skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's fun to turn a 3d-printer into a plotter,
but alas only for simple stuff.

A given-away laser printer (that is, $0) and $25 laminator deliver 15 mil / 0.4 mm traces easily and consistently.

I very much doubt any pen can do that, even with proper mount - the rubber band will just ruin any accuracy and consistency, and even if the pen is hard fixed, the tip will still wobble, plus always imperfect levelling will mess with the track width.
Google controls the major web engine. I don't trust google to not deprecate parts of html over time because the new shiny is "better". I would rather maintain markdown generators which I can update to change the markup to whatever the latest google insists needs to work instead of rewriting all my documents.

I'm currently tasked with writing a UI for a machine that has a 25 year expected lifespan before wear means it is replaced. This is a real concern - think about where computers were 25 years ago and try to find something you are sure will work and look nice.
The C-style switch/case construct is obsolete and awkward, and cleaner alternatives exist, such as VB.net's technique. There is no need for "Break".

The following could be added to C-style languages without overlapping with the existing syntax:

select(a) {
when 1,2,3 {...}
when 4 {...}
when 5,6 {...}
...
otherwise {...}
}

C# recently added a pattern-matching alternative, but it's still a bit verbose for most needs.
> Give yourself time and accept that there will be things where you will get terribly stuck.

I don't remember where I heard it, but this situation was described to me as the "moment before a breakthrough". I was told to look for these moments of stuckness because that's where the biggest wins are (and where many, many people quit).
Very often the very first thing you see when you open a very technical book is the book giving you the finger so to speak. You must remain calm and continue. You'll be surprised how much useful info you pick up that way. Anxiety is the killer of progress.
Borland's Turbo products were my entre into PC programming in the last 80s. It's amazing, but not unusual, how quickly they descended into utter irrelevance.
> Free Pascal and Lazarus […] is amazing.

No, it is less than mediocre. It has not kept up at any sufficient pace to other languages and environments. Just a small excerpt because I don't have the nerve to write an exhaustive critique: bignum, first-class functions, generators, lazy lists, lexical scope, macros, namespaces. Single window in Lazarus requires recompilation that errors out in CheckLst.pas instead of being a preference somewhere in a menu.
I cannot fathom the proliferation of phone-only messaging apps.

Am I really the only person who prefers to type on a full-sized keyboard, and see my multiple conversations on 27" screen, as opposed to one and a half inches of no-feedback glass surface? :-/

I went to Signal site, downloaded the Windows app, and once installed, it asks me to link my phone. No option for any other signup. NOwhere in the download process or on main site does it warn me that this is a phone-only app. The desktop app itself simply starts to a "Connect your phone" screen with no explanation why I have to do it, whether there are or aren't alternatives, etc. Nothing about this is remotely user friendly.

I have half a dozen laptops, two phones, few tables at home alone; the notion that I must be crippled to only communicate via the smallest, least practical communication device I own; and then be horribly crippled in attaching one-at-a-time additional device but with crippling dependency on said phone... I guess I'm a negative focus group and completely out of touch with the realities of the world, but I cannot imagine or understand who wants to live like that :-/
If all of my procrastination passed through a slow VPN, it would increase the speed of my real work greatly. :-)
>It's that browsers will eat any old crap that's thrown at them and turn it into something plausible, if not precisely what the author intended or reader really wants.

Reminds me of the fairly prescient "In Praise of Evolvable Systems" essay from 1996: https://web.archive.org/web/20190409041249/http://www.shirky...
Soundcloud lets you focus on your favorite music by type, country, etc.

https://soundcloud.com/charts/new?genre=deephouse&country=al...
If the bias was random, this would be less worrisome. However the bias is not random at all.

In particular we are biased towards stories that grab our attention. Which means that they scare us, they outrage us, they confirm our biases, and so on. Media is then incentivized to present them because those are the stories that get clicks.

A wonderful book laying out the incentives in detail is, Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday.

