variation of an existing thing isn't necessarily bad. Your execution may be better then the incumbent solution and uproot the status quo.

There are also other reasons why working on an existing problem may yield benefits:

You learn more about the process. For instance, a simple todo application isn't interesting in itself. But going through the process of building one and finding out how to do that efficiently: that's where you'll find value. Those experiences and lessons you take to the next project which may be your own or part of a bigger mission or vision.

If you work with other people, you are practicing your communication skills and your people skills. Both are hugely valuable as well. The most impact you can have isn't necessarily through writing code on your own, but by coaching and supporting others; clearing impediments and clarifying problems by reframing them.

If you cling on to the notion that building something entirely new is the only relevant measure of success, you set yourself up for failure.
This to me is what I really miss about Ruby on Rails being a more popular platform, way more than any of the metaprogramming magic or super-readable syntax. It made a ton of choices for you, which helped with productivity on teams more than anything else.

If you had a new developer coming onto a Rails project, there's no need to ask how logging is done, where models and controllers were stored, what the naming convention of database tables were, how assets are compiled, where to find tests or how to run them, how to start your application, or probably a hundred other little tiny decisions.

Sure, you have less control over things, but 90% of the time, that control doesn't matter, and you're making life more difficult for every other person who will ever read your code in the pursuit of what's often purely aesthetic.
Just because Google does not use their data to show better ads does not mean they don't know what to do with the data. Maybe more relevant ads would mean fewer ads and less revenue?

The data is there and can be used at any time, for any purpose.
By ”can't handle” people mean an incident similar in scope to a mine collapse or coal plant fire. The fires of Saudi oil fields were more toxic than that. People do not understand the kind and level of risk posed by radiation at all - Fukushima was cleanly contained, despite multiple safety systems failing. (Compared to TMI or Chernobyl especially.) The evacuation caused more harm than the incident, as does the sigmatization of the people <not really) affected by it. And it got hit by a tsunami, not a risk in Germany.

This is how overblown the whole affair is.

Yes, wind and solar are safer. So is geothermal. But nuclear is still safer than hydroelectric, gas, oil or coal.
Of course, secret agents play by different rules. In the EU intelligence agencies generally aren't as intimidating so it's less of a concern. But if you do have reason to worry about this, investing in this technology might help a bit with spotting spies.
Was reading this article while waiting for my kernel to build.

bwrawp giving my LFS nightmares, and I'm not super keen on user_namespace, but suid isn't working either, FML
You could apply this to virtually any product category. Liquor, beer, tobacco, soda, meat, toothpaste, soap, on and on and on.

Well you don’t need soda it’s a vice so we aren’t going to regulate it and make sure products are safe.

Who defines the start and end for what should be regulated? You? Legal products in the US should be safe to purchase. If marijuana is legalized it should be safe to purchase also.
Musk and Jobs having strong visions and making them happen so that we can all benefit is denigrated as "reality distortion field"?
You think that people who work for Uber Eats are the kind of people who own their cars outright?

It’s true, though, that you could look at it as a draw-down on a car loan.
It is still controversial whether n-back games improve working memory outside of the game context.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-back:

> Two studies published in 2012 failed to reproduce the effect of dual n-back training on fluid intelligence. These studies found that the effects of training did not transfer to any other cognitive ability tests.[12][13] In 2014, a meta-analysis of twenty studies showed that n-back training has small but significant effect on Gf and improve it on average for an equivalent of 3-4 points of IQ.[14] In January 2015, this meta-analysis was the subject of a critical review due to small-study effects.[15] The question of whether n-back training produces real-world improvements to working memory remains controversial.
The cellular Apple Watch keeps me from being distracted. It keeps me off the web and other apps but I’m still easy to contact.

When I’m running or at the gym, it’s really nice not to have to lug my phone with me and still have access to music, podcasts, and when I’m running GPS to track distance and speed.

The iPod was not technically a leap. They assembled it from third party hardware in less than 9 months. The only reason it wasn’t copied sooner is because Apple (smartly) bought up the complete supply of 1.8 inch hard drives for months.

Competitors still haven’t been able to squeeze the functionality and performance of the Apple Watch in a device as small.
That's a US thing. In a lot of countries, CC transactions have a surcharge. They also have independent debit networks (not Visa Debit or Cirrus, which uses the Visa/MC Networks) that offer substantially lower merchant fees (often a fixed fee per transaction of equivalent of 0.1-0.5%).
Wherever I worked, these kind of checks did always more harm than good. You force a bunch of tools on your developers which they hate, only to have your whole codebase littered with "disable linter X" comments. In a good review process the developers can negotiate the conventions by themselves, which leads to acceptance among the team.
Ask HN: Anybody Using KSQL in Production
We are considering KSQL for real time streaming use cases. How is your experience using Kafka SQL(KSql) in production.
Pain in the lower back, iirc mostly in the muscles next to the spine. The wiki page says "stiffness", but I never experienced it like that, it was more like regular pain.
I used to have 2 different beds so I could switch in the early morning, this way I could continue sleeping. The pain also occurred when standing for long periods, and later, when sitting for long periods. Improvements with walking and moving around, and as I later learned, with NSAIDs like ibuprofen because it's an autoimmune disease. (Don't take on empty stomach).

The exercises at first focused on identifying and strengthening the Transverse abdominal muscle (TVA). During the later exercises you're then supposed to activate this muscle.

