skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> i seriously know a person who was like "hrm, lets build our own pick-and-place for the smt line..."

I mean, how hard could building our own pick & place be, right? Once you strip out all the bloat the vendors add to make a sale, it is nothing you couldn't do with a couple servos and a $5 Arduino, right?

I think the "build everything ourselves" attitude comes from a not at all understanding opportunity costs and comparative advantage. Plus in the software industry, tons of developers I've encountered are super paranoid about "vendor lockin" without realizing that once they roll their own library/framework/pick-and-place-machine they have effectively locked their employer into a vendor as well. Only instead of a third party vendor with all the benefits that may come with it, they've "purchased" a product from a really shitty vendor--themselves!

It is never a choice between:

"Platform or no platform"

"Framework or no framework"

"Vendor lock-in or no vendor lock-in"

You will always be on a platform. You will always be using a framework and you'll always be locked into a vendor. The trick is to make sure you don't lock yourself into a shitty vendor who makes a shitty platform or framework.
Don’t you mean.. the space cash?
Yeah, no frequency capping. I got all Apple Card ads, which tarnishes Apple Card brand value. This feels like a dollar store theoutline.com. Brutalism doesn't work for long-form content, imho.
Yes, frequently it is. We were at UMCP at the same time, by the way.
Take from the poor, give to the rich, same with .org it’s a transfer of wealth, land grab, whatever you want to call it, the 1% looking for new revenue streams, costs a lost to take a private jet these days, costs are going up, you even have to pay up to find a good gardener.
No, but it rationalizes and generalizes the conversation so rather than discussing/attacking a single company, discussion can be about the greater problem and how to fix it.
Parasite: People living in Seoul's basement apartments
Frankly, I don't think we necessarily need more money in Alzheimer's research. We just need to stop burning that cash on amyloid drugs and clinical trials for amyloid drugs. What the whole saga of oncology over the past few decades has revealed is that understanding the actual cause and pathology of a disease is crucial to unlocking new treatments and cures - it wasn't until we understood cancer as a cellular disease that we developed chemotherapy, and it wasn't until we understood it as a genetic disease and characterized the role of the immune system that we began making progress with targeted therapies and immunotherapies.

We don't understand neurodegeneration yet, and we're probably lumping together hundreds of different disease pathologies under the name "alzheimers," each needing a different treatment approach. If we took the money we've been burning on the same dead end and redirected it to basic research, that might be what best helps crack the code.
Sounds pretty silly to extract your data instead of showing you ads — all in the name of protecting your privacy.

But to play devil's advocate, some ads do actually invade your privacy because they come from malicious malvertisers. If they are actually treating the purchase price information 100% anonymously (never linking it to PII), then there's an argument that they're protecting your privacy by doing this.

Or they could just run an ad platform that blocks malvertisements...
There are 3 private companies working on nuclear fusion right now. What has Argonne done in the past 50 years?
eh? Fortran is not dead. How can RoR be?
Sure. However, secrets are hard to keep.
This is machine-generated, right?
RPM CentOS 7 Error
Thanks! That was an incredible comment, thanks for taking the time to do it.
Government debt in that state's own currency is not like household debt. Frankly, we shouldn't use the word "debt" for the former.
In various non-european scenarios, possibly multiple times per sentence. For example, including the word "Microsoft" or "Linux" in the middle of non-latin script requires two keyboard layout switches, to latin and back.
They work on Earth, not in space. And while I think the philosophy of government organizations needs to be improved, if we don’t do this, we’ll be at the mercy of China.
Given that nothing we put into orbit or on another planet is going to be self-sustaining, you don’t need weapons to exert control on any residents of such infrastructure. A simple blockade will suffice
You can never be too early in stopping those Laconians I guess.
And they are breaking chrome each time they update windows now.
That organization took it to international stewardship in 2016 but it has no competition and seems to be just doing its monopoly thing.