And a wonderful book demonstrating how our world view gets twisted by this is Enlightenment Now. Despite most of us feeling that the world is a dangerous place and getting more so, on every measure that we can find, it has never been so good. Someone blows up a bomb on a bus? Everyone gets scared. A quarter million people are lifted out of extreme poverty yesterday? Nobody hears about it.

In fact blowing up a bomb on a bus is rare. A quarter million people lifted out of extreme poverty in a day is common place - that was the average for every day across a the last couple of decades.

So you can't just discount rare events. You also have to understand how the reporting and your mind is biased and actively work to bring it back to reality.
True enough. Though to be fair the last new version of a Win16 OS shipped 26 years ago, and Win32 became the standard API in consumer products 24 years ago. There are degrees of worry here. Software of the vintage you're talking about was contemporary with System 7, and the closest ancestor to current OS X was called "NextStep 3.3".

The point upthread was that genuinely useful stuff gets retired just a few years after release in the Apple world, and I think that's broadly true. It's true with hardware too -- professional audio people are stuck with truckloads of firewire hardware that they can't use with their new laptops, for example.
There's only a finite amount of 'features' a messenger can really have, I don't think it's going to work like that at all. If Signal can reach feature parity with WhatsApp/FB Messenger/iMessage it already offers a massive advantage that's getting more and more popular and it sounds like it is already close to reaching parity.

The biggest win for Signal (although not for the general public) is if WhatsApp ever compromises on their E2E adoption. Because right now there isn't a significant reason to switch between the two given WhatsApps massive adoption.

One unique feature advantage might be the encrypted contacts stuff they mention in the article, but even then that just keeps them at the top tier privacy wise.
If you're looking at a specific regex (~FSA), then N is constant... If you have a function that runs an arbitrary regex, then N will vary.
Just started using bats-core

Some more documentation would be nice
Not to be snarky, but if there is a need to do this, it's pretty easy. If there is a real need, it is pretty trivial to do with VirtualBox or DosBox.

Those applications from 20 years ago running in emulators will work far better in 20 more years than Apps from today that stop working due to remote service dependencies to force vendor lock-in.

It is endlessly amusing to me that the more tightly integrated the cloud services get to conventional computing tasks, the more likely we will end up with Vernor Vinge style programmer archaeologists from A Deepness in the Sky...
By leaning softly but persistently against the problem / topic.
The Signal desktop apps at least are independent in that they do not require the phone after the initial setup, but yeah, it's annoying. They were far from perfect, but the multi-chat-protocol clients from the ICQ&co days had a lot going for them...
> and an experimental method for storing encrypted contacts in the cloud.

Signal released an experimental encrypted contact syncing app for Android long ago (I can't remember the name).

I wonder what the challenges have been to integrate this or release it as a full product.

It's great they've grown from 3 to 20 people, now they can really start to address some of their wider goals from the beginning such as this.
I can't believe how well google translates this. Is there something about Italian that lends itself to english translation or is translate getting this good with other languages too I wonder?
Article skips from 1912 to 1962, leaving out 'The Intelligent Investor' (1949) by Ben Graham. Possibly the most influential stock investing book ever, it has been continuously in print since 1949.
There isn't much to be gained by simply hoping someone will magically decide to change there ways, but private clubs often have complex initiation rituals with the goal of pushing possible new members to conform to their standards of behavior. In this analogy though, HN "proceedings" are public, and membership is hardly exclusive as the barrier to register a new, undead account is low, so it's not like a private club, either.
> We could adjust that suggestion to modern times and give a guide to create an electric arc that stays just under your fuse's break point

That is delightfully disgusting :). There might be some heat problems, but in the Canadian Winter, having an extra 1750W of electric arc heating wouldn't be too bad!
Printing tiny, high-precision objects
This is a database that satisfies at least the first three normal forms, and that might be why it felt comfortable. I admit that I have seen some dirty usage of this from a few WordPress plugin authors on a consultation, and it has since then not thought as greatly of it as a system that enforces good practices.
I consider [0] to be well written and fairly low fat.

