skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i presume he means the increase in the traffic acquisition costs like the $12billion (!!) they pay Apple to remain the default search engine in Safari.

i always found this baffling business logic from Google. i think Google is a strong enough brand that a lot of people would switch to it if it wasn't the default. maybe not everyone would switch but not worth $12 billion a year
One of the responses on twitter links to another twitter thread: https://twitter.com/johnny_makes/status/1218668895655079936

This one explains very well how I've recently come to feel about Google Search. I still remember when they were new and everybody flocked to them because they had the cleanest search with the best results. These days I barely see any results anymore because I'm automatically parsing them all as ads.

Because that's what they did here: organic results look more like ads now. So my automatic ad blindness filters them out. Whenever I search on Google, I feel like I'm only getting useless results, so I switched completely to DuckDuckGo now (I've used it before, but only occasionally; from now on it's going to be my default everywhere).
There's a steady stream of airworthiness directives from plane manufacturers. Old parts get discontinued, new parts have to be used, issues are found and corrected, more inspection is needed, sometimes less inspection is needed. More training, different training, etc.
Why would it have to come from another Saudi?
I can't, I'm in sort a niche area where there are people you've never heard of but are heroes in my field. I think this is the greatest strength of Twitter, it's not the same few celebrities. You find the people who are doing the things you want to know about. What do you do? What do you care about? Look for the leaders in those fields, and search for keywords to find conversations and you'll find other people who have a little community around it.
What are you looking for, a percentage? I can't give you one.

Think about what the point is; the point is to give hearing-impaired people the same experience as hearing people. If you quizzed some people who only had the audio and others who only read the captions, both groups should be able to answer questions at the same rate of success (caption readers may get more questions right, like naming a speaker).

Some video captions could have numerous errors but of a type that the reader can easily tell what was meant. Other videos might have highly accurate captions but one essential word was missed, changing the whole meaning.
For a quick and dirty proof of concept, do these things really matter?

Have you measured the overhead and impact on performance compared to other development stacks?
In my teams we take tickets for meetings, which makes product owners very aware of their impact on delivery.

I like including refactoring in tickets, but if the refactor is consequent it's not going to work. It's not so often thankfully, I usually manage to convince the PO of the value of it, then try to not budge once it's decided
I think a certain amount of it is just a fascination with minimalism for the sake of it and clever firmware tricks, but one argument for it is ergonomics.

Simply: fewer keys means less travel for your wrists and fingers, albeit (as someone mentioned) at the cost of a steeper learning curve in order to master the layer-switching and dual-use keys that you need to make such a small keyboard work. Germ, designer of the Gergo split-ergo keyboard that I currently use at home, has a good post on it here: https://blog.gboards.ca/2019/11/on-gergoplex-and-updates-let...
> No real choice, unfortunately. Oh, I'm sure some clueless Linux Desktop evangelist will try to claim otherwise, but the reality is that Windows and Office run the business world.

Also mind that "professional" editions of windows contain less of the crapware than Home or similar editions...
Might be now? I just swapped my default search to DuckDuckGo.

I have been having several issues with google search recently, this just seems like a good time to make the jump.
Is it that easy to be hacked with WhatsApp?
By that logic, nobody should care about the Khashoggi killing as well.
Not to mention that actually debugging with PHP is a pretty big chore.
in 2018.
What you’re seeing are signs of a successful industry.

They have money to burn on irrelevant things. At the end of the day the IT system will typically not help your margin on a supply chain beyond a tiny amount.
It is very odd. Every article I've read recently or when it occurred seem to leave this detail out.
If you're willing to load up a page when you detect something suspicious, as CloudFlare does with their "browser integrity check" page, you can also try to fingerprint the automated tool. There's often something unusual about the setup like odd browser version, strange global JS symbols, etc.

Completely possible to work around of course, but it does increase the effort level quite a bit.
I don't get why most keyboards available in stores have a numpad. I never use it, and it takes up valuable space on my desk. I wonder how many people actually use the numpad section of a keyboard on a daily basis.
Very interesting to know!

> parapsychology research at Harvard and Duke

Takes us back a ways away, huh? Different world, but don't get too comfy in this one, things have a cyclic tendency IME. ;-)

I'll tell you this: I can see why they went there, Maxwell and Rhine and so many others. All of my research into such topics¹ shows that the mind-body connection and its manifestations (consciousness, "soul", etc) have always been such "hard problems" that they've always been met with supra- or para-normal solutions — whether in myths, in philosophies ancient and recent, in the generally benevolent groups (spiritual, friendly, etc). And it's still very much an open question, thus lending itself to beliefs.

I think there are also metaphors, images that were so good and are now so old that they became their own thing, and lost almost all connection to the things they described. "Magic" is a good example of that — the power of the word, and behind that knowledge. Magic as a concept is "old speak" (pre-recorded history) for power, very human and very real power.

