skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a lot to be said for making a computer my mother can/wants to use. And Doctorow's sneering condemnation of people describing their mother's as "not good with computers" is telling of what he thinks of those not firmly in the technorati circles he inhabits. Saying "not good with computers" != "a low opinion of that person". He's projecting.

My wife and mother are largely mystified by computers and have been brought to literal tears born of frustration when using them. One of these women is a PHD in English literature and has published over 20 books ranging from short stories for children to graduate-level textbooks. The other has a Doctorate of Dental Surgery and is clinical faculty at a respected School of Dentistry.

These women aren't dumb, but they don't give two flying fucks about a computer they lets them unscrew the casing or comes with the schematics of the circuitboards included! They're much more interested in exploring the human condition through language or practicing medicine. Between all of that they do need to check their email, shop, and keep up with their family on Facebook.

So Cory Doctorow won't buy an iPad. It's not for him/me/us/the nerds. We can buy raspberry pi's, Android devices, Linux desktops, etc... But there is a whole market of people who don't care about computers beyond what they can do for them in the most expeditious way possible. I'm not into toasters, but I use one almost every day and I don't care at all how/why it works. I've got bigger fish to fry.

This article is framed as a victory lap, but comes off more like a gear-head complaining about how shitty the Ford Escape is. Except that Ford doesn't care, because he wasn't on their radar when they made it. The people buying Escapes don't care, because they're busy with all the parts of their lives have literally nothing to do with cars.

I'm sure Doctorow's echo chamber will congratulate on sticking it to Apple (again!) with this trailblazing though-piece. And in 10 years we'll get another article about how he's still not buying iPads. It's all very boring to me.
Two types of command-line interfaces (2016)
What was the actual mechanism they exploited that made them think or pretend to think that this was legal? There is some explanation in the Wikipedia article but it doesn't describe how the refund was untied from, say, actually receiving a dividend, or the payment of some tax that would get refunded.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files
"Worry"? That seems like a strong word here.

This is a game that I enjoy playing. I have never tracked how long I take. Many days, I do only a single lesson. That's less than 5 minutes, sometimes less than 3.

I'm not trying to be fluent. I'm not really _trying_ to achieve anything. The closest I have to a goal is that I enjoy having another language's vocabulary that I can use when speaking around my children.
Richer Command Line Interfaces
https://www.gwern.net/Hydrocephalus

Gwerns very detailed write up on the conditoon
Maybe copperspice as mentioned by "icandoit":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22161633

But maybe that's more as Suse is to RedHat than CentOS is to RedHat..

https://www.copperspice.com/
Using Systemd Path Units to Monitor Files and Directories
We do call them scum masters and they are not engineers and not managers. It's like "let the blind lead the way". Same for managers that have no clue about what they are supposed to manage.
Taxpayers Decide Some States Aren't Worth It
Defining the Word, “Garbage Collection”
This.

In fact, it's really common to use a ZFS array on single nodes, and then create a SAN using multiple such machines by layering Ceph on top.
Exactly. It's totally subjective. My speculation is that the personality type that is drawn to moderating a public forum like this is low on the kind of self-awareness that could distinguish personal bias from the written rules of the community.
Mamba Mentality (2018)
New Asus Chromebox 3 $190
It's really nice to call ggplot2 from Haskell with inline-r quasiquotation, which is evaluated using an instance of the R interpreter embedded in the binary https://tweag.github.io/HaskellR/
Just last week Terry Jones' obituary received hundreds of upvotes here and in many other places.

I guess users are flagging Kobe but not Terry Jones because they like Jones more. But this is explicitly what flagging is not supposed to be about.
I've seen it, although it depends on the surrounding demographics. The suburbs I currently live in, it's uncommon. But much of the newer urban housing I looked at before deciding on a place had that particular set up. As well as some older housing, which happened to be in the vicinity of a local college.

