skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> When you first hear the taxicab number story, your initial impression is to be struck by Ramanujan's innate calculating capability.

This is the way the story is always presented, and I think that's usually how it's intended, but I think it's quite misleading for another reason too. If you've ever made or looked at a table of cubes, the famous fact really jumps out (in base 10). I'm serious, look:

n n³
--------
1 1
2 8
3 27
4 64
5 125
6 216
7 343
8 512
9 729
10 1000
11 1331
12 1728

The two pairs of cubes are 1000 and 729, and 1728 and 1, and 1000 and 1 make the addition trivial and the similarity obvious (and 729 and 1000 are even right next to each other, one row away from 1728!). With that observation, it doesn't take much effort to try the smaller possibilities and see that 1729 is the smallest number that can be written as the sum of two cubes two different ways. Ramanujan knew numbers and their relationships intimately, better than Hardy, who knew more theory. I think Ramanujan knew the fact about 1729 already, and that you are right about the taxi number coincidence being more surprising and, well, impressive.

(Yes, I've commented on this before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21165031)
A sample of 3 people is not representative of all the customers. This article is pushing for sensationalism.

Switching bank accounts in the UK is dead easy. Open the new bank account, give them your old bank account reference and they do all of the switching for you, port over the scheduled and direct debit payments.

N26 is not competitive in the UK compared to Monzo, Starling and Revolut. Just pick one and you're good to go.
> Continuations are well known to be completely mystifying.

Could you elaborate on what leads you to think this?
They are a German bank, UK are not part of SEPA european payment system, and now UK are not part of EU either...

You are blaming a company for not accommodating non standard UK systems, and now deciding to pull out of UK, as UK literally does not want to be held to common standards (be it chargers, trade or bananas) as rest of Europe.

Brexit is imposing costs on companies, some like N26 decide not to bother with UK, others like Revolut and Coinbase now have to open offices and operations in EU if they want to retain access to this large market.

Did you vote for Brexit? Brexit has consequences, N26 leaving is a very minor one compared to whats coming down the line, live with it.
A bit more basic, but I use two free desktop PC automation tools which I now can't do without.

1. TyperTask (https://typertask.en.uptodown.com/windows) to automate common tasks like adding different email signatures for different addresses etc etc.

2. ClipX (http://bluemars.org/clipx/) for managing a huge clipboard history file. This saves me SO much time it's unbelievable.
I post into various telegram channels using IFTTT
Having lived in Germany (where N26 started), had the opposite experience. Revolut is a disaster. Reason being:

- No 3DSecure, renders it useless for most online transactions.

- No personal IBAN, uses some janky shared IBAN that is not tied to your name, which is required for many online depositing service like Coinbase.
It's a bit easier to remove Chrome from a Pixel than it is to remove Safari from an iPhone!
Basically that is how I feel when I see HD colour screens being used to organize XTerms, similar to the IBM XWindows terminals I got to use in 1994.
Ask HN: Electronic Tool Booth
Every time I pass an electronic tool booth with RFID tag on the car always amazes me how fast it reads, verify if active and other stuff and opens for the car on moving. How this actually work and how’s the latency is so small?
Plugging another alternative to the horrible Selenium made by two friends of mine! https://uilicious.com/
Show HN: How to Fire a Remote Employee
It is a certainly an untenable problem for longhaul, though with the current pace of advances in battery tech (mainly driven by smartphone companies of all things) shorthaul electric flight could certainly find some support in the near future.

Electric offers dramatic reductions in engine noise and maintenance, along with far more reliability/safety. I can see that being a selling point to some aviation execs, Norway has been trying it out, hope it works for them.

> Also, a battery that weighs 100kg when full weighs pretty much 100kg when empty.

Offtopic: The discussion on that fact is an excellent question/answer to read on SE: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/34421/does-the-m...
Is this any different than the debugger visualisations that other editors/IDEs have?