I find it actually fascinating that we hold such beliefs about possible superpowers, I can't help but think this ability to image (imagine) more is what actually drives civilization at the lowest level.

[1]: I mean self-development/help/growth, philosophy in the pre-20th century common meaning of a "practice", "recipes for good living", not the "science" or study thereof we made it out later and to this day.
Why would you not consider a computer game a software project?
I'm not directly involved, but my understanding is that to some degree the entire computer system is now involved. The problem is that the design philosophy of the instruments and computers on the 737 is the idea of having two "sides" to many sensors and instruments, a left and right. If the captain's airspeed readout differs from the FO's readout, the pilots are supposed to decide which one to trust.

Crucially, in order for this concept to work, the two sides are supposed to be totally independent -- the computers are different, the displays are different, and the sensors are different. However, at any one time, only one FCC is active, in that it is actually controlling the plane. Comparing the two sides AoA now violates this assumption and so many of the other engineering and certification assumptions may be violated since now the two FCCs are sharing AoA inputs.

Furthermore, my understanding is that now that everything is being looked at more closely, the FAA is having a change of heart about the idea of having one FCC active at a time being acceptable. If there is a hardware fault in the FCC, it has a lot of authority to cause problems, possibly faster than the crew can resolve them. My understanding is that now the FAA wants the FCCs to cross-check each other. Making this happen will require a lot of engineering and testing, and I think that this is the big reason for the delay. The MCAS fix itself was flight tested way back in April and May of last year.

All of that said, I don't believe an FCC fault has ever been implicated in an accident, so this IMO doesn't really present a safety issue big enough to be relevant to say, my decision of whether to fly on a 737MAX, but it looks like the FAA is deeming it not adequate for certification.

Airbus of course uses a different philosophy and uses multiple FCCs that continuously compare their output and vote.
"Trying to be all things to all people is a good way to be mediocre at all of them."

What prevents a language from providing high-level features on top of low-level ones? It's a false dichotomy.
This is the most in-depth article I've seen on the topic: https://www.chinalawblog.com/2019/11/chinas-new-cryptography....
See my statement about secure, cross origin preloads. You're asking a search engine to XSS attack its own users.
No one has mentioned changing the default field separator, e.g.,

awk FS=: '{print $1}' instead of cut -d: -f1

awk FS="<" '{print $2}' instead of cut -d'<' -f2

awk FS=">" '{print $1}' instead of cut -d'>' -f1
What do you want Trump to do?
If the CEO goes against the shareholders' wishes, he or she will simply be fired. The CEO works for shareholders and has no independent authority.
They're just turning the big dial that squeezes more money out of every user. They resisted for so long, but now they can't grow YoY without turning it. It's a one-way dial too, you can never turn it back.

Yahoo did this, most easily seen back on Yahoo Messenger, where I believe they fit an ad in 6 point type between two elements.

I've seen it at plenty of places that does revenue based A/B testing. You do an A/B test, measuring $ vs User retention. Money goes up, and retention maybe is affected, but over a few weeks, it looks like its the same. So you go on to the next test. Eventually, you find you have to do drastic measures to stop bleeding money. I wish I could say how long you need to measure retention for, but its probably too long for the test to make sense.
> we are limited to billion dollar ideas

How did matchmaking for music lessons get into the discussion as a billion dollar idea?

Referrals for tutoring in any subject (math, reading, music, etc.) would be a bigger market, but even then it might not be a $1B company.
Not suitable for Vim users, because it lacks an Escape key.
In saying "If your users are anything like ours, they're going to have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the new tool", I think you miss how the end-user sees things. Having worked with many such end-user teams over decades, what I found was that the end-user is seen as the "troublesome" bit of the organisation and have to be corralled like "wild animals" (to use an euphemism).

If they are consulted and treated as if they have serious input to what is being developed, here I mean what they see and what they do, they become much more amenable to the new system.

What end-users really don’t like is being told how to do their jobs by people who do not do their jobs. Especially, when they are now required (for management purposes) to do something that does not fit into their work-flows. This is where the development teams have a strong place to collect information without user intervention by being very smart.

However, this also means that the development teams have to show that they are NOT just cost centres but are “profit” centres for the business as a whole. This takes a lot of effort to achieve this in many organisations because of the biases of other parts of those organisations to the IT challenge.
"Britain will be ‘Siberian’ in less than 20 years" (2004)

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.t...

"By 2020 'catastrophic' shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war."

Ironically, we have more energy than ever before in 2020.

"“The End of Snow?” | by The New York Times" (2014)

https://snowbrains.com/end-snow-new-york-times/

Meanwhile, 2020 near record year for snow mass totals in Northern Hemisphere:

https://globalcryospherewatch.org/state_of_cryo/snow/fmi_swe...
Pavel Durov argued that WhatsApp's vulnerabilities are intentionally created as part of surveillance programs with government agencies. [1]

If that were true, Bezos's case would be an example of how that approach to security is double-edged. Backdoors can be just as useful to foreign intelligence as they are to whoever pushed for their implementation.

