skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The four hours and 56 minutes flight arrived at Heathrow Airport 80 minutes ahead of schedule on Sunday morning.
> According to Flightradar24, an online flight tracking service, it beat a previous five hours 13 minutes record held by Norwegian.

Extremely poor proofreading there from BBC. 4:56 hour scheduled flight when the previous record was 5:13? The numbers simply don't make any sense.

Original numbers: https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1226395432252780544...

> Fastest across the Atlantic tonight from New York to London so far is #BA112 at 4hr56m. #VS4 in 4:57, and #VS46 in 4:59.

And average flight time is 6:10
Isn't it just depriving the employees of the philanthropy money they labored to produce?
Seem likes an awfully laboured equivalent of GCP's OSLogin [1]. To SSH into an instance:

gcloud compute ssh <instance_name>

GCP takes care of generating a key pair. The GCP linux images configure OpenSSH and PAM to check you have relevant IAM permissions. IAP [2] is used in place of a bastion if the instance doesn't have an external IP address.

[1]: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/managing-ins...

[2]: https://cloud.google.com/iap/docs/using-tcp-forwarding
I listen to No Agenda! they won’t be going to Spotify!
How much does API-discrimination affect innovation?
Airtable, Notion, Hubspot (Inboxes) - they all allow you to one-click connect with Slack, but have no Open APIs to connect with Mattermost, Teams, Grape, etc.
Do you think this is hurting new players, challengers and are there any studies on the effect of API-preference?
if a virus would wipe out say 50% or 75% of humanity, it would be terrible for us but wouldn't be that bad for mother nature. It may provide a couple of decades (if not centuries) in which nature is able to recover from us.

I think thanks to global warming, there will be many more diseases coming our way. Things that our immune system has never previously had to fight against and for which there is no cure.
I'm not saying that nothing should be done. I do think, however, that focusing so much attention on cruise ships is a little ridiculous, and not just because I happen to be on one. The virus us much more likely to spread through airports, but I don't see international air travel being shut down.
Is the Room Open? – Weekly Challenge
No you wouldn't: a car-pedestrian accident at 30km/h gives you about a 5% chance to die. https://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_safety/specialist/knowle...

With a bicycle I'm quite sure the odds of a fatality are <<1%
120 deaths, 5.2m people
This is obviously false. Any technology that could allow humans to live anywhere but on earth (the moon, Mars, space stations, generation ship, you name it) would be infinitely more applicable on an environmentally devastated earth up to any degree of devastation.

Living on Mars would be much harder than living on the earth after an all-out nuclear war with the worse effects of global warming present, in the aftermath of a small asteroid strike.

In fact, diverting much needed resources from saving what can be saved of the climate for the pie-in-the-sky (literally) goal of having a minuscule handful of human beings possibly live a scant few years off the Earth in 20 years time is lunacy.
It is. Also, philanthropy is tax advantaged. It's the giving that keeps on giving back.
Police arrested Two Chinese alleged anal rape in Nigeria (see photos)
Yup, and developers looking for shortcuts or how to do things the way they are used to (e.g. calling a database directly). I can recall one instance where a guy was asking for SSH access to the production environments, just so he could look at some env variables and logs. We had the best ops team (IMO) who worked with Principles (they were working towards 99,99999% uptime), which simply excluded SSHing into production servers. The developer was told to add something to his application that logged the environment variable, if that's what he really needed. It's a bit more work but at the same time he had no excuse because new deploys were a matter of minutes.

But anyway, the main lesson I learned there is that as an ops team (or broader, as an IT department) you need to have Principles, capital P. A short set of rules and goals which you can always point to. Like the uptime goal, which excludes / includes a LOT of things right off the bat - access controls (nobody can touch production directly), testing practices, application architecture (stateless), etc.
> Can someone explain to me why it's more philanthropic to amass billions instead of sharing profits with employees?