Genuinely curious, because if I'm understanding this correctly, it's just another front-end like what VSCode/Atom(probably)/CLion/Visual Studio have been doing for years if not decades.

I guess what I'm asking is: does this do a better job than the others?
Which one isn't an issuing bank?
yeah, waiting 2 weeks to report it is just way too suspect. Even if he is innocent he wasn't too bothered.
This is kind of a mess. The title says it authenticates the client not the user, but it doesn't actually talk much about authn. What it actually seems to argue (with some detail, but incomplete to remotely make the case) is that the JWT should be used only to validate user->client authz, not user authz.

It fails to really do this, as it notes some IAM systems can be used to transmit user authz information in it, and it provides no substantive reason to reject that use, it just asserts that it's wrong and that there are (unspecified) better alternatives (which it also fails to explain how they are better concretely.)

Waving a hand at more efficient and secure is nice, but show me a concrete security concern or evidence that another way is more efficient given that I'm already paying the cost to decode and parse the JWT and maybe I'll believe you.
I remember when Google Fiber was going to put verizon, comcast, time warner, etc out of business. I remember everyone being so hyped for Google Fiber to come to their neighborhood. Haven't heard anything from them in years.
Most grants worth having have a success rate of <15%. It’s got to be at least 30% to get someone to pay you to write their grant.
Its really slow for me and very frustrating to use.
May be the last piece I write, Xi critic internet cut after house arrest
I've long wanted a whole game around that. Proper procedural stuff floating around.
I've done a bit of Salesforce dev as I'm CTO of a small startup (~12 headcount currently). The Process and Flow builders are a breath of fresh air to allow me to do simple logic based programming tasks which respond to events and data changes on the platform. It's great! I have 0 desire to learn Apex and our requirements are moderately complicated but easily encapsulated by what you can do with the configuration frameworks and logic-based visual progamming system. 100% think more platforms should have this.
> “never gave any indication that the U.K. leaving the EU would make trading difficult for them.”

duh. it should not be something you have to say. the opposite would be surprising and would be worth stating. my point is the default for banks is that brexit will affect their licence to operate in the UK
I think I get it, it's pretty smart. So you have a texture atlas - a big texture with many small textures packed into it. Each small texture occupies a rectangular UV region in the big atlas, and when you are looking up texture coordinates x,y of the small texture, you remap them from (0,0)-(1,1) to the coordinates of the region in the atlas. This lets you avoid having a ton of small textures and instead use one big texture, only changing the UV region before drawing each model.

What he's talking about is a more advanced version that lets you do multitexturing from a single atlas - use two small textures and blend between them, with each having different tiling settings to make everything line up. The way I imagine it works is like so:

You're trying to draw a concrete cube with windows on each side, spaced 1m apart vertically. You load up a concrete texture and a window texture in the atlas. You set up the concrete texture to tile continuously. You set up the window texture to repeat with an offset that lines it up with the building's UV coordinates such that the windows appear horizontally and vertically where they should. The shader then chooses the window texture if the UV coordinates fall within the window tile, or the concrete texture otherwise. Depending on how complicated you make the tiling, you can get a lot of effects this way.

P.S. Look at the second link's first screenshot. The building that's second from the bottom, facing towards us. The windows are all spaced equally.
One of the predictions of Brexit which was dismissed as "project fear" was that there be job losses and companies will leave.

When Brexit happens and companies start to leave, there is surprise? shock, horror /s
can you give examples of things blamed on brexit that is not, in fact, brexit's fault
The article misses out the people element.

Isn't it best to design for reliability in the first place?

Don't you incentivize that best by having the same people supporting and app as well as developing?

Nothing makes you write reliable software like being the person being called out, or dealing with the customer issue.
> That's only a meaningful comparison if you drive across oceans to different continents. People tend to fly much much longer distances than they drive.