Related : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22288279
I think what GP was getting at is that there's a healthy amount of "if all you have is a hammer" mentality going on w/ React/Redux. The tragedy of commons here is that you _could_ conceivably just slap a class at the root of your React tree to implement dark mode, but if one is using something like styled-components, there's a good chance that the library will get in the way of the style cascading semantics that come for free w/ the browser. And ultimately, the end-user is the one paying the price for all the extra code needed to make a "complexity-friendly" implementation of dark mode work.

Another observation that I've been finding interesting about "modern frontend development" is that despite all the arguments about how React makes DOM manipulation easier, people still prefer to defer to libraries to do any non-trivial amount of DOM manipulation rather than actually use pure React to do it. This is exactly the same modus operandi as when jQuery was "modern frontend development" ("it makes it easier to work w/ DOM", plus a ton of opaque jquery-* libs)
Remember, “defense” funding also killed several (>5) million people since the US was founded in several wars of aggression, including about a million in the current generation.

Don’t believe the hype.

NASA put people on the moon and brought them back. They could design, launch, and operate GPS like they do Hubble and other satellites. It’s well within their expertise. We don’t need to accept DoD funding of violent undertakings that end up killing millions simply for the meager benefits we get as a side effect sometimes.

As a counterexample: the military has had supersonic jets for two generations, and there is no civilian supersonic transport. The only one that did exist was an european undertaking. You get no benefit from any of the billions spent on fast planes by the war machine. None.

Massive defense spending only trickles down to defense contractors. This is just public-to-private wealth transfer, nothing more.
Pin striped OSX, now that was a time to be alive.
The sail. You're welcome.
> It was original designed by Dominic Giampaolo

This is the first that I'm hearing of this. That is absolutely sick.
I still rely on notebooks and pens for everything, yet I never used liquid paper. What am I missing?
I'm using an extension with FF which claims to reduce the number of requests the browser makes for `extra' files and reduces your online tracking. Might be useful?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes...
> I mean, when Mars gets colonised, what's to stop Mars from becoming a superpower in the Sol system within a very short period of time? Pretty much nothing.

Aside from the enormous cost of moving the (many, many) needed resources from the Earth to Mars. I'm super bullish on a Mars colony (I will be going within 5 years of it becoming an option) but the idea that it will be even 100% self-sustaining in the next 100 years -- let alone a superpower -- is absolutely bananas.
I'm not saying this will spawn AI. Just that, like computer vision was essentially solved by CNNs, NLP will be solved by transformer models.
Right hand: "We're outraged that China's Huawei is exploiting state subsidies to develop technology that poses a national security threat to the USA!"

Left hand: cuts research funding.

Sometimes I get sadly resigned to the possibility that this really is what a majority of this country wants (or has been convinced is what is best). Despite us being overall so developed, these kinds of issues show you the importance (and inescapable historic truth) of still needing to tend to your fellow citizens' basic material needs. And, when not doing it properly (or seen to be doing it), it can determine whether you get to advance on the forefront of other issues.

I swear, the biggest gift to other countries who are our long term competitors (and yes, don't mistake that we're not in a long term race here), is not any transfer/leak of technology or outright sabotage. It's that our stagnation and policy choas (caused by the dumbest issues!) for a decade sap our progress on strategic, major, major technologies. And cause the experts who you need to make progress to leave for more fertile ground, whether through leaving government, private companies, or to other countries. (How do you think that the FAA and military gradually became so dependent on their industry partners for any semblance of expertise?)

Edit: yes I know that it's just the budget proposal, and that it's likely to get watered down more than Bernie Sanders in a general election. But the decline in funding in actual budgets is undeniable. And the outright deception to present such a budget is near fraud.
Putting all your speech/text onto cloud machines runs counter to e2e encrypted messaging.
Amazon is the latest to pull out of MWC over coronavirus worries
Yeah it said "3G" but it seemed more like 33.6kbps dial up speeds of yore based on the experience. I've gone through extended periods of using both 3G and 33.6kbps to know the feel!