Barring the specifics of rich people's house, you'll generally see this set up in places where the "kid's rooms" are not, in fact, intended for kids. Where I've seen it in urban homes, it was designed so there was definitively a master suite, but then every other bedroom came paired with it's own en-suite. From my understanding talking to builders, it's done this way since a large chunk of owners in that area are young professionals that rely on renting out other rooms in the house (whether to other young professionals or AirBNB-style short term rentals) to afford the home. In college areas, you get similar rational, but because every room tends to be rented out to a student, there's usually not a definite "master suite" and all of them tend to be similarly sized and equipped with amenities.
Fast answer - you're over thinking this.

Looking to build a portfolio that's public is fine on either GL or GH. If a particular mentor will not work with you because you're on one platform vs another, then switch. But GL is a perfectly good platform to host your public portfolio if you like it.

Digging a bit deeper, this likely falls into the rabbit hole of optimizing something that doesn't matter.

Focus on creating things that teach you - move you forward. Either technically or solve a specific problem.

What could change the above answer is if you're looking to build OSS. Less about building a portfolio but more about pure number of eyes. For better or worse, GH is still more widely used so then I could recommend a switch.
You'd probably want to tether the balloon somehow. A balloon I worked on stayed aloft for about two hours, but in that time it traveled about 100 miles. Even then, when it was above the horizon we could hear it with our equipment on the ground.

I should note that the balloon only came down because it was designed to burst at a certain altitude and return under a parachute. Other designs that are meant for long or indefinite missions can last for weeks. As I understand it, other than lifting gas leakage the main limiting factors are energy (solved with solar panels, batteries, and smart usage) and balloon integrity under bright sunlight.

As for quick deployment, perhaps there are ways to do it, but it took our (admittedly inexperienced) team of 15 or so about an hour to string up our payloads, fill the balloon to the right volume, and release it. Lots of fun, though.
Depending on how it's configured to wake, my guess is it's your mouse. When you stand you move the desk just enough to cause the mouse to wake it. Happens to me all the time when I bump by desk when getting out of my chair.
Can you share a bit more about how it's showing its age?

(I'm not a web dev, but played around with Flask recently and in general find the giant ecosystem of different frameworks fascinating.)
We've known for at least a decade that astrocytes and other glia play important roles in synaptic transmission and learning, not just axon insulation and blood-brain-barrier related stuff. It's still unclear what most of their contributions are. They're harder to interrogate because they're not as electrically active as neurons, and though they do exhibit Calcium waves, they're small and seem to be localized to small compartments. There's a number of people out there working on glia in a functional sense, like Atwell at UCL and Magistretti (though he's retired now i think).
Kobe Bryant Has Died
Well since you ask: Flutter is good, but it's also buggy.

1. Problem with Cupertino theme on Android - https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/42988#issuecomment... -- only point 1 from this post matters, because point 2 was resolved by a helpful person below the post. But point 1 is still unresolved, and it looks bad.

2. Flutter runtime simply crashes on some mobile phones when loading the app. I've released an app on old SDK, and with every update of some minor thing + SDK I'm getting reports about new crashes from people who rated the app 5 starts on older SDKs, because it was working for them earlier. I've tried to report it: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/43240 but my issue was grouped with some unrelated problem, and my questions were ignored.

3. I think the x86 codegen in Flutter is sometimes buggy. I've used a ZIP compressor/decompressor library written in pure Dart and it sometimes crashed in random location after using the library. I've tried to debug it but there was no pattern for the crash. The crash also was happening on the system level (SIGSEGV) instead of simply throwing an exception that would be catchable by Dart. When testing on the mobile phone, so when ARM codegen was used, I've observed no crashes and no problems when using the archive library.

4. Google AdMob has poor support for Flutter. The official AdMob lib doesn't support native ads, and is incompatible with widgets that draw an always-on-top layer, like Drawers or Action Buttons at the bottom right corner of the screen. It IS possible to finally work out the solution by using some thirdparty library which uses AdMob in a hacky way, but I would expect something better for one of the most crucial Google services like AdMob.