[1] https://t.me/s/durov/109
My policy on rewrites is that you must already fundamentally understand not only the code but also the business that the code covers. If the developer responsible for the rewrite satisfies this constraint, I have a much greater deal of confidence in the success of the effort.

Also, any rewrite should be done in contrasting terms of: Value to the end customer VS long-term technical value. Many rewrites remove value from both ends of the scale. Some may improve both. I think as long as you keep this equation balanced you will be ok. Many developers have ulterior motivations which can greatly compromise this equation if not carefully accounted for (e.g. chasing shiny things, resume padding, etc).

I would say that in purely technology terms, rewrites are amazing. My approach to writing a new system usually involves writing it 2 times at a minimum. The first pass is the fastest, hacky way I can get to MVP with a major focus on the most difficult technical aspects of the product. This pass is what I put in front of our internal developers to get some input so that I can quickly correct course if needed. During this time, I allow myself to make sloppy mistakes in favor of proving that a certain feature can (theoretically) work. This seems to do wonders for productivity because you are much more likely to experiment and find better paths when you aren't worried about your extremely pedantic code policies (of which we have many).

The 2nd pass (aka the rewrite) is when I have the first pass project up on the left hand side of my monitor, and a new solution on the right hand side. I use my original implementation as a reference, but now view it through the lens of auditing another developer's code for quality and policy. Having already proven that the hard thing can be done, my mind is now free to focus on the correctness and standards applied throughout. This is the code that I would actually put in front of our customers. From this point onward, unless a major shift in framework, architecture or language is decided, all future iterations are done on top of this 2nd pass codebase.

I would also say that just because you decide to do the rewrite doesn't mean you have to throw away the old code and any support for it. The most successful rewrites I've ever seen occur where the legacy system is ran in parallel with the new system with both being maintained and used in production simultaneously. Obviously this has some overhead, but it also ensures you have a stable fallback option with clear A/B comparison capabilities throughout the migration phase.
If anyone's using modifiers on alpha keys with QMK, let me know what sort of setup works for you. Right now I have ctrls under both pinky fingers (A and S since I'm using dvorac), and it kinda works but but I'm not 100% happy with it. Either I get unintended ctrl-modified presses while typing normal text, or a crtl-modified combo does not register because I do it too quick.
> "ask whether or not they close the bathroom door (or the stall in a public restroom) when they're taking a shit"

This is a pretty bad question and a hyperbole. Most people would want no one (including people who they are usually intimate with) to watch them defecate. And that is not the same thing as government snooping on its own citizens. Arguments for massive surveillance given by governments is not so much about invading the personal privacy of people than it is about protecting national "security" or preventing "terrorism". For this reason, few people are going to get convinced if you equate the privacy to use the lavatory without anyone watching to the privacy of being able to communicate without the government monitoring you. The best argument against massive surveillance is the one that Snowden gave during a Reddit AMA:

> "Some might say "I don't care if they violate my privacy; I've got
nothing to hide." Help them understand that they are misunderstanding
the fundamental nature of human rights. Nobody needs to justify why
they "need" a right: the burden of justification falls on the one
seeking to infringe upon the right. But even if they did, you can't
give away the rights of others because they're not useful to you. More
simply, the majority cannot vote away the natural rights of the
minority.

> "But even if they could, help them think for a moment about what they're
saying. Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because
you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care
about free speech because you have nothing to say.

> "A free press benefits more than just those who read the paper."
It's an example of a product regressing in quality over time. You can't even search properly using double quotes now. I have to deliberately append 'reddit' or 'stack overflow' to most queries to get decent answers now.
A little while back I started experimenting with changing the user agent string and found that there are actually many different variations of Google’s search UI that are currently accessible. For example, I was surprised to find that by setting the user agent string to Netscape Navigator 4, I could get a lightweight, no-JS version of Google that looked like it was from the early 2000’s. By using a user agent string from IE6/IE9, I could get a version of Google they looked like it was from around 2010 (the former with a simple white navigation bar, and the latter with a more complex black navigation bar). I found it interesting that these UIs seems to be almost frozen in time: many of their navigation bars contain some outdated links that either redirect or 404. I assume this mean that old browser versions are stuck in time in terms of Google search UI also.

Many of these UIs don’t have the controversial changes that Google has recently been implementing, including adding favicons and hiding full URLs.

I also found that there were several different mobile UIs for Google with different navigation schemes and search box styles.

I implemented what I found in a simple Firefox extension that changes the user agent string for Google searches [1].