0 https://github.com/Genymobile/scrcpy
I have a 'personal' website which is also about 18years old. It was the first website I built while in elementary school, also in Frontpage. I uploaded it to I think Geocities or something like that, I think it was Yahoo related hosting, can't remember exactly, but it was free hosting.

Some 'fancy' JS effects do not work on the page now, but it is still up. I forgot about and remembered it few years ago and checked it to find it still up. But I can't remember where could I login to see the files and what are the credentials so it makes me giggle that it will stay up for who knows how much longer as a small part of my past :)

http://dzigi.itgo.com

http://dzigi.itgo.com/o_autoru.htm "about author page" with a bio and pic haha
For starters, make sure that they're reasonably groomed and dressed in whatever the current style is. I didn't have this and paid a large price.

Encourage them to take up sports, or whatever group activity. Meet their friends parents and maybe host a Haloween party, etc.

You can't do it all, but definitely you can do some.
ironically, i bet the author has learned more technical skills by maintaining a system that can continue to run their version of frontpage than they would have if they had just taught themselves HTML from the start.
Added, shared. Love from first sight.
Anything not text based is problematic. But beyond that it is hard.
GopherFileManager, a File Manager for Linux with GTK3, Written on Go
Ask HN: What makes you get out of bed in the morning?
Reproductive tales where it doesn’t turn out so great for one partner
Wait wait wait wait... Justin Frankel is behind Cockos (of Reaper and WDL fame)??

Mind blown. Reaper in particular is fantastic, even if I could never get my head around it long enough to stick with something other than FL Studio.
Yabai: Tiling Window Manager for macOS
Take a look at StackOverflow’s schema. Freely available to study, used in a production site, and a great resource.
My impression was that the article made the exceptions graph much more complicated than it needed to be. Each function doesn’t need three boxes, and they don’t need to each throw exceptions twice. IMO exceptions are much cleaner in practice and are great for things like “kill this script” or “throw a 500 error”.
I’m working on yazz Pilot which is supposed to be a modern take on Delphi or Visual Basic. I will take your comment to heart and make sure we implement proper layouts and positioning for the web
My sense is that Markdown is probably pretty safe for most uses, particularly if you control the processing. If not, then yes, it can bite. For me that means pandoc to generate endpoints such as HTML, PDF, etc. I'm fairly confident that most of that toolchain should continue to work (provided computers and electricity exist) for another 2-4 decades.

For certain more complex formatting, Markdown has limitations and features are more likely to change. But I've used Markdown to format novel-length works (from ASCII sources, for my own use) with very modest formatting needs (chapters, some italic or bold text, possibly blockquotes or lists), and it excels at that.

For HTML, it's a combination of factors:

- Previous features which have been dropped, most to thunderous applause. (<blink>, <marquee>, etc.)

- Previous conventions which have largely been supersceded: table layouts most especially. CSS really has been ... in some respects ... a blessing.

- Nagging omissions. The fact that there's no HTML-native footnoting / endnoting convention ... bothers me. You can tool that into a page. But you can't simply do something like:

<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
<note>Consectetur adipiscing elit</note>
Nulla malesuada, mauris ac tincidunt faucibus</p>

... and have the contents of <note> then appear by some mechanism in the rendered text. A numbered note, a typographical mark ( * † ‡ ...), a sidenote, a callout, a hovercard, say.

In Markdown you accomplish this by:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.[^consectetur] Nulla malesuada, mauris ac tincidunt faucibus

[^consectetur]: Consectetur adipiscing elit.

Which then generates the HTML to create a superscript reference, and a numbered note (when generating HTML). Or footnotes according to other conventions (e.g., LaTeX / PDF) for other document formats.

- Similarly, no native equation support.

Maybe I'm just overly fond of footnotes and equations....