Because you have to dedicate immense resources in a concentrated approach for an extremely long period of time, to conquer some major problems like Malaria or to develop an HIV vaccine or to drive down vaccine production & distribution costs (& difficulties) for the third world. Private philanthropy can often maneuver at speeds that government money can't, take risks governments don't like to, and go places that government money takes far longer to go (there are typically few stakeholders, decision makers - Bill Gates can just decide tomorrow to put a billion dollars behind a thing, whereas the same action might take many months or years by a government body).

If you have 100,000 people and give them each $100,000, their actions will be wildly disparate and will make essentially no impact on major problems. They may make small dents in very local problems, at best (and or improve the well-being of their unit: their family, neighborhood, community and similar). There's nothing wrong with that mind you. However standard local problems already have heavily proven systems that work on them, particularly local government + taxation (this is obviously dependent on the effectiveness of the local government in question and the taxation; regardless it has been repeatedly shown to be highly effective all around the world).
Yes that is an awesome museum, too! Be sure you make the effort to find the computing-history section - there are some awesome things to see there, such as the original Z4 from Konrad Zuse, and a replica of his Z3 too ..

A bummer the Space pavilion is closed at the moment though. Definitely better to plan a visit to Munich when that re-opens again.
>Well, seeing that almost every stat shows that the majority of podcasts listeners are iOS users. (https://musicoomph.com/podcast-statistics/) - 54% iOS users

How would they even measure this? What share of those is Spotify users?
I think assignment into the buckets can be done in parallel.
Off topic, but that headline instantly reminded me of the "In a world without fences who needs Gates" t-shirts popular at JavaOne in about 1997
Dr. Tedros has faced a lot of criticism for strongly praising China's handling of the epidemic over the past few months.

There is now growing belief that China is under-reporting. Primary evidence for this is that the stats fit too neatly to a curve extrapolated from previous releases. Would actual deaths occur so tidily? Secondary evidence is that China's response seems significantly larger than expected based on the statistics they are releasing. Judge by actions not words, and all that jazz.

This doesn't conclusively prove tampering, but at minimum suggests there is some rate-limiting factor influencing the figures. Shortage of test kits or test lab throughput, perhaps.

Either way, if China is under-reporting it puts the rest of the world at a disadvantage information-wise, and that leads to inadequate preparation and response.

Assuming this is true, Dr. Tedros is in a political pickle. True transmission and mortality rates will become apparent once the virus spreads in countries that can't or won't falsify figures.

On the basis of all of the above, which I admit is by no means conclusively proven, this Tweet makes a lot of sense. It provides a stepping-stone in messaging from fawning over the CCP to providing more aligned-with-reality messaging on the developing pandemic. When the dust settles, I wouldn't be surprised if any stats differences between China and what we see in the rest of the world is pinned on 'mutation'.

A more generous take is that Dr. Tedros had to gush about China to avoid non-cooperation, but is now trying to move past that and back into a messaging space where the WHO can best prepare the rest of the world to respond appropriately.

