skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think every time is remote right now, and could be for months. I'm hoping that by then everyone will be more open to keeping roles remote
> your comment is not fair to FF.

I disagree. I could have been a hell of a lot more vindictive.

> Pocket can be disabled with about:config => pocket.enabled set to false (non-obvious but easy).

That doesn't remove the feature from the right-click menu. And, there's a ton of other configs in about:config which mention Pocket, some of them include URLs. Does setting pocket.enabled=false disable retrieval of those URLs?

FF accounts & sync do nothing if you don't use them... except recommend to me that I use them. The data might be e2e encrypted but that's still more attack surface than _not_ having the data there in the first place. Yes, it's extremely useful for a huge number of people but nonetheless it's still a privacy issue for me.

Extension & feature recommendations being done in browser isn't the point. The point is that they're _done_ in the first place. Which means that not only does Firefox parse and render content, but it inspects it and tries to determine what I'm doing and what extensions "might" help. Thanks but that falls right into creepy territory for me. It's only one step away from sending that already-data-mined data to some marketing company.
A small shot of Bailey's Irish Cream when I wake up to knock the edge off the day. Nytol to help me get the best possible night's sleep at night. I also try to limit the amount I read the news.
How is Java bytecode fundamentally insecure? (Example?)
> I don't understand. Regardless of COVID, they always need to consider the impact on developers.

Sure, but that impact might be somewhat more... impactful right now. This isn't that difficult. If you're a FB user, you probably saw last night nearly all of your friends reporting that their posts were being flagged as spam yesterday. That's because a bunch of people were sent home and the automated system took over. Staffs are being sent home and their ability to work effectively is reduced. The prospect of breaking changes and new bugs in the world's most popular web browser could put more strain on already strained teams that are struggling to keep up with both their current working environment and new challenges as they respond to the public health crisis. Removing that as a factor is a net benefit for those teams and for all of their users.
It's actually not bad nowadays if you use APIs (e.g. Amazon Transcribe, Google speech to text, etc.). I worked with speech-to-text APIs for an AR app and they performed quite well. For a desktop app you could probably toss in something like Snowboy for custom hotword detection to make it function like Alexa.

I think it's mostly a matter of no one having bothered to write the software, because it's hard to think of an application where desktop voice control is super useful. Perhaps the first question to ask is not "how can it be better?", but "if it were really good, what would it actually do?".
I was using Plan 9 for years, attended several workshops, and even was paid to work on it for a little while. It happened.
> I conclude that it is impossible to build a new web browser. The complexity of the web is obscene. The creation of a new web browser would be comparable in effort to the Apollo program or the Manhattan project.

True. But if the web did not adopt those features, then you would have to install more native applications to fill the void.

If you make a simpler web browser, one that is doable by a newcomer, with the subset of features that you deem appropriate for the web, nothing is stopping you. You could still visit most websites that are content only. But for some of the web applications you would have to install the native version of those applications to fill the void.

Either way you have the same outcome. You have a simple web browser that can be made by newcomers, but you have this other application platform (Windows, Mac, Android, Linux) where "the complexity is obscene, the creation of a new operating system would be comparable to the Apollo program or the Manhattan project."
Great idea and great work!

A couple nitpicks: it would be nice to see what happens when the leader fails. Optimizing for the case of a stable leader might have impact on recovery time.

Another important aspect for fault-tolerance is whether you can really survive any minority crashing. For example, if only the strictly necessary number of nodes keep up with the leader, then if most of those crash the system will have a really hard time recovering due to the backlog accumulated at slow nodes which now need to catch up for the system to continue operating.

A performance number that does not take those things into account may not be very realistic. Nevertheless the idea is pretty good.
Here are some examples of dubious advice from experts: the Iraq war, regime changes throughout the middle east, interventionism in general, margarine instead of butter, fat is bad/sugar is good, antidepressants are harmless, medical doctors don't understand Bayes' rule, etc. etc. etc.

For the record, I'm not American, and not anti-intellectual.

Here's a better example of patronizing by experts from the current crisis: "The average person should not wear a mask. Not only it doesn't protect against the virus, but it actually may harm."

