skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> What's the point of a number plate if it's not to allow a stranger at a distance to identify the car?

The point is to allow a human to identify the car, not a network of cameras connected to a computer database. The ideal would be a plate that could be read by humans but not cameras, but failing that, a plate that can't be read by either is preferable to one that can be read by both. That still serves a purpose in satisfying legacy regulatory requirements to have a number plate even if it's now vestigial and no longer serves any non-bureaucratic purpose.

The case for number plates has really eroded over time. Originally they couldn't be used for tracking because the logistics for that didn't exist, so that cost wasn't there and now it is. At the same time, their original value was always rather modest. The strongest case is for serious crimes like a hit and run, but even in those cases you need someone to get the plate number which they commonly fail to do, and in the most serious cases it's even less likely because a victim who dies can't remember the plate. So we're talking about it helping in a minority of a minority cases to begin with.

Meanwhile in modern times it's more likely that the perpetrator will be caught on video (especially when every bystander has a camera phone), and then you have their face in combination with the make, model and color of the vehicle, which is enough to have a non-trivial chance of getting caught and preserve the deterrent even without the number plate.

So on the one hand they now have a huge privacy cost that wasn't there before, on the other hand the value was never that high to begin with and it's even lower today than it was originally. So maybe we should just get rid of them.
I did this inadvertently in the 80s on an Encore Multimax, a parallel computer base don NS 32k processors. I was writing a parallel program in assembly that had to call fork() in a loop to spawn a few child processes. I did not realize that register contents are not copied over to the child process after a fork call and the loop counter was in a register. They had to actually power down the system to get it out of this state :-)
Should You Get a Master's Degree or Graduate Degree
Google maps is a bad example in tours rant. Used it to explore many cities, not only turn by turn direction. It worked get although personally like openstreet maps, because I feel one company s shouldn’t control so many aspects of life and like open source nature of it.

Indeed able to discover a onsen built by community in Hokkaido. That’s based on a lake I saw by just zoom in out of the map to do exploration and saw it built by Ainu community living there. In that turn by turn map helped quite a lot to reach there subsequently just by click and dropping a pin there. Submitted a text describing it and subsequently visited by many people.

Took a journey through treacherous mountain and went up to 2500 meters high and crossed it via a tiny off-road designed for motorcycles. That too did based on exploration of map on phone.

Paper maps didn’t provide such convenience. Yes POS is slow, but then it has different expectations today. Try integrating old POS with 10 payment network working under milliseconds to authorise transactions. Worked enough since 1990 with dos based POS and also wrote IBM MQ C++ code for integration. Don’t want to go back there.

I think today is a step forward. Like always there will be good and bad as it was in 1980 or 1990. But largely today we do much more with computers than we ever did in those days.

So not everything is perceptually slow on computers. Apple Watch, iphone, androids are responsive and usually fast. Windows 10 for certain tasks might be slow but then overall it’s not that bad either.

As far as exploration goes you can do the same or even more today than before. I can discover planets. Built3D model in physical form, use CNC on desktop, do laser cutting in my home.

Built a computer like BBC micro, raspberry pi, fly a computer using fly by wire and test it using real physical model plane. Can do farming on a small scale using hydroponics at home. Can just go on and on about it. All possible thanks to advancement in speed and reduction of size in computing devices and peripherals.

So I feel it’s not slow, just the work we do with old computers is very different from what we do with modern one’s.
I second this. Once one learns the keyboard shortcuts and builds the habit to learn shortcuts in general they won't be encumbered by small visual tasks like aiming lots of boxes like in menus and sub menus. These interactions micro-dent the flow. When I use the keyboard to navigate I'm not even consciously thinking what shortcuts to press, it happens naturally. I also noticed that I don't even know the shortcuts and have to think a bit before telling someone what shor-cut i use, my fingers remember them.
All this said, the software has to have a good shortcut flow in mind. Not all software offers this benefit.
> These posts fondly remember just the speed, but always seem to forget the frustrations, or re-imagine them to be something we treasured.

More to the point, I grew up with early Windows XP computers and early 90s Internet, and I don't remember the speed. Maybe I'm just too young and things were magically faster in the 80s? Maybe I was born just slightly before everything took a giant nosedive and became crap?