Disclaimer: I'm not an expert and I spend far too much time in the sewers of the Internet to have an objective opinion. This is just a summary of the more plausible speculation I'm seeing.
Seems pretty disruptive to my layman eyes to force code to run slower on a competitors hardware.
Don't forget that Oslo all but banned cars in the CBD.
The people who produce podcasts think that podcasts are the shows they make. Why should your technical/implementational definition take precedence over that? It's not obvious that a photo is a JPEG file and it's not obvious that a podcast is an RSS file with audio embeds.
I had this idea years ago when teaching a girl to drive some. She had to put seats all the way as far as they go, and with several vehicles she would not drive them because the thickness made the blind spot too big for her comfort, on both sides.
Not sure if this has to do with airbags being there with some vehicles?
Anyway, I had seen an article about flexible led screens, bracelets maybe? and thought to put them on those blind spots with a few cameras on the outside.
I wasn't sure the idea would be popular, or who to even present it to. Glad to see others talking about it and doing it!
Some things will have to be rebuilt though. I read a story the other day (probably from HN as well) about rebuilding an older model rocket engine, because they still had the plans. Turns out a lot of that depended on the skill of the engineers, welders, machinists etc at the time, which could compensate for small changes on the fly. It didn't work the same with modern manufacturing technologies and materials. Mind you I do believe the modern stuff is better, they can do the same or better performance with less material and waste.
Depends on what kind of pricing and lead time Dell gives AMD, because TSMC 7nm production capacity is definitely limited and their required lead time for wafer orders hit 6 months as of last fall. AMD has already experienced some shortages due to their supply being relatively unresponsive.
It's not just your phone that spies on you, it's mostly the apps on it that do. With no Android to push it so hard and fast, perhaps surveillance capitalism would be a bit less developed by now, but I doubt the difference would be all that big. The allure of corrupt money is just too high, and the pressure is industry-wide.
Who's Quit TLS 1.0?
Sounds like software; trying to build on top of 40+ year old software vs building something new.
What if it's the team working on this that's looking for a better conversion rate ?
I agree, but only if you tried really hard. I believe that the main benefit of exercises is not so much getting the right answer (who cares anyway?), but the fact that they made you go over and over again over the concepts, forcing you to really understand, to reread your notes, and to apply them, even if you fail at first. If you do this, it will stick, and, as you said, the next time you come across said concept you will be much more likely to get the subtleties and, suddenly, that mother of a problem becomes trivial.
Thank you. It's great information and a well-written article. Here is an article about how to get success in hiring software developers for a startup: https://mobilunity.com/blog/3-ways-to-hire-developers-for-st... nowadays. Maybe It would be interesting.
Ok, I’m prepared to stand corrected. 30km/h is probably a bit to high speed, although data vs bike is hard to find.

Getting hit by a bike a 30km/h might well get you killed though, judging from the state of my friend mentioned above.

A bike have no deformation zones and no slick surfaces to slide along.

Thank you for enlightening me with some numbers though.
BSDs in general are quite happy, since Apache is pretty much just BSD with patents thing sorted out. The only unhappy ones are OpenBSD folks.
But what do we get from having humans in space? There is no foreseeable path at the moment to a permanent settlement supporting even hundred people. Sure, we can invest in research in this direction, and in the effects of space on human bodies - we already have the ISS for that. But what could be gained from another human on the moon? What was gained from the first one?
Amassing the billions in itself is not philanthropic, it's how those billions are then used.

You're certainly not being philanthropic giving those billions to your already handsomely paid employees whose welfare is already more than secured.
The Meego interface is better than what I have in my Android 10 phone... Those gestures are so awkward and bolted on. I haven't used an iPhone with gesture navigation but I imagine their navigation is only marginally better, also being bolted on later.
Oscar winning Taika Waititi: “Apple needs to fix those keyboards.”
(Laguna and Van Ness are parallel N/S streets, maybe you meant a different intersection?)

Not to detract from your point, though. A lot of the Market St. intersections are deathtraps because of the diagonal grid-cutting nature of that street. You get really weird 5-way intersections that are confusing to navigate by drivers, illegal Uber/Lyft pickups, and mentally ill people (esp. near Civic Center) wandering aimlessly into the street. Hopefully the recent car ban will fix these issues.

The delayed lights are actually intended to address a pedestrian safety issue (see starting at slide 21 here: https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/civicax/filebank/documents/68...). I'm not aware of any spike in deaths, but it's possible there were unintended consequences as you described. IMO unprotected lefts at signals and right-on-red are inherently unsafe, but they're too integral to American driving culture to change at this point.
Google barely even touches podcasts. I'm not sure if there's a "default podcast app" on Android.
I don't think so. There are lovely scripting languages such as Python, Perl, Ruby and the like, which make simple things simple.

There are gorgeous novel system languages such as rust and golang which make system programming easy.

There are beautiful domain specific languages such as Fortran or Julia which make, for instance, writing numerical problems (or "math" in general, if you like) easy.