What they mean is: it may harm by giving a false sense of certainty. Clearly the average person is too stupid to understand the difference between perfect protection and "not quite perfect, but better than nothing" protection.
maybe also this?

https://www.reddit.com/r/China_Flu/comments/fkeewi/how_to_us...
That is how it was for my shop too but honestly I think the semantics of VB.NET was always closer to C# than it was to VB 6. I remember working on a mixed code-base and it was absolutely effort-less because the semantics and of course the libraries were all identical, you just had to switch syntax. Syntax isn't really what takes time to learn in coming up to speed in a new language; what takes more time is language concepts, semantics, APIs and tooling. Once you realize this and observe the fact that C# is winning mind-share there didn't really seem to be any need for VB.NET. It really seems to me like it should have been stopped entirely ~2006 but Microsoft just doesn't do that to products, to their credit in most cases.
I'm a Contractor focusing on technical support for eComm sites (Woocommerce, Shopify, Etc). and overall helping with the technical needs for companies that can't do it in house. A few clients have indefinitely suspended work, We'll see what happens when I send invoices at the end of the month ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

If your looking for a stateside contractor at rates of around 90$/hr I'd love to talk! My portfolio is here https://talleycodigital.com/
In Europe, I only see the ones that attach to the inputs from the bathroom sink. That way you can control the temperature.
It's not even just false positives. Real positives can also throw up huge dilemmas.

For example, let's say it had been discovered during my scans (which were taking place for unrelated reasons) that I had a minor aneurysm in my brain that had a roughly annual 0.2% chance of rupture. Let's then say I was given the choice of having an operation with a 10% mortality rate. What do I do?

This sort of decision is really tough, because I could easily live another 50 years with such an aneurysm, but the terror of having something like that in your head might scare you into taking a risky operation you logically shouldn't take. Sometimes ignorance of minor problems is a good thing.

(Note: These stats above are plucked out of thin air to make a point, but I know of real cases where the numbers have fallen this way.)
> And really, Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces aren't that amazing.

And the fact that Catmull-Clark is based on recursive refinement makes it really bad for GPU evaluation (or parallel evaluation in general). It's completely incompatible with hardware tessellation, for example.

If I had to pick an especially non-obvious, elegant, and useful 1980s graphics technique, Pineda rasterization would come to mind.
> Having said that, with crypto now all but finished

Bitcoin will come out of this stronger than gold.

It got the wrecked for the same reasons gold and silver did. People needed funds for margin calls and safe reserves, and bitcoin markets were already far less liquid than gold and silver. An emerging currency can't help but be volatile.

Coming out of this, it will explode for the same reasons. It's less liquid, and there will be less supply to feed demand when people go for 'safe' assets.

Young people have no trust in gold or silver. It's another metal with no intrinsic value other than being heavy, inconvenient to spend, and really inconvenient to transfer across borders. Bitcoin is at least half a step better than that, and a half step ahead of any other cryptocurrency competitor when it comes to institutional and retail availability.
Just tested, it appears to work.
Regarding the other types of nodes, pure consumers are useful as "standby" nodes. They are ready to be swapped in when another host fails, but don't participate in voting until they are swapped in. Swapping them in still requires a quorum of the previous nodes, so they are only useful in small numbers to be swapped in when another node fails. Nodes that are catching up are just a special case of this pure consumer type that shouldn't be promoted to be a full voting member until they are fully caught up.

I'll add another type of node that sometimes comes in handy in certain network topologies. I've typically heard this called a "witness" - it is a voting member but doesn't store any actual data (just metadata) so it can't be a leader. The typical use for this is if you have a data center cluster with only two DCs.

In that scenario you can make the number of nodes in each DC unbalanced so if the minority DC goes down you still have a quorum. But you can't make it so that if either DC goes down you can still have a quorum. So you add a third DC over a WAN that acts as an arbitrator between the two. Because it's far away, you don't want it to store all the data - keeping it in sync would be expensive. You only need it to know enough metadata to vote correctly.