There are lots of things that annoy me about modern computers, but none of them take upwards of 2-3 minutes to boot any more. I remember loading screens in front of pretty much every app on my computer. A lot of my modern apps I use don't even have loading screens at all. I remember clicking buttons on apps and just kind of waiting, while the entire computer froze, for an operation to complete. Sometimes I'd start to do something complicated and just walk away and grab a snack because I literally couldn't use my computer while it ran.

There were entire joke websites like Zombocom set up to riff on how bad the loading screens were on the web back then. I would wait literally 10-15 minutes for Java apps like Runescape to load on a dial-up connection, despite the fact that the actual game itself played fine over that connection, and the delay was just due to dropping a giant binary that took no intelligent advantage of caching or asset splitting.

I can't imagine waiting 10-15 minutes for anything today.

I got a low-key allowance out of going to other people's houses and defragging their computers. Do you remember when Windows would just get slower over time because there was an arcane instruction you had to run every year or so to tell it to maintain itself?

> On the library computer in 1998 I could retry searches over and over and over until I found what I was looking for because it was quick
Now I have to wait for a huge page to load, wait while the page elements shift all over, GOD FORBID i click on anything while its loading

What library were you going to in 1998? I also did library searches, and they were insanely slow, and prone to the exact same "don't click while it loads" behavior that the author is decrying here. And that's if I was lucky, sometimes the entire search engine would just be a random Java app that completely froze while it was loading results. And forget about giving me the ability to run multiple searches in parallel across multiple tabs. Whatever #!$@X cookie setup or native app they were wired into could never handle that.

The modern database search interfaces I have today are amazing in comparison. I have annoyances, but you couldn't pay me to go back in time. A lot of those interfaces were actively garbage.

Again, maybe I'm just too young and everything took a nosedive before I was born. But even if that's the case, it seems to me that interfaces are rapidly improving from that nosedive, not continuing to slide downwards. The computing world I grew up in was slow.
I wouldn't be too sure. The author, Jia Tolentino, has made a career exploring, and often ridiculing mass trends like these.

Yet by the end of the article she is admiring women who had the procedure done and avoids looking in the mirror as much herself.
> is there a reason you're not calling CEF's C api directly from Python?

Such as by using CFFI? Cython's strength, in my opinion, is in the fact that it is its own language resembling both C and Python that compiles to down to C, rather than just an FFI.

> Are your extension modules doing some heavy lifting themselves, or are you using Cython just to handle the glue between the language interface?

I would say the majority of the application logic is written in plain Python, and Cython makes interfacing with it, creating higher level interfaces, and marshaling data far easier than with CFFI or using the C API directly. This is pretty subjective though.
This. Use a Yubikey or similar for 2FA instead of your phone.
This is just another area of life where everything becomes fake. Similarly we have fake overprocessed food, fake news, fake history, fake personalitie, fake medicine etc.
I'm not a fan of bootcamps because I think a lot of them are more focused on making money than actually helping people who need help.

Last year I decided to take action and started a free coding group at our local library: https://www.meetup.com/San-Jose-C0D3

I show up before work every day (M-F at 8am) to help students who are learning how to code. So far no students have gotten a job yet, but our group consistently gets 4-8 students who show up promptly at 8am. I answer their questions, give them guidance, and teach them best practices I follow as a software engineer with 10 years of work experience. I ask for nothing in return except the joy of students going "ahhh" when something clicked for them.

Things are still early for us, but my dream is to inspire other software engineers to help create a free and open learning center at their local libraries so people have an alternative to coding bootcamps.
How to Write an Injection Bot in Java
"Terminal response times are way slower than they used to be in the 80's." In 1983 the top selling computers were the TRS-80, Apple II and IBM PC (among others). I started on those computers. And what you said is crap... straight out BS. Any person from that era should remember what happened when you typed dir (or equivalent) into a folder with a couple hundred items. It was time to go make some coffee while each...item...was...written...to...the...screen. The OP has good points but the start was WEAK because it is factually inaccurate like your comment.
While these problems are valid and a shortcoming of distributed version control in general, I believe this is a good illustration of how we should not be using Git in the future. Git can be used as a deployment mechanism for sure, but it's not a very good one when comparing to other means of publishing and deployment, such as Docker and Kubernetes.

In my opinion, Git is best used as a system of record for changes to a codebase, and while deployment _can_ be triggered from events happening on Git (or a centralized repository such as GitHub), that should definitely not be the only way to deploy something. You should always be able to deploy manually.
Here's the million/billion/trillion dollar question: how much is a brand worth? Clearly it is worth something. Facebook can do the most inane thing, but if they put their brand on it then it will have some value.