But HTML and WWW originated, literally, from the world's leading particle physics laboratory. You'd think it might include such capabilities.

- Scripting and preprocessors. I remember server-side includes, there's PHP, and JS. Some browsers supported other languages -- I believe Tcl and Lua are among those that have been used. Interactivity and dependency on other moving parts reduces reliability.

The expression "complexity is the enemy of reliabilty" dates to an Economist article in 1958. It remains very, very true.

HTML is for me more fiddly than Markdown (though I've coded massive amounts of both by hand), so on balance, I prefer writing Markdown (it's become very nearly completely natural to me). OTOH, LaTeX isn't much more complex than HTML, and in many cases (simple paragraphs) far simpler, so if I had to make a switch, that's the direction I'd more likely go.
If the cleanliness of their website is a hint to their usability, then this might catch on fast!
It's a weird feeling when I don't know how to do something so I practice a lot and I then still don't "know" how to do it but somehow I can do it.
Is interest in GA just a local fashion or there are objective reasons in recent revival of interest?
Ocean Hero: The search that saves the oceans
That’s not all the data on you. That’s all the obvious visible sort of data.
These are not the businesses we're looking for.
> I’m not sure why Amazon didn’t just block non-verified-purchaser reviews, increasing spammer costs significantly.

I'm not sure this would help much. I've been asked by vendors to leave a review and if it's 5 stars, I will get something in return. I think for some people this would be a "well, nobody is getting hurt, right?" decision and they'd just do it.
I really like the fastai abstractions and their attention to detail. Also their callbacks are amazing. I always look at their implementations for inspiration.

But my main issue with it is the code formatting (https://docs.fast.ai/dev/style.html#layout).
Maybe I am too used to PEP-8 and black (https://github.com/psf/black) formatted code, but honestly I cannot stand the code format.
I think the standard approach is to not add extra constraints.

Are you writing general purpose, portable code code? You'd rather not be locked in to a specific vendor's compiler.

Are you working in embedded systems? Your code is probably hardware-specific, at least to some degree. You probably aren't going to switch CPUs very often. You probably are never going to switch CPU families. You also probably are never going to upgrade the compiler, still less switch to a different vendor's compiler. So if you aren't going to do that anyway, you don't worry much about a one-vendor-only compiler or language.

I think it's a similar story in HPC. You're constrained by your hardware. You get the best compiler for that setup. That means it's hard to change compilers? It's even harder to change your hardware, so you didn't add much of a constraint.
Plus, if you fill all the empty areas with copper pours (see my other comment), there isn't that much copper to route away!
The premise isn't refuted at all. The IEEE calls out things to be aware of, on both sides of the coin, and says as with all things, take limited sample tests with a grain of salt.
I had this perception that those spinning gifs and moving text made pages crazy hard to parse but I was pleasantly surprised that this site seemed simpler and easier to parse than half the sites today with pop ups, notifications, and blocking modals. Is it just me, or are these notifications and modals that are getting so prevalent really degrading a lot of the web browsing experience today.
This article definitely resonates with my experience of 20 years in the engineering and research and development.

Bad organizations tend to promote based upon faulty metrics and, commonly, people are promoted to their natural level of incompetence or are promoted a single level when the best organizational fit may be a 2-3 or three level promotion. e.g. from principal engineer to director of new product development.

Good organizations work hard to figure out peoples strengths and what they enjoy, and then play people in their natural positions (as best as possible).

Someone else wrote in this post that they got promoted from an engineering position to managing a small team and they hate it and don't feel like they are doing a great job. I can relate... a good engineer might not make a good team manager. You need a lot of strengths to team/people manager that a lot of engineers don't even want to have: attention to other people's details, high emotional IQ, enjoy Gantt charts, well organized, to name a few.

... but that same engineer discussed above might make a great director or CTO (or consultant to the CTO, etc.) where they are applying their technical knowledge to investigate technology, plan strategically, and chose technical directions that have immense impact on on the company's future.