But still 1st world problems. A CB or ham radio would have been nice though!
What would happen if the world suddenly went vegetarian? (2016)
There is a difference between the military and government agencies.

It's like asking why not get rid of military in favor of militia, Hired guns, And police forces?

Who had what authority. Funding. Jurisdiction and related. And plenty of other things.
>The budget documents released Monday anticipate 6,434 active-duty Space Force members

Seems like incredible bloat for this agency to have any sort of 'active duty' military personal at the moment. What are they exactly going to do that civilians can't?
I found that, at least where I was, it would take 45-60 seconds to place a call or fail trying. Yes, this was AT&T, and yes they had problems, but it was also in large part Apple’s fault. I had a chance to sit down with actual network engineers from AT&T’s local network contractor, and the story I got was that the iPhone generated much more signaling traffic than it should have, so it worked much worse than it should have. Certainly my old Blackberry could place calls easily on the same network in the same location.

(IIRC the iPhone issue was hypothesized to be related to an incorrect GSM power management implementation.)
DoD ends up funding quite a lot of science and engineering research. They're also quite big on trauma medicine.
It didn't really make it into the article, but at the end of our interview, the author asked me about trying to contact _why, and I told her that she shouldn't, I thought it was wrong, and refused to help.

I have lots of complicated feelings on the topic of _why, but this is one that I've always felt very clearly and strongly about: he wanted to go. Leave him alone.
Not so much a weapon system as an information and coordination system.

It's like calling the camera that looks at stars for determining position a weapons system. GPS and astro guidance are both part of a redundant navigation system.
I'm sure that for any given drug you'll see a pattern of later research costing more, but as a field, unless we happen to get lucky early on with figuring out the basic science (which we clearly didn't with neurodegeneration), we'll need years (or decades to centuries - emperor of all maladies is an excellent read into the amount of work and time it took to understand cancer to the level we do now) to understand what to spend money on drugs on, and we'll have to pay for all the dead ends there too.
Sound like a niche business opportunity?
It’s just a portion of the old Air Force budget, so it’s, at least for now, to do things the Air Force was already doing.
I think the space shuttle is a good example of "Space Force" equipment. DoD support played a major role in getting it funded and setting its requirements, and it was able to fulfill a variety of roles from deploying and repairing our own satellites (including complicated deployments of spy satellites that needed a DoD crew member present in orbit) as well as capture of enemy satellites.
Another reason to get an LTSB license.
Show HN: Commerce – Drop in e-commerce for any website
Hey HN. I'm Matt White, co-founder of Commerce, along with Nathan Martin (centipixel) and Daniel Newman (over-engineered). Commerce is a drop-in e-commerce platform for any website from a single line of JavaScript. You can find us here: https://static.tools/commerce

With this single include, you get a shopping cart, account registration and login (Email, Google, Facebook, etc), live shipping quotes, invoicing, and the ability to sell complex product variants (composite/configurable products, delta pricing, fractional pricing, wholesale pricing, etc). Much of this is configurable via an administrative interface we've built up alongside the product.

From individual clients we've onboarded onto the system, we've already processed over 2 million dollars in transactions - a drop in the bucket compared to most of the other players in the market, but we're proud of it!

Before Commerce, the three of us consulted full-time as a team with a focus on static/Jamstack sites. We have over 30 years of agency and consulting experience between us (we're all mid-30s). Commerce was born out of a need to supply an e-commerce solution to a client, while still maintaining a static build. It was so successful, we decided to split off the product as it's own business, and Commerce was born.

As a company, we applied (late) to YC's W19 batch and didn't make the cut - and are currently working through Startup School as we work towards a full public launch.
We're hoping to follow-up with a Launch HN in the coming weeks, but in the meantime this is our first time exposing the product to anyone who isn't a direct client of ours, so we're happy to take questions. And if it's a product you're interested in, we'd love it if you hopped over to https://static.tools/commerce and signed up for our launch announcements.