5. Until recently there was no support of Cupertino theme's i18n. I had to manually translate all texts of Cupertino theme to a different language (like 'copy', 'paste', etc).

I've released two apps in Flutter but I'm afraid to update them, because something always breaks after update.
For startups no, for classical jobs, at least here in Europe, yeah.
Turkey has 80 million people and a GDP of $770 BILLION (nominal) or $2.3 Trillion PPP. Essentially unlimited money and manpower--for the task at hand.
On the Metal, Episode 9: Jonathan Blow
It is due to Brownian motion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion
> I agree 100%! I would like to hear ideas about how to eliminate this notation. I feel it's keeping too many people away from the field.

I didn't mean you shouldn't use the standard mathematical notation, which seems to be what you're talking about. I meant you should use it in the standard way. Don't use superscripts that are neither powers nor variables; for example, don't use U^M to mean "max weight capacity" and U^V to mean "max volume capacity". UM and UV, M and V, or even U_M and U_V would be an improvement. Don't typeset your display math with the subscripts to the right of the Σ as if it were part of a paragraph; put them underneath. Don't put extra spaces in the middle of your subscripts. If you only have two subscripts (with numeric values, not things like "M" and "V"), it's okay and probably better to make one of them a superscript, especially if you parenthesize it to reduce the chance that people will mistake it for a power. Don't leave out your variable of summation when you write Σyⱼcⱼ or, as you did in another case, write it in upper case. Don't write sets as comma-separated sequences of elements without {} around them.

Alternatively you could write the whole model down in GNU MathProg, which is more verbose but not that much, arguably more precise, and universally understood by people who work in the field in anything other than pure theory. Or Pyomo, which I've never written anything in, but assume can't be that much worse or nobody would use it. Either way it would be easier to use multi-letter names for your variables and parameters if you thought that made things clearer.

I don't think the standard mathematical notation is keeping people away from the field; students who already know basic algebra don't seem to have much trouble with the notation. Figuring out how to make reasonable MILP models or how to diagnose the problem when the solver says your model is infeasible, those seem to take a lot more work.

> Flexport uses the Medium.com platform,

Why? You want to screen people out of your recruiting process that haven't signed up for Medium accounts? Or you want to signal that you're a nontechnical company that can't figure out how to install Wordpress? There are Docker images for that now, you know.
> Use React’s declarative JSX syntax, JavaScript components, and a rich component library to build, deploy, and operate your <NodeService>

Im sorry but why would someone want to use a templating language to configure infrastructure? It’s like using CSS syntax for defining an HTTP API. Doable, but... why? It’s not any easier to pick up or reason about than any existing configuration language.

On React + node, this assumes no rendering on the server, plus you’ll need to pick your own state management solution, data layer, http framework, router, and a whole host of secondary tools, which will comprise about 96% of your actual development time.
I've moved desks 6 times (between 2 buildings and 5 floors) in under 3 years. I guess when a company is growing rapidly, you've got to shuffle people around.
I know "meta-commentary" is generally frowned upon on HN, but a quick question to people considering flagging: why is this flaggable, but Terry Jones' obituary from last week [1] is not?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22117044
In software verification,
a sound technique is ...

In other words, tests are not sound ... Anyway, we are quibbling about meaning of words, so this is unlikely to be fruitful.
Any way to subscribe to your development? I'd be willing/interested to beta test things.

Any chance of actually doing something about the response to microsoft's query about using python as a macro language?
The community impact of GitHub is huge: I explore GitHub projects all the time, and I'm very likely to submit a drive-by fix for a GitHub project. ...I have to be pretty invested to feel like logging into GitLab. I also do often look people on GitHub to see what they do, and if they're not there, I might not assume where else to look.

