skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I prefer serving the average user who doesn't have time to dive into the settings and tweak everything before he is finally able to use the product. Striving for ease of use removes the need for most settings.

Serving average users by providing sensible defaults is a good idea but why does so many think that removing settings is a natural next step?

I've joked[0] about making a slide deck and start selling training to every modern software company :

> Have your cake and eat it too!

> How to please all your customers at once - Combining sensible defaults with the forgotten art of making your software configurable.

[0]: https://erik.itland.no/courses-id-like-to-teach
Dependent Type Systems as Macros cropped up on HN a couple of times recently...

p30 of https://www.mpoffald.com/papers/depmacros.pdf has a table comparing the macro systems of various langs

Seems only Racket has enough juice to do this, for now :)

(though I do wonder if some of those missing features couldn't be provided by libraries in other languages)
The Home Office is a den of mad, evil bureaucracy. I'd honestly have believed it even if it hadn't been anything to do with a computer. The people who work there are especially twisted, the culture needs flushing down a toilet.
Yes, at least for the specific code discussed in this example.
Well, Dana Carvey always did maintain there was little difference between a baby and a 100-year-old man...
Signal has MAJOR UX problems when you have several devices (which is fairly normal for mainstream users). Try using the same account multiple computers, smartphone, tablet / chromebook at the same time. It's painful.

Compared to Telegram (which is also privacy-focused and NOT owned by Facebook like WhatsApp is) that simply works, I'm not sure what Signal brings to the mainstream table.

The people behind the predecessor to Signal were somewhat successful in a disinformation / FUD campaign against Telegram's cryptography early on, but 0 POC exploits have ever been released. Telegram even upgraded their cryptography to alleviate some of the concerns - https://core.telegram.org/mtproto . They are now recognized as IND-CCA secure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciphertext_indistinguishabilit....

To be mainstream, you have to have mainstream usability. Signal does not (at least not right now).
This approach doesn't work when dealing with fractional cents, like charging $0.0001 per hour for something.

I would rather recommend using an arbitrary precision decimal library like Decimal.js, and using strings to represent money in JSON. And of course using an appropriate database type for storing the data.
Hm. I'm not sure I follow and I use Fusion regularly and FreeCAD a little. Does the property editor/spreadsheet in FreeCAD not count? You change a value, the dependencies get recomputed. Works about the same as in Fusion and certainly satisfies "parametric" for me.

(I use Fusion too, and think it's overall easier to use and more polished, it just seems strange that the lack of parametricity is what irks you.)
No, it's not even conversion efficiency of burning fuels, rockets expend a lot of their energy accelerating fuel that is later burned as well. That energy is not in the satellite when it's in orbit.
(Throwaway for obvious reasons)

Proud of my bank in India (State Bank of India) which is crazy over security. Secure password requirements for login. Another completely different password for managing my banking profile and adding bank transfer beneficiaries. OTP for each money transfer related activities I do from the bank.
>What makes it worse is that tech elevates this capitalist propaganda, glorifying workaholic ism

A desire to throw yourself into your work isn't capitalist propaganda. The fact that one doesn't want to compete at this level is not an excuse to dismiss it as such. The people who are best at anything are the ones who obsess over it and dedicate themselves to it. That is the nature of a reality where time and resources are limited.
I’ve been debugging a fair amount of service traffic lately, and I think I’ve about hit breakpoints in all of the major http client implementations in Node.

...

Every single one of them has so much delegation (to achieve some fucked up definition of minimalism) that it’s not even funny. And with async await it’s downright maddening. Even in node 12 with the async stack traces flag.

I’m taking over maintenance of a service and it’s throwing an unhandled promise rejection that’s a 403 error with a one line stack trace (which is in the wrapper we wrote because the library somehow isn’t minimalistic enough for our tastes). Took way too long to catch in papi. The stack trace is huge, none of our code in it at all, and the request is not even in scope for two or three frames away from where the error is thrown. This is, from a user’s standpoint, an awful library.

Anything I struggle to debug, I can guarantee at least a few of my coworkers will bring the same problem to me. Which means I spend three times as much time looking at bad library code as a junior developer would. That fosters a lot of contempt for code that is ugly on the inside.

What I really want as an industry is for us to start judging third party code by how sane the stack traces look. This has been bugging me ever since J2EE traces started going north of three pages (with the same series of four frames appearing three times). And sane stacks are going to require us to stop avoiding having a bunch of methods with a single line of duplicated code in them. Quelle horreur!

The whole point of code reuse is to reduce duplicated effort not lines of code. Arcane call stacks are huge amounts of duplicated effort, by people already having a bad day.