TVA: while lying on your back, feel with your fingers next to the protruding hip bone. Try to imagine you have to put on pants that are a little bit too small. Meanwhile keep breathing with your belly, so you don't tense your abs. Feel if you can sense a muscle tightening. Then first just tighten this muscle a couple days, then start with lifting part of your leg, etc.

Then you can start with bridge and opposite arm and leg raise. These are pretty well documented on google. With bridge, focus on lifting 1 vertebrae at the time in a rolling motion. With the opposite a/l raises, focus on maintaining good position of your hips, keeping them horizontal throughout, and starting off with the correct amount of cat/camel roll. Do only an arm or leg first, then opposite. Make more difficult by moving your arm, someone pushing you, unstable surfaces. Sideways planks and pushups are also good.

Other exercises we did but I never practiced much: sitting in chair with straight back, activate TVA, lift 1 leg a little. Standing up, activate TVA, keep hips horizontal, slide 1 foot forward, sideways, circles etc. We also do a lot of stretching, mainly piriformis, hamstrings and thighs.
The GDPR isn't the only privacy law in the EU.
Agreed, but there are differences between the GDPR per members country, for example, in the Netherlands we are not free to use data derived from people that specifically said their data would be usable for science (data like tumor gene expression values). You need to ask for consent again. Or if you can't, you need to prove you can't and then you need to publish everything you derive from the data. This is different in the UK.
Milligram [1] and Scaffold (recently on HN [2]) follow this principle of doing a stylesheet for semantic, classless HTML.

[1] https://milligram.io/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21948472
No, the grid will have issues because there isn't a transition plan in place, it's technologically viable to run of mostly solar and wind with some gas peakers. It's obviously, politically sensitive to plan for this transition. So it hasn't happened and now you're arguing that coal is the only way to provide "baseload".

Think about how much sun covers Australia and you're telling me there isn't enough sun? What about wind, uranium and gas? Look to the stars my friend.

To your point about the ratio of thermal to coking coal. What's your point? So Australia stops exporting thermal coal, and increases taxes on coking coal to pay for the transition to a renewable grid and support coal miners while they find other work in renewables (which they should've done 20 years ago). There's no problem with that plan.
Sure, it's possible, with major compat breaks. What I'm asking is this: what is the (commensurate) benefit from this change? I just don't see "looks prettier by default" as a strong enough reason - what am I missing?
The Germany Shock: The Largest Economy Nobody Understands
Who Wants to Play the Status Game?
Reminds me of _The General Problem_ [1].

[1]: https://www.xkcd.com/974/
Well they have to push the ads they have. Clearly they can't run an ad for not buying a lawn mower.
> I built exactly this. The idea was to make databases look and feel like a file manager where databases are shown as folder, tables as subfolders and rows are shown as files that once open shows a fully editable form ... It understands foreign keys and create relevant links to easily navigate through.

I thought that was the whole point of e.g. LibreOffice Base and the like? (including Paradox, Access, etc.) So you built a web-based clone?
There are a lot of headless CMS which assists with the creation.
>But if you do have reason to worry about this, investing in this technology might help a bit with spotting spies.

This seems really doubtful. If anything the wide availability of commercial surveillance data would be a treasure trove for intelligence agencies to sift through.
There is one issue that I can see with this, which is when the stock is valued near to some calculated future value of dividends. The price of a stock can go down while the dividend remains constant. Hence, some will take up coal stocks that now have a high dividend for the value of the stock; essentially a discount (which may in this way be naturally corrected).

However, in terms of capital available to a company, often a company needs enthusiastic investors (Uhm... WeWork anybody?) that generate funds for large capital expenses.

Since you worked at BlackRock, I'll take your word for it that the former will not take preference over the latter. I'm too young to have money to invest and don't know enough about the nuances for big time issuer companies to know the exact impact of Fink's [1] move.

[1] The CEO of BlackRock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_D._Fink
Water is a good insulator, but not a perfect insulator. If the temperature difference between the bottom and top changes so does the heat transfer and given time the effects will spread. But most important is, warm water/moisture is less dense than cooler water, that means large heat transfer by convection currents in addition to the low conduction (inverse of insulation).
I'm still confused why would people keep working for DoorDash? No other jobs around? Would they just be unemployed if DoorDash closed down? Is it that DoorDash actually tricks people into working for them with hope of a higher wage which never comes?

I'm against the practices they put in place, but am more leaning on better universal income, health, basic amenities, things like that. And I'd hope that if that was the case, it would also mean no one works for DoorDash making 2$ an hour, since that's less then your universal benefits would even give you. But I'm not sold on any one idea. So I'm asking to help refine my opinion. I feel I'm missing a piece of the picture here.
The website does not implement what it advocates:

- Scroll bar on left.. why?

- superfluous links

- messy typography

- overly contrasty colour scheme.
> done not to provide genuine improvement, but done for amusement and promotion of the author

I'd argue that if done for amusement, it's rather self-fulfilment than dick waving. Spinning the metaphor, some of us are not open-sourcing their project to put their external organs in other's face, but rather publish "just in case" someone may be interested in bootstrapping another project from here.
From the article:

> As they have raged for months in Australia, the fires have pumped 400 megatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere

That's crazy. For comparison, 400 megatonnes is roughly half of what Germany emits in a whole year.[1]

[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-co2-emissions-...
It's to the point where ideals don't matter.

If you invest in energy you want renewables. Purely because of the economics of it. The only exception is if you get some shady Adani deal.
This was also my thought. I think the only fail-safe strategy is if renewables are cheaper than coal (or more convenient / popular from the consumer's side).