Thanks!

Site: https://static.tools

Demo: https://demo.static.tools

Docs: https://docs.static.tools
The story seems to be that deleting and disappearing was his response to his real-life identity being busted or soon-to-be, not something he just up and did one day.
I found soap nuts to be the cheapest, most eco-friendly, and reasonably efficient detergent there is. Just drop a bunch of soap nuts in a cloth bag into the washing machine, and it produces enough foam to make everything clean.
Scaling with Kubernetes – What It Means for Customer
For now.

GP comment is speculative in either case.
I like to compare expenses to the interest on the national debt.

Looks like it's about 3% of that:

https://www.thebalance.com/interest-on-the-national-debt-411...

Of course, rates are historically low.
Your Laptop Ruined Your Life
Not really, the great depression caused by private interests in US overlending to europeans lead to a sovereign debt issue that finally made it possible for Hitler to gain power leading to WW2.

But sure you can ignore the nuance.
If I felt it was so dangerous that I needed to stop and offer unsolicited advice to someone I didn't know, I would feel responsible for their safety if I didn't offer them a lift.

Besides, a world where well intentioned people self-censor themselves from being kind to strangers is a bit self-fulfilling isn't it?

Driving your 2 ton metal box in a way which doesn't endanger the lives of others, especially children, would also be a good lesson to teach to children. In fact since it is a vastly more real danger than "stranger danger" it probably do more good.
Check out Statium: https://github.com/riptano/statium, and the RealWorld example that I threw together in a couple of evenings: https://github.com/nohuhu/react-statium-realworld-example-ap.... The basic idea is to have state kept in a separate component that deals just with state, a ViewModel. Internally it works just the same as usual React components: by calling `this.setState()`; externally it exposes API for getting key values and setter functions, same as hooks do.

It's really easy to work with, and the concept of hierarchical state store is something that I haven't seen in any other library. If there was I probably wouldn't end up writing Statium in the first place. :)
I would be more of the belief that by its existence that Space Force will further separate NASA from the military.

It provides much more separation that what NASA currently has, if anything the real question becomes how much will the other branches give up to Space Force. The Air Force has the most to lose; unless of course this becomes something similar to Navy and Marines
You might already be familiar with it, but I can heartily recommend the book The Box by Marc Levinson [1]. It describes how a simple idea of putting items in a container first, instead of directly on a ship, completely changed the world. It is for example the reason why Oakland and New Jersey eclipsed San Francisco and New York as ports. When Malcolm McLean, the inventor of the humble container, died in 2001, container ships all over the world, at an agreed moment, sounded their horns in tribute.

[1] - https://g.co/kgs/vCK3nB
> If durable, maintainable, and resilient are your number one priority, maybe you want a desktop. It is trivial to open up the case and replace or upgrade components.

I'm both confused and utterly baffled about why you think taking a full-blown desktop computer to conferences, hackathons, cafés, work, etc. is even an option. It feels like a common response on hacker news, and hell, even in developer circles in general at the moment, is the equivalent of:

"I want X, Y, and Z, and we used to make things that
satisfy those requirements, and we don't anymore. Why
is that?"

"You don't want Z, you want Q, which does X and Y"

where Q is something that makes the whole point of X and Y impractical for the person's use-case.

To belabour the point: I don't see how you get from "A slightly less-thin laptop that has some room for upgrades" to "A desktop computer that requires a separate monitor, a stable and available power supply, a table, and associated peripherals"

Thinkpads used to be designed in a way that would allow upgrading and replacing of common components. Hell, it used to be the case that IBM/Lenovo had a line of thinkpads that were specifically designed for this sort of upgrading. Why aren't they still? There is a market for this (one only has to look at the prices and the demand of second-hand Thinkpads of that variety), the problem is that not only did laptop manufacturers realise that not allowing users to upgrade components, means that they can charge them again for a more powerful laptop in a few years time, but laptop manufacturers are trying to compete on Apple's "we have the thinnest machine in the world" front, for whatever reason.
The app review process can be very time-consuming. I imagine this is at least part of the reason there are not more open-source apps on iOS.