To me this is the flaw in corporate taxation. I don't think you can ever work around this as long as you allow free trade. It just makes sense to tax them in other ways instead and perhaps simply get rid of corporate taxation itself.
I have to be honest that I’m not really seeing any major issues here. They _used_ to do something and now they don’t, so he didn’t lie about it. They _have_ had low placement rates and informed their investors, but it’s unclear what the average or common placement rate is and if it’s significantly different from what they claim. And _some_ students didn’t like the curriculum. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You also make reference to some internal documents. Perhaps sharing them will help further the story?
> The only real answer is to lower ave standard of living

Or we could stop wasting our resources in idiotic ways. How many people spend hours every day commuting to a job that produces no actual value to society? How much of our resources do we spend propping up the health insurance industry instead of just giving everyone healthcare?

Restructuring the economy to provide for human needs instead of profits for the bankers (who ultimately own the companies that own the companies that run the spreadsheet farm that you're commuting to every day) would go a long way towards fixing these problems without having to lower anyone's standard of living.
Debugging and (semantic) renaming. As said, this is the minimum requirements I pose on any language for production use. Nim in VS Code lacks both.

There's some limited debugging support at the generated C code, but this is not sufficient for me.
GitLab employee here, specifically on the Runner team! What kind of problems are you facing with `docker:dind`?

We had a recent problem where jobs were hanging due an update in Docker itself, where things halt when running on single core machines as explained in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/issues/6697. It's being fixed upstream in https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/40514. In the meantime to prevent you from having problems like this, it's always better to use a specific version of Docker for example `docker:19.03.5-dind`. Like this, you have control over which dind version you use and can upgrade when you have tested it beforehand.

In retrospect, we could have caught this issue earlier and informed our users if we had automated pipelines pulling latest images and testing them out, which we started working on yesterday https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/2674 and we started monitoring dind specifically in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/ci-cd/tests/dind-image-tests/
Do Machines Dream? An Interview with Terry Sejnowski on Recreating Real AI
Larry Tesler cut and pasted from this mortal coil
The difference is that those sites generally don't hard gate features behind having a certain amount of MeowMeowBeenz.
Some of the best satire is based on real life situations. Unfortunately, the examples within probably are for some of us here.
I see somebody does not like it. Lemme guess who ...
Thank you, whoever made the change!
What i find particularly embarrassing for Citrix (although only marginally touched in the article) is the amount of time taken for them to close the hole that was in their Netscaler/ADC components.

I mean, this is not a one-man show and an open-source project....
> so I've noticed that I do want a map that works like a map - something I can explore and annotate.

I don't doubt that there are use cases for a map that works this way. Even if Google Maps covers 80-90% of the use-cases for mapping, mapping is an absolutely massive domain. 10-20% of use-cases still represents a huge volume.

But it doesn't have to be Google Maps. It actually seems worse to be for one "maps" app try to handle all possible use-cases for a map.

Why isn't there a separate different tool that handles the use-case you describe?

I guess, going back to the original thesis, what would the "1983" replication of what Google Maps does, but faster. Or, what would the "1983" version of the mapping behavior you wanted.

In the thread they say:

> in 1998 if you were planning a trip you might have gotten out a paper road map and put marks on it for interesting locations along the way

I'd argue that this use-case still exists. Paper road maps haven't gone away, so this is still an option. People largely don't use this and prefer Google Maps or other digital mapping tools for most of their problems. Why? If you gave me both the 1998 tools and the 2020 tools, for 95% of the options I'm going to use digital tools to solve it because they let me solve my problems faster and easier. I know this because I have easy access to paper maps and I never touch them. Because they're largely worse at the job.

> There's a very subtle point the Twitter thread was making here. This use case may be most popular not because it's what the people want, but because it's all that they can easily do. The tools you use shape how you work, and what you can work on.