But I agree with ktpsns, git is decentralized. Feel free to use both. You open yourself up to more interaction and more safety for potential issues like service outages or data loss.
That looks like the Mercer dorm at the University of Washington!
Sticking to your principles isn't really in-and-of-itself a virtue. History books are littered with lives destroyed by charismatic and unwaveringly principled monsters. I'd treat it as a curiosity at best.
5 answers as of my typing this, all 5 recommending almost entirely different options.

I think you're not going to see much consensus to this question, merely a comment-based list of all possible frameworks that people know.

User joshmn had it right in his reply:

> If you know something now, use it.

Anything your team already knows will be easiest and fastest for you to use. Any new person you hire will have a lot to learn no matter which one you choose, unless you hire people for the framework/stack you chose.

There is no "right" answer to this, and there probably never will be, and that's not a bad thing. Trying to find the "perfect" solution is a futile effort.
Define "Turkey's Interest".
It saves a fortune, but the companies are spending a fortune on their employees' salary and benefits too

I think we're talking the difference between $300/month on open desk space vs $1000/month on an office. It's a lot of money and it adds up, but these people are costing the company a total of $10k-$40k a month

My theory is that open space is extremely helpful to certain types of people, and those traits coincidentally overlap with the people calling the shots at a lot of companies. Sociable upper managerial-types probably value being able to collaborate more easily in open space more than being able to concentrate in private offices.

Plus it's harder to get away with blatantly goofing off if anyone can look over and see your screen at any time, but I dunno how big a deal that is when people are setting their own hours and picking the projects they're working on. At least in my case, I don't give a crap if my teammates have Facebook and Netflix onscreen at all times so long as they're getting their jobs done
I had that with terraform before Kubernetes anyway.
NSFW, please!
Looking forward to seeing a high performance dev-board from SiFive.
Is Data Privacy and GDPR Legislation a Concern for Social CRM?
How did you deal with people criticizing your masking tape construction? This has been a bane for me since I can remember.

I love prototyping but hate the instant terrible feedback. People often look at the construction instead of the results and/or can't/won't imagine it a first step or how awesome a final product it can turn into.
Fortuitous timing. I just started writing daily on https://ds0.xyz whose backend I recently updated to employ tagging, but I haven't covered anything worth reading*.

How do people keep up with each other, private site-wise? Should I just add an RSS feed or something?
Announcing Gatsby Builds and Reports
Question for Brad (if you have time): other than Go, what Google projects that became open source deserve honorable mention?
Ask HN: What can we personally do to prep for the coronavirus?
I’m guessing buy a bunch of non perishable food, a can opener, and a bunch of bottled water, so that we can hold up in our house if needed.

What else?
It is a matter of concern if said database systems leaves its filesystem contents in an inconsistent state at any point. ZFS, BTRFS, and others can only keep consistent what they have control over.
CacheOut: Leaking Data on Intel CPUs via Cache Evictions
2.39 KB landing page? A blurb above the fold not only addressing the purpose of this product but also the context that it's addressing? A digestible list of features and improvements over alternatives?

An exemplar to aspire to, for sure. Bravo!
1. Realise work is subservient to life, you work to enable life, not the other way around. As such re-evaluate and keep your goal in mind .

2. If work isn't taking you where you where you want to go and worse, if it's hurting you, you need to either find a new tack or different work. I know this is easy to say from a position of privilege, but would it be hard for you to change post or change company?
'tptacek, your Twitter is (or was, I guess, I don't think he's talking about that problem much right now) full of retweets of Pinboard saying things along the lines of "Companies throwing money and lobbying to influence legislation is bad and should be stopped."

A decade later, the [iPad] is ten years old and Apple has killed 20 state Right to Repair bills, in part to lock out third parties who might change you batteries for you.

How can you not understand that? Not allowing "plug'n'play" batteries that anyone with a screwdriver could do is at least hypothetically justifiable as a design decision, but Apple's batteries are replaceable and they go to great steps to prevent indie shops from doing so.