Also, there's no way to change your default mail client, so that makes it somewhat less likely that we'd see someone develop one of these.
Possible, yes. Economically viable for the vast majority of applications, no.

In undergrad in 2001 I had a professor that had a 3D printed airplane model with a wingspan of ~5" that he thought was so damn cool (it was some now-defunct military airplane he helped design or something). He was also very fond of pointing out that the model cost his former employer $500 to print, so we better handle it with care. And rightfully so, because if we treated it like a toy it would have fallen apart in under a semester. Compared to what I print today using my MK3s for, I dunno, 50 cents, his $500 printed airplane was a piece of crap.

Point is there have been a lot of technological advances, patents aside, that have made 3D printers viable for anything outside of extremely high-value rapid prototyping / mold forming / other narrow niche applications in the last 20 years.
The more subtle thing to consider is that the amazing tech stuff whose development we tend to think of as being paid for by defense funds was developed prior to ARPA becoming DARPA in 1972, and more importantly, prior to the Mansfield Amendment's passage in 1973. This limited funds appropriated for defense research to projects with a direct and obvious military application.
US Cyber Command was elevated to "full and independent unified combatant command"[1] in May 2018. I think Space Force is somewhat different in that they're not a unified command and are meant to be a separate standalone military branch.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Cyber_Command
Bizcat: An 8x16 Bitmap Font
>You could end up throwing away years of edge case handling

I work with software that has been continuously worked on since the 60's. It has the dreaded legacy if's like below everywhere.

if(obtuse variable) then
change a few other obtuse variables

There have been at least three attempts at major rewrites done of the software. The main goal was always to get rid of those corner case ifs everywhere. Every single attempt failed because we lost our ability to handle massive amounts of our customer's projects. Each of those ifs does something important.

One of my main projects throughout my stay has been to reduce these with small, disciplined improvements. I have made major headway in this fashion. You have to find the leaves of your software and work your way up while rigorously testing your changes. This is the exact opposite of the human gut reaction of a massive top down rewrite. It's impossible to tell how far you are off-course until it's done. It's the waterfall method of refactoring.
> I can now buy more pens for $100 than I'll ever use in years

I just checked and you can get a pack of 60 Bic Ballpoint pens for $4.50.
Yeah windows default search is kinda bad. Its only really OK for applications and settings. For everything else file related voidtools Everything is a godsent.
On the "surveillance footage", were they mopping and sweeping? I wonder whether such "footage" constitutes prima facie evidence for an indictment going the opposite direction...
Issues can be undocumented if it is found by the 3 letter one, as pointed out in the article.
I posted earlier about the Momenta Pen Computer, which debuted in 1991, when "pen computing" was all the rage.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21492195

>In 1991 when "pen computing" was all the rage, a start-up company called "Momenta" came out with a "pentop" MS-DOS based pen computer with a pie-menu-like "command compass", whose user interface was done in Smalltalk.

>Remember that this was in 1991, the same year Go Corporation finally released PenPoint, and a year before the 1992 founding of Palm Computing (which took over the Pen market for many years) and the release of Microsoft Windows 3.1 in 1992 (the first version of Windows that wasn't intolerably irritating), and the release of Microsoft Windows for Pen Computing in 1992 (which was a big flop). So there was a huge amount of excitement around pen computing.

[...and more about how their founder confused Smalltalk with Lisp, plus links to photos, reference manual excerpts, and more info about the Momenta pen computer...]
Sure, React is just a library, but I don't think I've ever seen it used as just a library.