Ultimately, my point above is my response to that. None of the old tools are gone. Paper maps are still available. And yet they have been largely abandoned by the large majority of the population. I agree that there are limitations to our current digital tools, and I hope in 2030 we have tools that do what the article describes. But the 1983 version of the tools are worse for solving problems than the current tools, for most people.
Yes but the flip side of it is that it takes more time now to restart an Adobe application than it took to reboot the machine in the 1980s
Yes, in some senses, but completely different in others. The availability of it to nearly everyone, and the sheer volume of content are unprecedented. It's also way more visual. Photos used to have the constraints of being developed and printed on paper. You might have a hundred photos of you in your life. Now we have that many in a year. All of these things impact societal expectations, which impact individual behavior. Sometimes it's a harmless impact, but it's a new ballgame to be sure. And it doesn't have to be a drastically different game for wellbeing to be dramatically altered for the worse.
Facebook might have decided to simply do less business, because the risk wasn't acceptable with the taxes added. When the cost of doing business is higher then less business is done.
That's not the conclusion here. The conclusion is that there are many axes of oppression and one does not invalidate the other. The kind of thinking you describe was more common in the 60s and 70s but has fallen out of favor after the rise of black feminism and intersectional analysis.

Race does not bind more tightly than other aspects. Ableism exists. But the existence of white people who suffer in a myriad of ways does not negate the existence of white privilege in places like the US.
Ask HN: What are awesome blogs you read daily?
Website SEO: How to rank #1 in Google
As the OP who wrote this while drunk two years ago and thinks that about 30-50% of it is objectively wrong, it's extremely funny to me that every five months someone reposts it here and everyone gets in a fight about it again. Many of the details are wrong - the thesis is still completely valid, and it's Computer Person Thinking that wants to attack the details while refusing to stand back and look at the overall picture, which is that using computers is now an incredibly messy experience where nothing quite does what you want, nothing can be predicted, nothing can be learned.

I hypothesize that this is because programmers and other various Computer People consider "being on the computer" to be a satisfying goal in itself that sometimes has positive side effects in the real world, while everyone else simply has stockholm syndrome.
I remember listening to this when it was recorded and I still remember details from it years later – probably my favorite Changelog podcast ever. It's obviously very foolish to make software choices based on how much you like its creator as a person. But Richard Hipp comes off as a guy so likable that goshdarnit, I hope his little project succeeds. Jokes aside, though, I don't think it's entirely coincidence that SQLite, something that is so good and reliable, was made by someone who seems so conscientious and thoughtful.

Though I have to admit, I was and am still disappointed to learn that the official way to pronounce SQLite is "S-Q-L-ite", i.e. "like a mineral".
I'd recommend using Dash (on Os X) or Zeal (Linux and Windows) if you want to have an easily browseable local version of the docs.
> Whether or not this counts as “selling” strikes me as a meaningless semantic distinction: Either way, the school receives some money up front and an investor shoulders some of the risk of the ISA not paying out. And either way, Lambda School students don’t know that the school isn’t as incentive-aligned with them as the school’s marketing indicates.

It is certainly not meaningless! Selling an ISA means that Lambda no longer has any financial interest in its outcome. Borrowing against an ISA is completely different; if the ISA doesn't pay out then Lambda goes bankrupt, which is precisely the incentive alignment they claim to have.
Bacteria are the biggest argument against grey goo. They already are, they already exist, and they're already everywhere, yet things other than bacteria still exist. They've had several billion years of evolution to work on it too.

They're probably in local maxima, not in any global maximum, but it's also likely that there is no single global maximum given how different the requirements are for using different energy sources.
I disagree that this is an accurate assessment of my claims. When you claim that you "never have" done something after you've already done it, you're making a statement about both the present and the past. Your point about averages or something is also difficult for me to parse.
They are illegal, but that doesn't stop ServiceOntario franchises from selling them with a little sign saying (paraphrasing), "you're liable".
That’s gonna mess with plate recognition algorithms. They’d need to prob retrain a lot of data using plates as certain letters gets crossed over with the new “camo” paint
As the OP who wrote this while drunk two years ago and thinks that about 30-50% of it is objectively wrong, it's extremely funny to me that every five months someone reposts it here and everyone gets in a fight about it again. Many of the details are entirely inaccurate - the thesis is still completely valid, and it's Computer Person Thinking that wants to attack the details while refusing to stand back and look at the overall picture, which is that using computers is now an incredibly messy experience where nothing quite does what you want, nothing can be predicted, nothing can be learned.

I hypothesize that this is because programmers and other various Computer People consider "being on the computer" to be a satisfying goal in itself that sometimes has positive side effects in the real world, while everyone else simply has stockholm syndrome and has long since given up on even imagining a better experience.