Distance isn't everything, many many flights are avoidable/suitable for alternative modes of transport. This [0] estimates that 18% of flights of adults in the UK are "long haul". 40% were either domestic or short haul in Europe, both of which are replacable by trains. The longest domestic flight in the UK is from Gatwick to Inverness, and takes just under 2 hours, or an 8 hour train journey.

[0] https://fullfact.org/economy/do-15-people-take-70-flights/ - (Note this was just the first source I found)
How much does that cost?
So.. the very same sentiment people had when they first saw cubist art made by humans...
Reminds me of the opening paragraphs from SICP (https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...)

"We are about to study the idea of a computational process. Computational processes are abstract beings that inhabit computers. As they evolve, processes manipulate other abstract things called data. The evolution of a process is directed by a pattern of rules called a program. People create programs to direct processes. In effect, we conjure the spirits of the computer with our spells.

A computational process is indeed much like a sorcerer's idea of a spirit. It cannot be seen or touched. It is not composed of matter at all. However, it is very real. It can perform intellectual work. It can answer questions. It can affect the world by disbursing money at a bank or by controlling a robot arm in a factory. The programs we use to conjure processes are like a sorcerer's spells. They are carefully composed from symbolic expressions in arcane and esoteric programming languages that prescribe the tasks we want our processes to perform.

A computational process, in a correctly working computer, executes programs precisely and accurately. Thus, like the sorcerer's apprentice, novice programmers must learn to understand and to anticipate the consequences of their conjuring. Even small errors (usually called bugs or glitches) in programs can have complex and unanticipated consequences.

Fortunately, learning to program is considerably less dangerous than learning sorcery, because the spirits we deal with are conveniently contained in a secure way. Real-world programming, however, requires care, expertise, and wisdom. A small bug in a computer-aided design program, for example, can lead to the catastrophic collapse of an airplane or a dam or the self-destruction of an industrial robot."
For many years, I thought that most French people were arrogant douchebags that hated foreigners.

The reason was that I had only visited the center of Paris, and I really felt disdained there. I even developed the habit of opening conversation in Spanish (my native language) because then people would try English and we would communicate. When I opened conversation in English, they replied in French, I wouldn't understand and they didn't seem interested in communicating at all.

After going to other parts of the country like Nice, Avignon, Lille... and being involved professionally with French people, I had the chance to meet many excellent people and now have several awesome French friends.

Later on, I had the chance to revisit the center of Paris and it no longer felt that unwelcoming anymore (probably partly because I got the hang of the culture and at least some of the language, and partly because I had some more money to go to somewhat better hotels, etc., which can help). But for the first-time clueless foreign visitor, it can feel really hostile. I'm not at all surprised by the testimonials you mention.
How does error-handling in this case happens? Do you get a message if some part of this pipeline fails?
A Review of Google Interviewing Process for Software Developer Role in 2020
Never Say Wolf
for sure. but the way N26 framed it is extremely amateurish. and i'm being generous.

"we are writing to share the news that we will be leaving the UK and closing all accounts."

this is what you write when you've gone out of business, not when you re-focus on the US for example. own your failure, explain what you did wrong and move on.

especially when you've basically told everyone a year ago that everything's going great.
I can totally see how staying in a market this volatile - due to Brexit of course! - can pose a too big and complicated task to a startup.
That's fine I think. Better to estimate your ability to provide a good service up front and make professional decisions, even if that means sacrifice.
Mind sharing those 5 metrics?
I think that is some of the best validation, to know that your solution is not to different than the ‘standard’, without having any prior knowledge of its existence.

Good work!
This.

What is finished anyway? Are projects ever "finished"?
ESO telescope sees surface of dim Betelgeuse
It's a relatively common idiom here in Australia. It gets used quite a bit in STEM education, i.e. "prove such-and-such from first principles", but is also pretty common more colloquially.