DRY is not worth all the lost hours and energy wasted in debuggers. Do better.
Maybe run `sudo chmod -R 000 /` instead. Can't get charged with destroying any data, but it's a huge pain to get a system working again from that. Only done it twice; hope never to do so again.
And the government also "chose" that it is "good for us" if people of different races (miscengenation) weren't allowed to get married up until the 60's and that people shouldn't be allowed to have sex with someone of the same sex (sodomy) until the 80s.

So now you're trusting the same government "to protect your privacy" that would like nothing more than if companies were forced to have backdoors to read secure messages?
It doesn't have the same issues (at least from my experience in C#) but it runs quite a bit slower than normal floats and doubles:

http://csharphelper.com/blog/2017/05/compare-the-performance...
You're thinking of PHP. Modern Javascript has good error handling and is a pretty nice language to use.
[Nitpick] Instead of this:

;(async function () {
try {
// All your code
} catch (e) {
console.log(e)
}
})()

Just do this:

;(async function () {
// All your code
})().catch(console.error)

Overuse of try/catch is probably the #1 mistake I see when people use async/await.
I’ve always heard it was because the budget dried up after we beat the evil commies to the moon. Could you point to a source that talks about the safety angle? I’d love to read about it.
Right, linking to the wiki makes sense. I just don't think expanding the name gives you anything.
> and dozens of independent plugins for different purposes by different authors, all implementing a well-defined interface. Any new contributor adds stuff in parallel, without being blocked.

This reminds me of Jenkins, which is the most nightmarish piece of software I've ever worked with. The plugins are of such wildly varying quality that it's hard to tell if something broke because of a plugin you just upgraded/installed, because the VM Jenkins is on got upgraded etc. And it's plugins all the way down. Plugins built on plugins. So if you try to file an issue with one plugin, they'll often just point you one plugin down the stack.

You get what you pay for, I suppose, and obviously a lot of people like the tool.
It's tough to decide which tech stack to use. What would you add to this advice?
Bad Metaphors and Artifical Intelligence
Whoa, thanks! I've used the compose key for a long time (I'm an amateur Polish speaker who also occasionally writes French) and I never realized it was order-insensitive!
I love seeing this book listed. I picked it up 4ish years ago while learning Rust. I was converting the code to Rust and I found a small bug[1] because I could not convert the code as it was. Peter was amazingly responsive and encouraging. I highly recommend this and the second second book.

[1] https://github.com/RayTracing/raytracing.github.io/blob/7e2a...
RSA Conference 2020: Making Cybersecurity About Humans
Entitled is a loaded word. That makes it seem like the user is unreasonable and he should take whatever facebook gives him. Be quiet you don't matter, you are lucky they allowed you on the platform.

Is it unreasonable to expect facebook to be able to determine the tone of the conversation. They probably already do this or are in the process of researching this. This is a great feature and I look forward to getting content aligned with my mood. I'm mad, show me angry posts, I'm nervous show me calm posts. I'm bored show me exciting videos. Maybe a box on top how do you feel to determine current mood.

Users complaining give free feedback. As a developer it helps shape the product.
I can attest to this. When you call in you just have to type in your alphanumeric password completely using the 10 digit phone pad. Just like in the 90s. On the other hand Fidelity has the best customer service I have ever experienced so I guess everyone has competencies.
> Name one thing that a) we're sure exists, and b) it's so extraordinary that it "can't be explained with a textbook

What does "explain" mean? There are lots of things that are known but unexplained as well as effects that are known but we havent proved an explanation (eg. the shower-curtain effect to wikipedia unknowns in physics).
> developed a ten year plan to fix their legacy problem then

They did. And Pi factor came in. And budget was cut because those pesky fintech are a threat, and clearly money was better spent on a more modern offer than on those "security" concerns.

And yes, it's possible to add 2FA to the front layer. However, the remnants of COBOL code running on the mainframe for the last 25 years weren't designed to handle passwords length 9 or more, and the last guy who knew how that code was built has retired some 15 years ago.
You'd think someone who picks JavaScript as their go-to language would pick a better layout but alas...
mm. this is what annoys me a bit with BBC online - much of their interesting content is simply promotional fluffing for TV media they have on otherwise.

I get why they do it and don't particularly feel they shouldn't - but there's been so many times I've clicked on ostensibly interesting articles on the BBC website only to find it's just a mechanism to encourage me to watch TV... which I try to avoid.
you mention using macOS keybinds with linux. have you found a way to set everything to macOS keybindings? it's super frustrating to relearn every keyboard shortcut and terminals not supporting it fully
Do many people use LaTex for notes?