I have heard many a "CTO/chief scientist type" describe how much they hate detailed project planning and paying attention to all the little details people are supposed to be working on. But I know good managers who love that stuff.
"A math textbook might be fascinating page turner, if only it were written by a writer instead of a mathematician" -Paul LaRocque
The point this article makes most clear is exactly to what extent C++ has the attitude of “screw it, let’s put it in”. There are only a handful of constructs listed that C++ doesn’t implement.

Also, TIL about “long jump”. Seems like a feature I’d never use in a million years, but maybe it has its applications.
Joyent Public Cloud was shut down (three years after the Samsung acquisition): https://docs.joyent.com/joyent-public-cloud-eol
I personally think something like this is ridiculous. See all this poor child? YOUR money can help us (a multi billion dollar company) makes a difference!
VMs solve this problem.
> During my undergraduate time I knew people memorizing instead of trying to understand theorems (especially ones with background in chemistry).

As I pointed out in another comment, this is a false dichotomy. You can do both. I contend that one who attempts to understand and memorize will know the material better than one who doesn't. The thrust of my argument isn't that it is necessary. It's that you will gain from it. Of course, if you make that your only tool in the toolbox, you will suffer.

And I never claimed that not memorizing will prevent degrees. I'm sure while in grad school you came across plenty of less capable people than you who nevertheless still got a PhD ;-)
I love seeing DIY PCB manufacturing projects like this. Using the 3D printer as a plotter is a creative take on the traditional DIY process.

For any aspiring EE hobbyists: Manufacturing your own PCBs is almost never worth the effort. You'll spend days or weeks getting the process and tooling right, and you still have to manually wire any vias that connect the front and back sides of the PCB. These DIY PCB manufacturing projects are fun if you're in it for the experience, but very impractical for getting work done. It's quick and easy to order small quantity PCBs online.

OSH Park is a popular option: https://oshpark.com/#services You can get 3 boards in 9-12 days for $5/square inch. If you need the boards sooner, $10/square inch will get you a 4-5 day turnaround time. You won't save any money by buying all of the gear to DIY etch your boards, and you certainly won't save any time.
Delivering new revenue today is extremely easy and too often overrated.

Delivering new revenue today, without negatively affecting future revenue, is what drives a business to be successfull.
How to celebrate Valentine's day without a Lover?
Interesting case. Is Facebook or any platform expected to be the police of all their users' private contracts? That the legitimacy of content is based on how profitable is for the poster and who paid them?
Product requirement docs to cover your ass.

While answering this, I'm wondering if the rejection of that style is also correlated with organizational use of acronyms?
>No, art is supposed to be about sublimity.

that's a pretty fuckin entitled opinion to have.
That problem isn't moderation, but monopolisation.

Power corrupts.
DBAs still have their place. In my shop, we have more DBAs than infrastructure people.

When you have a small team working on a given tool that only really needs to manage its own data, it really doesn't matter. But some point, you do need expert gatekeepers to tell engineers when they're Doing It Wrong when there are many heterogenous clients accessing large datastores for different purposes, complex audit requirements, etc.
As someone who's self-taught everything, this is... awesome. It's exactly what I needed to be able to up my game in describing code to management using the flowcharts they've asked for.
Random data is definitely useful, but IMO, they shouldn't be used in unit tests. Unit tests are for development, for asserting overall correctness, you should use some combination of integration tests, property based testing or formal verification.

The first problem is it makes it easier to write false negative tests. If you're not testing that some result is equal to some hard coded data, then your test might just be asserting equality on two null values, for example.

The second problem is that it's often tempting to write tautological tests. That is, testing some function by comparing its result to the same function, but written in the test file.
Love this idea. It would be interesting to see what different ways (AI) you could predict that a site is distracting based on personal and wide-spread usage habits. Some advanced method that doesn't require a user generated whitelist would be the next level for this.
Hardware Memory Tagging to make C/C++ memory safe(r) (2018)