According to your link, it is also used a bit in South Africa (where Elon grew up), but less common in the US. Rather than being a new and overhyped term, perhaps it is a case of Elon using a term that is quite everyday to him, without realizing it is less familiar to the audience.
I'm not surprised. Farmers live and farm in rural areas. Rural places aren't on lockdown.

Even Wuhan still has food.

But there are still plenty of people starving: disabled people who's entire support network died or are in ICU. There is no-one to bring them food and they cannot get it themselves so they die of starvation. There are volunteers trying to go around but they cannot get to everyone in such a large city.

Also since the hospitals are focusing on coronavirus, people with other diseases or conditions are at the back of the queue and are having treatment or delivery of drugs delayed.
Cython also has had a mechanism for this for a long time. In fact if you wanted multiple dispatch in a new pure C program in 2020, just write it in Cython with no use of the CPython API and have Cython generate the pure C library for you.

https://cython.readthedocs.io/en/latest/src/userguide/fusedt...
Yeah, every contact I have with UK institutions had been sending me letters for well over a year now about their brexit plans. OTOH, N26 (which is also my bank) really should have notified customers about their plans way earlier.
Stronglifts 5x5. Buy the app. Set your brain on pause, lift, progress.
> But this is not really the Three network. It's a separate network with a different network ID and cannot be accessed with ordinary Three devices/SIM cards.

I'm not in the UK and ask purely out of curiosity, but what SIM/configuration do you use then?
NMS had problems of a completely different character at launch. Once they fixed the bugs, added the features that were missing and did a lot of polish, people really like the game. It's very well-received now. Here's a short story of how and why it had a bad launch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ .
That would confirm what they're saying - that the costs of continuing to give it a go in the UK market will increase substantially post brexit. Inside the EU costs would have been lower so it was worth trying to gain a foothold.
And that's what/all they're paying for, maintenance and upkeep etc. Ooooh. I get it now.
The Dever Ransomware Experience
Others have explained, but I found it funny to read this word. My native language is Dutch (flemish variety) and I would also read this word as expressing a negative emotion (fed up sounds right). "gat" = dialect/slang for ass, "vol" = full.
Queues in Schiphol...
Gameplay is often hard, they played it safe by using well tested concepts. There is however a "hack" you can do if you you have a cool engine but lack gameplay - just make it a multiplayer sandbox experience, and the "gameplay" will be invented by the players and community.
I have tried to use a lighter background because apparently "that's the correct thing". After experiencing significant eye fatigue I switched back to dark blue.
> - No 3DSecure, renders it useless for most online transactions.

Revolut have had this since August 2019: https://blog.revolut.com/3ds-secure-payments/

> - No personal IBAN, uses some janky shared IBAN that is not tied to your name, which is required for many online depositing service like Coinbase.

this, unfortunately, depends on the jurisdiction/currency :(
customers should have been wary that N26 did not have a brexit plan
What that's...

Good thing the net neutrality meme has died down, would be quite the interesting PR headscratch if not.
> What I don't understand with this "modernity" is these "black background shimmery text" themes.

Because we're mostly using emissive displays, and it turns out that trying to imitate what works on paper on an emissive display sucks for long term use (though it looks pretty at a glance, and if you are composing things for print WYSIWYG may be more important than what is most comfortable on the screen.) We tried light themes as the almost invariable rule for the first several decades of GUIs, but recently got over it.

(Light backgrounds are awesome on reflective media, and if eInk was cheap and fast enough to use for primary monitors for coding we’d do that.)
Thanks.

It was mostly a personal itch. I had been using Pocket for sometime but it honestly wasn't cutting it anymore. I built a smaller app over the Pocket api but as time progressed, the app diverged more and more. Once the Pocket api just became a glorified database, I decided to go all in. I waited for other solutions to come around but none were satisfying enough. After 5 years I had enough, talked to some people who expressed similar desire and that's when I jumped in full time.
Wonder what is your opinion about hearing aids. Many modern ones broadcast everything via radio because of stereo processing. It's strictly proprietary and impossible to get any further information from the manufacturer.