And there are beasts like C++ which come with the idea that you don't pay for what you don't need. In contrast, of you don't need C++, don't use it.
It's not strictly true that the rt-patchset is meant to give faster response times. It provides bounded response times. You get a guarantee that some code can run within the time frame that you specify. That's not necessarily faster.
The affero license is useful for things accessed over the web, which of course became quite important and thankfully the GPL catching up.

I wrote the library license back in the early 90s because of a similar shift (Unix and Windows were late adopters of the the philosophy of libraries, not just programs, for non- system code, but once they finally started to get on board the GPL had to catch up)
Coronavirus live updates: China goes back to work as cases exceed 40k – lates
Oh, that's entirely possible.

I just heard that for this particular virus (the bat virus believed to be the ancestor of 2019-nCov), transmission to human without an intermediary was very unlikely since the bat version used a receptor that doesn't have an equivalent in human to infect cells.

Any animal, wild or domestic, can theoretically transmit diseases to humans if the conditions are right.
Where does the 600 million dollar superyacht fit into this all?
This is rediculous and dripping with silicon valley "we're workers too" attitude. Employees, especially tech employees, have the luxury of being able to go elsewhere if they don't feel they're being adequately compensated. There is no comparison between helping poor african groups or donating to education and giving your employees, who agreed their wages were fair, a raise. Even if you don't like it, it's ultimately his money. This isn't the alms that could have kept the poor coders from having to endure hardahip. It's difficult to comprehend the mentality that could see the workers as the victims in this situation. They were paid the wages they were promised, is the argument that somehow he's a bad person for amassing more than them?
Might be a alit more if some of our nuclear reactors arnt shut down properly
Microverse | Remote only | Full time
Microverse is a global, distributed school for software developers that doesn't charge students anything until they get hired.

The company is backed by Y Combinator and other top tier investors from Silicon Valley, and the team works remotely from more than 7 countries.

We have full-time students in 70+ countries, thousands of applicants per month from ~200 countries, and graduates from Nigeria to Mexico that have increased their salaries by 2-10x after completing the program.

We currently are hiring for several roles: Head of Business Development & Partnerships || Lead Ruby on Rails Software Engineer || Program Support Lead || Student Success Advocate || Career Coach.

We offer: Opportunity to join a rapidly growing company and shape our direction and organization || The opportunity to join the whole team at company retreats somewhere around the world once every nine months or so || Work alongside a fully distributed team that lives all around the world and is from 7 different countries.

Apply here: https://angel.co/company/microverse/jobs/
Spotify has plenty of healthy competition. Audible also tries. Both players are poorly optimized for podcast consumption. They could learn lots from overcast...
If you try hard enough you can always imagine "factors we may not be aware of" to explain differences from the rest of the world that are in fact just caused by US policy. You'll see that with gun deaths, healthcare costs, a host of problems.

The carriers "vetting" upgrades weren't doing any actual work, it's just a shakedown. Nice phone OS you have there, shame if critical updates were... delayed.
ByteDance's Slack-like app offers free services to SMEs
Ask HN: How do software platforms ensure money is transferred to lender?
I was wondering how do these platforms that allow businesses to sell their invoice/receivable on them ensure that the lender is paid back? What are the ways in which a software platform can ensure that money is redirected/transferred to the lender who purchased invoice/receivable? Is paper contract the only way to make it legally binding on the borrower to payback or is there some automatic way to redirect money to the lender?
For those interested - In a few weeks, 26-27-28 February, there is a (free) workshop featuring talks and workshops from Leo Dorst, Anthony Lasenby, Charles Gunn, Steven De Keninck (the lecturer from this vid - disclaimer - thats me), Vincent Nozick, Dietmar Hldenbrand, Hugo Hadfield and Eric Wieser.