This obviously changes the failure characteristics quite a bit vs having 3 DCs in the cluster like normal. Such as how many real nodes and witness nodes you can tolerate failing. Latency while one of your your main DCs are down is much higher than normal (because you now need acks from the witnesses) but you at least keep running.
Why do you think they owe you that? You think they don't cry enough when they go home to it? Of what purpose would this info help you or anyone?
What's the difference between "mandatory unpaid leave" and "laid off"?
I am also in Calgary, using a bidet. The cold water gets to you but you need lots of pressure to knock those pesky poops off.
I want to say that I appreciate your team's decision and I especially appreciate your personal effort to answer questions here in public. I'm sure it's frustrating when people second guess important decisions during a stressful time. Just want you to know I (and I'm sure many others) see your effort and appreciate it.
SBA disaster loans all require personal guarantees. So, you can't get run away from the debt by declaring business bankruptcy. You'd also have to declare personal bankruptcy.
I also suspect that germany is not attributing death to coronavirus when the dead had other disease like cancer. But i lack source as well.

It's just that the number are so off with other countries that it is too good to be true, like the dieselgate.
Well, you have to say which statements from epidemiologists we should trust, because in my country a month ago they said "nothing to see, carry on", and now they say "the end of the world is near, start digging".
It's not impossible, but it will take an enormous amount of effort to replicate. Consider the ReactOS project, which strives for compatibility with Windows Server 2003. I use it occasionally in a VM and it is roughly at par with Windows 2000/XP, but this project has been going on for over two decades (granted, the target has moved over the years; originally it targeted Windows NT 4.0 if I remember correctly). It will take years of work for ReactOS to reach compatibility with Windows 10.
Docker? No thanks.
I've been on the opposite end of this.
We're a small startup that's vc backed but cashflow positive and we're hiring a new frontend dev for our next project, full-remote globally possible. We've received a ton of applications, put a lot of effort in whittling them down to a final candidate, who could only start in April. This was a bitter pill for us to swallow but she was head-and-shoulders above the rest so we decided to keep the position open and wait for her.

Yesterday I received the mail that because of COVID-19 she wants to stay with her current employer as she doesn't want any additional uncertainty in her life at this moment. I totally understand the sentiment, but now our project timeline is hosed and I have to start the recruitment process from scratch.

Sadly our conservative budgets don't allow for hiring multiple people for this position.
Fear vs. Greed Amidst the Coronavirus Stock Market Meltdown
The Saudis Have a High-Stakes Plan to Win the Global Oil War
Tedmed Q&A with Peter Piot, world's top virologist on Covid-19 [pdf]
How out of touch with the real world can you be to think that small businesses can afford to service enough debt to survive a year? Do you know how small the margins are for many every day businesses? Jesus.
I'll see what happens when we go video over the internet and audio over phones. Thanks!
Is it feasible to do landscapes or is this more for macro distances?
My team at Apple is hiring two software engineers to work on WebKit Web Inspector.

https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200129232/web-developer...
No, this is a shady supplement peddler fabricating "research" to sell vitamins. Please keep this worthless crap off HN.
Authoritarian regimes have less control over their populace than you imagine. The War on Drugs is a laughable failure the whole world over, and China is no exception. If something as unsavory as drugs, which are easily condemned, are able to survive and continue, even under the CCP, how successful will a law against wet markets be, when the populace is in favor of it?

The issue with authoritarianism in this case, is that a fear of looking bad; weak, or ineffectual, caused mid-level party leaders to try and hide the reality of the situation, with disastrous results. (That Trumpism has lead the US in the same, disastrous direction is shameful. I don't know enough about the cause in Italy to comment about the failures there.)

It's funny you should bring up the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (assuming that's what your Europe-US ping time is referring to). We had knowledge of "an unknown virus" as early as November. That no one paid attention to it is a human failing, not a technology issue.
Simple Respiratory Mask (T-shirt fabric)
> I could have it both ways. I could lend the dollar to A, and get paid back a decade later with interest. Now I have (more than) a dollar after the decade. But that dollar is still worth 1/2000 of the year's output, so I also got paid for everyone else's gains, even when I didn't leave them the resources...

So company A paid you back your original nominal investment, which is already worth more than it was at the start, plus interest, which means that whatever they did produced a better-than-average return for them to be able to afford to repay the loan. You did something even better than just hold your money and wait without interfering—you contributed to raising the average rate of return. Resources (others' savings, as well as your own funds) were put to better use due to your wise choice of investment. Ergo, you get a higher reward than those who just passively waited for the economy to improve.
JavaScript: The first 20 years. (HOPL)
I thought cruise ships run off bunker fuel same as container ships.
As someone who went through the last downturn, this isn't looking good in the same ways. Back then I was on a contract that had just completed and as soon as the housing market collapsed all the VC money dried up, established companies did some purse-tightening which included layoffs, and there wasn't a job available to even apply to for almost 6 months.