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/google-search...
Still my favorite game
Nice, thank you for the info. I'll check this out
Ha, that's the answer actually, what it'll come down to if it must. Thanks for the insight.
Yeah, that's not how it is working right now. It's more like:

User: "Google, how do I get to Costco?"

Google: "Here are directions to Target."

User:"But I asked for directions to Costco."

Google: "Target gave us a lot of money. So, firstly here are directions to Target. If you still want Costco, keep scrolling, but Target is great. You should shop here."

When you literally search for one brand and the first result is a competitor, just because they bought out the ad space for your brand name's keywords, that is theft, imo. Or extortion if you'd prefer. It's at the very least, extremely disingenuous and sleazy. Customer loyalty is looking up the preferred brand to begin with.
There's a brilliantly-named paper on this: Why Nothing Matters: The Impact of Zeroing.

Efficient zeroing is something JVMs put some thought into. Well, with a notable exception, in HotSpot itself: We were able to substantially improve its performance by using memset() to perform the zeroing.

[0] (PDF) http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.225...
It is also worse than quora because quora can be blocked easily in search results since it is one domain. People use medium with their own domains too, which makes it hard to block entirely.
I use mine more now that it's right under my fingers via a layer switch ;)

I use a Keyboardio Model01 split ergonomic keyboard at work.
I don't understand it either. I built a keyboard with fewer keys and it makes programming very difficult, even if having the keyboard split apart is much more ergonomic.
> As a Linux user, I prefer much more the old Microsoft.

Me too. I prefer excel from 1991-1993 era. It fit on three 2.5" floppys, and did the basics perfectly.

Around Office 2004 I started to encounter weird formatting bugs (e.g., rotated axes would sometimes be clipped off the screen if I resized the chart), and this has persisted to today where Office Excel (v15) on macOS still fucks up the fonts, e.g. this morning I couldn't change the the x-axis font label: it was frozen as Calibri. Maddening.

I try to use Google Sheets for simple sharing spreadsheets, or gnuplot+awk for technical precision, but the industry is so MS heavy it is challenging. I've seen an uptick in Google Docs/Sheets/Slides usage over the past 5 years that is encouraging.

MS is clearly a monopoly on office productivity software, but slowly becoming a duopoly as Google Apps pick up momentum. Star Office still hurts too much when switching between Linux <> PC. (And Apple's Pages/Numbers? LOLOLOLOL)
One thing which this article doesn't address at all, is what is the beef between MBS and Bezos? Why would the Saudi prince leak this data? How did Amazon upset him?
jk stands for ESC
I'd like a 200 key keyboard please, will full macro functionality and programability
Slowly move all your stuff (user acc around the net) to new domain/email and once 1 year passes with no new emails to your old mailbox, trash it.
I use it for entering numbers, sure.

Almost every fancy mechanical keyboard seems to do away with it, though, so presumably a lot of people are OK without one.
As part of a practical component to any software engineering degree should be a simple course on common Unix tools, covering grep, awk, sed, PCRE, and git.

A little bit of knowledge here goes a LONG way.
Whoops, confused Hajj with Arba’een. I did not know about the latter and I assumed that they were the same. Arba’een is much larger than the Hajj.
Ha you are totally right, Chrome was such a joy to use back in the day...

Remember when google was cool?

https://youtu.be/SC-2VGBHFQI
I’m not sure how I feel about the ethics of volunteers massively contributing to the growth of a for-profit company.

StackExchange wouldn’t be anywhere near as big as they are without its volunteers and yet they only care about their bottom line.

Are there any non-profit alternatives?
There are lots of software projects on Kickstarter! I think what you're considering, though, is _consumer_ or _enterprise_ software. Which is because the incentives don't align that way. The way to capitalize those businesses isn't through Kickstarter.
I disagree, it's quite elegant if you think in terms of relational algebra operators:

* Projection (Π): awk and cut for simple cases

* Selection (σ): grep for simple cases, otherwise sed & awk

* Rename (ρ): sed

* Set operators: join, comm...
It's curious and sad that journalists are having to use the same or similar tools -- Tor, e2e encrypted, zero-knowledge chat and file transfer services -- as child pornographers or organized crime and to hide from the same people: agents of the government. Without journalists doing what they do then there's little to stop these over-stepping government agents from imposing digital tyranny.
To pile on :-) you often want -w (match word) flag to grep.

In awk, I couldn't find how to do this. I tried /\bfoo\b/ and /\<foo\>/ but neither worked. I don't know why and don't care enough which brings me to my major awk irritation ...

It doesn't use extended or perl REs, which makes it quite different to ruby, perl, python, java. Now, according to the man page it does; at least on OSX (man re_format) but as mentioned it didn't work for me.

Details

$ echo fish | awk '/\bfish\b/'

gets nothing, vs

$ echo fish | perl -ne '/\bfish\b/ && print'

fish