They'll be talking about their research on applications of GA in robotics, AI, CS, physics, graphics.

more info :
https://bivector.net/game2020.html

Everyone welcome !
I’m surprised they don’t teach this in US schools. I just Saturday had a large stack of documents notarized and I observed the poor notary getting hand cramps. Then I saw her grip on her pen and it was no wonder. I felt sorry for her.
Let the market decide. Paying your employees better would be "trickle down economics" in actual action. If those employees decide to use it for philanthropy then the "trickle down" continues.

Except "trickle down" hasn't happened, isn't happening, and won't happen.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to sounds like I was disagreeing with you.
May I ask how did you get a remote position in Germany?
In much of the US, voter registrations are considered public record by state law. For example: https://apps.leg.wa.gov/rcw/default.aspx?cite=29A.08.710

Israel may have a similar law but I don't speak Hebrew and I suspect any searches I do for this will get buried by the news of the leak, so I don't think I'll be successful in finding it.
Some might call it karma for all the spyware. Feels different when the shoe is on the other foot, doesn't it.
Microsoft/Windows would have won, not Apple. Apple is doomed† by the fact that they're a vertically integrated provider with a limited range of products. That makes them a big player in every market they are, but rarely the biggest. People crave simplicity but the real world is very messy and needs are super varied so they have to settle for complexity that solves their issues.

At a much larger scale and with the US as a much bigger hold out, it's happening again now, very, very slowly. Before it was PC/Windows vs Mac now it's Android vs iOS.

† "Doomed" is hyberbole, they'll just never be the biggest player on a long term scale. But they'll make zounds of money along the way :-)
EC2 Connect is OSLogin-esque: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-inst...
I’ve faced this a lot, particularly when the management is a couple of layers away from the team doing the work.

It makes me wonder how these organisations don’t collapse under the weight of their ineptitude. Most of the bugs or issues I have to fix are from problems we created by short term hacks. Way beyond simple tech debt.

The engineers are as much at fault as the managers, particularly when it comes to introducing insane complexity to the stack to solve simple problems (how many startups seriously need to invest in tech like gRPC or graphql except to gain cool points?). Management, on the other hand, have no empathy for the people doing the work, so quality dips as we are pressured by both self-imposed and external deadlines which are decided with zero input from engineers.

Half the time we web engineers are building glorified content management systems with some nice design over the top. It’s boring but it’s not a burn out.
It sounds like this is really more, "What happens when a city says they're going to end traffic deaths, then completely half-asses it."

It was super obvious when these cities committed to Vision Zero on hilariously overoptimistic timelines that they weren't taking it seriously at all. It was just a bullet point to signal that they cared, without having to do actual work or sacrifice any convenience for cars.
And how exactly is the Apache license preventing OpenBSD from anything?
Recent QNX has removed Photon and encourages the use of Qt instead which while can be made small, certainly does not fit in 1.44mb especially in 64bit
If you’re stuck working with people who think they are the only ones ever to have written good code, I’m sorry. That must be unpleasant. But please don’t take that out on everyone else who merely gives a shit about the quality of their work.

Most of the code I refactor is my own from a few years ago, btw. Usually because I learned new information, past choices turned out to have regrettable unforeseen consequences, etc.

But we have learned to be really careful about public APIs. Implementations may change, interfaces are forever.
it did it because its the same business plan as everything else they do; become the infrastructure then slowly exploit it
Why, when and how to return Stream from your Java API instead of a collection
> Tor only masks IP and that was never the intent of the Tor network and using it that way is a is a complete waste of resources that doesn’t solve anything

More garbage traffic on Tor isn't necessarily a bad thing. It keeps others safe who actually do need it.
I've wondered for years why we don't have more tow trucks on the road for this, and bars need to have X amount on retainer per Y seating capacity.

It's not just the cost of the cab / uber, it's not having your car when you wake up, no good way to get it, and not being sure if the lot you left it in is going to have it impounded / booted or something.

Still waiting for the uber/tow combo that guarantees your car arrives before you wake up, and in the exact condition it was in when they went to pick it up.