I’ve considered using it for my notes on my iPhone/iPad. At the moment, I’m using Markdown but for a few things, LaTex would be better.
> it was a power user's dream

It is some power user's dream. There are a huge number of power users who consider it a nightmare, though. Well over half of the people I know who have to use the ribbon range somewhere between disliking it and hating it, because it makes it difficult to find what you need to do.
It may be a question of taste and personality. I absolutely love Lex's style. I thought the Jim Keller interview was fantastic.
Croquet Launches Live Collaboration Dev Platform
Welcome to Croquet, new platform that lets developers add real-time collaboration to multi-user games and apps. News about investment: https://bwnews.pr/2STAE8D Developers can signup for SDK now: https://www.croquet.io/sdk-access
I look at the change to ribbons through the lens of: "Would they have done it if they had viable competitors?", and I have to think that there's no way MS would have. Everyone would have laughed their way right over to Word Perfect.

Perhaps it makes things easier for new users, but only without competitors where they able to shoe-horn it in for everybody.

Now I use it on a Mac where there are still menus on the top and I can get stuff done. I wish there was an option to enable the menus (and fine, leave the ribbon if you must) on Windows.
Ask HN: Is Facebook still using memcached?
I've followed Facebook's engineering team through the site's meteoric rise. It's what got me into PHP in the first place.

Unfortunately, Facebook's presentations at different conferences these days seem to cover mobile apps and complex global datacentre solutions rather than the basic web tier like in the early days.

Is the company still using memcached? The Memcached at Facebook page has been silent for 2014. I also don't see it mentioned in infrastructure talks anymore.

Did they come up with a better solution (McDipper/Flashcache) or is it just a tried and tested solved problem/legacy system?
I know the results are biased given it's a sample from OP inbox but I'm surprised not so see https://postmarkapp.com/ here. I thought they were pretty popular.
> Storing conversations is introducing a massive security hole.

Sure, but that could be up to every sender to decide whether they want their messages to be view once/view for 24hrs/store forever.
Just make the smallest possible fractional cent the unit then
LiteDOM is only 3k and relies on web standards:

https://litedom.js.org/
Good design don't come from just asking question, it comes from understanding the need. Often time when dwelling in a problem space, an industry, a customer sector, there is a underlying common problem to be solved. But everyone articulates the problem differently. A good design is to find a general solution to all these seemingly random problem.

Have seen quite a few "designers" who drinks the koolaid of design sprint, design thinking, etc by asking everyone what everyone thinks the product should look like, then proceed to prototype a frankenstein that "addresses" everyone's concern.
Not once did it end well
The service seems to be down...

I've used Mathpix in the past for converting math formulas into Latex with great success.

https://mathpix.com/
>They are made by people much faster/better/stronger than most of us.

lmfao no they're not
+1 for sendgrid
At the end of the day, if you want something for open-source, you have to do it yourself or pay somebody to do it.

I'm just sick and tired of people bitching and moaning about open-source software and expecting that people will do work for them for free if they castigate the people actually doing the work hard enough.
True. Most likely, over-education is less valuable now. An undergraduate engineering degree is still highly valuable while a liberal arts masters degree is arguably less valuable than the loans taken out to procure it.
use git to track /etc/hosts changes and you can get some stats out as to how well it works for you over time, or recognize patterns!
The smallest unit of US money is the mill or 1/1000 of a dollar. The smallest unit of US currency is the cent. You're supposed to work in mills and round to cents.

Or just work in floats and round as the last step. Or do both selectively depending on which rounding error works in your favor, but don't tell anyone that's what you're doing.

The real problem is that nobody at the company seems to have looked at the parts of their software that everyone sees, so what else have they not looked at?
They are rare, but definitely out there. I've worked with one, managed one, never been one. One charateristic I observed over these 2, they'd take a manual home and read it over a day or two. They'd retain most of it. They tend to be touch typist not needing to look at the keyboard often. This reduces context switching and lets them flow when they are being creative. They know and remember syntax, library routines and interfaces so they aren't stopping to look things up. They "try on the fly", fail fast and often, and move to alternatives when blocked. The ones I know I'd love to start a company with. But I would be the bottleneck...
What Is the Hardest Language in the World to Lipread?
‘Huawei is definitely beatable if we double down on investments’: In-Q-Tel CEO
Is that your argument?

Noone is perfect. Greta eschewed the plane for a yacht, and guess what, people like you are still complaining. This is why people are blocking it out and are angry at her. How the can anyone win with this logic?

We can't just shame ourselves into fixing the climate. Broad regulation is the only way this will get solved. It can't be up to each individual person to save the climate.

If that's your solution, we're even more fucked than we currently are. Even if everybody stopped flying or eating ribeyes or whatever, there's still a huge amount of carbon that needs to be sucked out of the atmosphere, and plenty of extremely large sources of carbon and methane that are still there. The world is going to shit and you want me to eschew the tiny bit of enjoyment I have left in the hopes that everybody else does the same thing? Not gonna happen.
Oh boy, we're redesigning VLC interface those days, and does this article is spot on on numerous part we've seen.

0. A lot of things are not-intuitive, and we've had to do basic UX and looking at our users to understand what the needs where (we don't use telemetry/spying). And it took a lot of time...