They demonstrate it pretty repeatedly by selling it as an extremely marked-up service in Apple's stores.
I've had 9 in 4.5 years. 3 were from me choosing to switch teams. All others were moves within 500ft to adjust for growing teams.

Why do you think it's a big deal to switch desks every 6 months or so? My company does the move for me, so all I have to do is put my few things in a box and label it (and my computer stuff). Takes 30 minutes tops.
I dont remember Google's Search Engine had outages. ( May be once in the past 10 years ) Why is it all the other products, from GCP to Google Sheet had more outages?

And Google was suppose to compete with Microsoft Azure or Office 365?
We had to move to Excel. :(
It's really not and there are absolutely cases where marketers have to market a superior product over a sub-par product. A lot of the art in marketing is ending up in front of the consumers for whom your product IS actually relevant. If a superior product fails to sell over a sub-par product then the marketing was probably crap.
> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

Now that’s what I call nonsensical. By that logic with the recent Cambridge Analytica scandals, the US and China trade wars, etc have all been top on HN and covered on the news, meaning that HN broke their own rules.

Perhaps when the UK decides to use or ban Huawei for its 5G technology, as soon as it mentions the UK PM’s name, I won’t be surprised if this gets flag/dead quickly.
So communication is completely top to bottom?
> It’s amazing for how long Emacs’ Org-mode has been largely unparalleled!

After jumping into org last year, I think it because orgmode has a solid foundation for organizing stuff that's infinitely customizable with elisp. Roam, evernote, onenote; they just don't have the flexibility. The lack of customizability is a feature in itself: it's easy to pick up.

On the other hand, orgmode has a fairly vibrant community that will keep improving orgmode for many years to come.
Everyone says fewer features sounds great until the missing features includes the one they reeeeaaaallly need.
do you really need the numbers? if it's alphabetical list, maybe letters, otherwise, just prev/next . most people are now accustomed to infinite scrolling which doesnt even have a prev button, let alone numbers
Maybe there is a little bit of solace in knowing that in some sense he lived more in his too short life then most of us will in our full-length ones.
Office 365 has multiple outages daily, so are you sure that was a good example?
It's a familiar interface with well-understood operational primitives (copy, apply, combine, etc.). SQL/Python/writing declarative code introduces an interface which has a substantially steeper learning curve for anyone who isn't a power user, and is a step removed from the ease of use of drag-and-drop.
We have 'macros' in https://www.cloudsynth.com to create issues on the various issue systems (jira/github/etc) and it it is actually pretty impressive how slow JIRA is compared to the rest of them. It's like theres a sleep loop or something.
If you'd kept asking the 5 whys you'd have gotten to the real problem: noisy machines in open offices. You should have thanked the lady who put the paperclips on the fans.
A Machine Learning Approach to Grocery Promotion
A business prof once asked a simple question to prove the value of a brand:

Would you rather own all the plant and equipment of Coca-Cola, or would you rather own the brand?

The answer is obvious and this sort of thing is taught in every business program. Which makes it a shocking when companies do self-destructive things with their brands: Microsoft advertising candy crush and adding pervasive telemetry; Dropbox selling/oversharing user data; chipotle failing to ensure integrity in their supply chain.
How is it any different than a sports player getting millions of fans to glue to their TV screens watching them play? How about a highly paid actor convincing billions of people to glue themselves to the silver screen?

They're all forms of widespread entertainment and are valuable enough to pay good money for.
The problem is that with insecure crap flooding the market there’s no way to tell the good stuff (if it exists) apart from the garbage. It’s not like they clearly explain how it works or publish the code. Worse, people involved in this usually come from a physical security background and the electronic aspect of the system somehow gives them a false sense of security where it’s actually even easier to break than picking a good mechanical lock.

I’ve seen hotels and student dorm rooms using insecure systems (the latter of which I exploited as a teenager to make a second keycard to sneak into my GF’s room without having to borrow her only key. How easy the attack was worried me quite a bit).