If you ask their wearer to put them away before entering, then you can't have conversation with him/her.
Brexit will have many challenges. But blaming “volatility” instead of competition is letting N26 off the hook for simply not being all that compelling compared to it’s competitors.
Control of games, especially keyboard control, has long been an interest of mine... Many games go to great length to help the player control the game properly/optimally, yet many games fall short and can be improved by simple AutoHotkey programs, or more complicated xlib programs.
Merchant Account vs. Payment Gateway: The Better Pick for Your Ecommerce Website
This is an example of Peter Thiel's "the last mover advantage" principle at work.
As I understand it, the need for UK regulation only came up due to brexit (before they were in thanks to the common market), so I guess "it's brexit" is sort of right, even if that leaves it a couple of steps?

Without it they could have coasted along for a while longer with not much extra effort.
As I said below, I've been intrigued by APL ever since I picked up a couple of discarded APL books in 1995 and read through them repeatedly, taking profuse notes. I keep hoping that someday I will learn APL well enough to be able to just jot down program fragments and be sure that they'll work, rather than giving me a rank error; the same is true of APL descendants like Numpy, although I have a lot more experience with them. I watched Roger Hui's "Tour de Force of APL in 16 Expressions", and although I understood the expressions, I don't understand how to design them. There are a bunch of notes in Dercuano about variants of APL. I've downloaded Aaron Hsu's dissertation, but I haven't read it yet.

For now, though, I can write out algorithms in what seems to me to be a straightforward fashion in paperalgo.

Some APLish things I've done include recoding T$'s 64-byte demo Klappquadrat in Numpy http://canonical.org/~kragen/demo/klappquadrat.html and this keyboard-driven structure-editing calculator with broadcasting over one-dimensional vectors http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/rpn-edit#50_iota_2_ln_*...
To put it in perspective, I live in Norway, and I live in the city where I work. Driving to and from work each day for a year would be roughly the same distance[1] as a single direct flight to and from New York.

Of course an ICE car doesn't get the same milage as that aircraft, but it's just a factor of 2-3 off. And then there's the difference in emissions and between a jet engine with its jet fuel vs the ICE car. For someone like me, even if I was driving to work, that single vacation would be a significant contribution to my travel CO2 footprint.

[1]: https://www.airmilescalculator.com/distance/osl-to-jfk/
I share Nelson's belief that we can conquer the rampant complexity in modern software applications. I'm generally in favor of the approach he's advocating for -- working to understand the layers of the stack rather than treating them as a black box.

That said I can't help but feel that the problem is a missing abstraction. As computers and the internet grew we did a lot of experimentation, learned from it, and came up with abstractions to help us conquer higher-order complexity through chunking.

But for cloud-based software today, creating a "simple" (in terms of business logic) backend API requires an insane amount of moving parts and complexity to have it up and running, but there is no underlying abstraction that offloads this complexity from the engineer writing the business logic. It's as if the people writing business logic were hand-crafting IP packets, but instead of juggling bits we're juggling build pipeline definitions and Kubernetes yaml files.

We need higher-order primitives for writing software.
That reminds me about that one day in at Sun back in the late 90's when I compiled Solaris in debug mode and set up KGDB.

I was running a full Solaris kernel while anothe rmachine was running GDB and DDD. I was able to visualise all the kernel structures in realtime. It was significantly more usable that I would have imagined it to be.

Can you do something similar these days with Linux?
MySpace will live forever in our hearts.
They launched in the UK after the EU referendum... It's not like Brexit meant that they suddenly had to rethink their strategy, is it?

No, they are faring poorly in a very competitive, crowded market and have simply decided to focus on the US.
I remember this (reported in mainstream news as well as this eco-blog), with pollution at London Heathrow reduced by taxiing with only one engine running.

I don't know if it was implemented generally.

https://www.treehugger.com/aviation/airports-can-cut-noise-p...