1. And yes, this requires to rethink some of the basics stuff for VLC usage.

2. And the nerd-porn part is very true: we solved it with 3 layers of access. Simple usage should be direct, Advanced usage for normal users should be within 2 clicks, and Geek/Pro options can be further away.

And we will have options for different usage of VLC that will impact a bit the UI (but we're making that as simple as possible, to not make the codebase too complex -> more time)

3. Finally, a lot of things had to be decided without consensus, and that requires leadership that is not the usual way we work.

I can share some of the work, if some people care...
There are many more 101 year olds than 1 year olds doing their own administration.
whatsapp is also impossible to use on >1 mobile devices.
Attaching a confidence / accuracy score to the data isn't a step that's commonly taken. However for qualifying user input this sounds like a great idea.
How to handle reactivity with vanilla JS?
As opposed to perl? :D
Great LaTeX tool but oh dear:

"Your connection to this site is not secure"

You probably need to cover the "I want to use this site without anyone MITMing me" use-case with Let's Encrypt, but you probably already knew that.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-work-at-Google-What...

Do you have any reasonable way to convince me and everyone reading your responses that your opinions are more valid than other people who offer contrary opinions?

Why would someone take a 50% pay cut and turn down a google offer? There has to be a bigger reason than the one you mentioned.

>whoosh. Re-read what I said to understand how I didn’t compare anyone to Trump.

I assumed your analogy was used to state that people at google are incompetent and that those who are incompetent can't recognize their own incompetence. The later part may be true in the context of google but I disagreed with the former. Your reply indicates to me that you in fact don't think much of google engineers and that your comparison of incompetence is apt.

As far as I know Gayle didn't work to create the interview process, she was just part of the board and now she actively works to help people pass it. Saying that there exists many people who can't pass the google interview will harm sales of her book. I believe it is against her incentive to say it and that she only said it because she believe it's the truth. There is no active lying going on here.
Because with forklifts you need fewer box lifters. That's bad for the box lifters and so they will reject the technology.
Nice video lecture series by scot

https://video.ethz.ch/speakers/bernays/2019/7b11b50e-f813-4d...
Modern Perl is fine too
I literally gave using the non normalized ray for ray tracing as an example.

(Also in practice floating point inaccuracy doesn't become a huge problem since you have to design around floats not being exact in the first place. Spheres can also wind up being more finnicky with precision but are rarely used as primitives to trace against in production renderers. There isn't a single right way to do the tracing, but the shading does need normalized vectors for a lot of common operations.)
OpenSCAD will barf quickly on high poly shapes too. Try asking it to render a 1000x1000 point surface some time. That's not even a particularly crazy level of detail if your 3D printer is reasonably large.

Hint: 32GB of memory is not enough.
The Glitch Gallery
Modern PHP has good error handling, too.

There are differences in style and views on things from the way they were long ago that float around. These impact a lot of opinions.
I took a look at Signal again a few days ago, and their desktop "app" is still a 323 MB Electron tire fire.
Isn't PDF almost Turing-complete?
Kickstarter Workers Vote to Unionize
I'm looking forward to Signal introducing basic features like iOS message backup (which exists in the Android version).
Programmer's critique of missing structure of operating systems
Never used this site before and can't figure out how to reply to your other comment. Nonetheless, I think having a tier betwen free and lite that allows 25mb attachments would be great for us casuals who have a few domains to manage and just want it all to forward to our main email. And don't need up to 100.
Reverse-survivor bias.

You aren't seeing the non-existence all the well engineered stuff you never had time to build "properly".
> I think that's the key. Unlike software development, where you can improve things here and there incrementally, with design you need to have an overall view of what you want to do, where you want to get, how the final product should look.

I think many software developers would say exactly the opposite (and I think both would be wrong.)

Except the marketing effect of a new UI, do you have literature (or just easy explanations) that would help me understand why this should be the case?
Fighting Disinformation Online: Building the Database of Web Tools
Most music applications have a feature called “MIDI Learn”, where you basically click any parameter, turn a knob or push a button on your controller, and it binds that input to the parameter. It’s amazing and allows for the creation of complex, expressive workflows.

I wish that this was a feature throughout the OS. Being able to bind a foot pedal to pasting from the clipboard, or a slider to a variable in your IDE, or a rotary to a control in a video editing app, would be amazing and open up entirely new avenues for computing and letting people customize their setup. Particularly thinking of the accessibility implications.
I wish more software could map external controls over midi or osc.
People understand dollar bills, but they don’t understand their credit card and the visa/mastercard network.

You’re making the error of talking about cryptocurrency from the network perspective instead of the ecosystem perspective. You can compare a cryptocurrency with a financial backbone. A bank/credit card/any financial service can be sitting in front of both a cryptocurrency network or the current financial network and users wouldn’t see a difference (well except lower fees)