I work in a more downturn-resistant company now and I should be alright since we were going to be working on some internal projects for the next 6 months or so anyways. But you never know. Any expenses I have at this time are being heavily scrutinized because, like last time, things are going to take 6 months to shake out.

God speed, everyone.
Mux is hiring a product designer for developer tools and video
Libmdbx 0.7 released, up to 20% faster than LMDB
I'm a (hiring!) tech director for Singularity 6, a game studio startup on the west-side of Los Angeles.

We're actively hiring. If anything, we're trying to be _more_ aggressive in our hiring. There's some concern that talent will, understandably, want to hunker down and stay with what's known and safe than risk jumping to a new job.

On the plus side, everyone's at home, so it's a bit easier to get in touch with candidates!

Our available roles are up at www.singularity.com/careers. We're all work-from-home for now, but expect folks to eventually be on-site in Los Angeles when life returns to "normal."
To be clear, this bill doesn't set aside more money to loan to small businesses.

It only did two things:

- made the existing SBA Disaster Loan program available to businesses affected by CV19

- added $20M to help w/ administration of said loan program

There were talks about actually increasing the budget of the SBA loan program by $xxB. This bill did not do that.
I think we might still be missing each other.

Everybody has to be able to see everybody. Everyone sends their updates to the leader. The leader sends those to everyone else. When the leader dies, consensus is used to elect a new leader, based on 1) who asks first, and 2) whether everyone agrees they have the latest stuff. That is the consensus moment.

It is possible for one server in a remote data center to have enough inbound bandwidth to be 100% up to date when the election happens, but be throttled for outbound traffic. It may get itself elected and then be voted out the very next time that a spike of traffic occurs. If you have a couple of these, they could spend all day swapping around leadership.

And to be crystal clear: I'm not talking hypotheticals here. I'm talking about corner cases that people have had to confront in real systems.

I brought up the case of Consul earlier. I could have a bunch of servers locally, harassing a local Consul server to avoid making higher-latency requests over a potentially constrained interface from, for instance, a branch office. You wouldn't want any of the branch offices to ever be leader unless the home office is completely offline. One of the 3 servers located there should always be online, even in a double fault situation (eg, someone is upgrading one server and restarts the wrong one).
How the Coronavirus Is Affecting Online Retailers and What You Can Do About It
How does the terminal work in Unix? Well, in 1869... https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/tty/
Descent is my favorite game of all time. Are there any modern alternatives?
ECB to launch €750bn bond-buying programme
And the novelty is? I mean, everyone fantasized about life in outer space - why would the soviets not? Or is the novelty that it is amazing how the people that wrote those magazines somehow eluded the gulags? Because the answer there presumably is that they probably did not elude the gulags.
I would argue that Apple is a luxury brand, and iPad Pro is an Apple product. If you're saying the Surface Pro can make people happy too, I'll give you that. It doesn't make me happy though.
Any JavaScript/React or Scala engineers in NYC (and some remote opportunities). Looking for a job my company dv01 has a lot of open roles. Currently doing interviews over hangouts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22618788
It's all a fancy optimization problem. Each project can be broken into tasks that take X amount of skill/experience and you have workers with varying skill. If you only have high-value workers, you'll be wasting a lot of skill/experience on the menial tasks. If you only have low-value workers then some projects will fail because none of them meet the skill thresholds.

As a company you want a diversity of workers to allow you to better optimize.
TL;DW: "closed" is not accurate, he's turning it to a place for healthcare workers to stay (so maybe if they need to quarantine, away from family), and staff will remain to run the place.

What a clever move. The alternatives would be to be empty and abandon the buildings for a few months; or to be open, maybe have some desperate people who needs rooms because they can't get home/many other reasons, but feel like a scumbag for charging them.

It also relieves staff from anxiety about their jobs..
Yes, I think that’s right. However, I think it would work better if classTheDefIsFoundIn were resolved dynamically rather than lexically. Perhaps it would have been possible to do this by modifying the descriptor protocol?
This isn't being caused by high gold prices. Gold price was higher last month and still remains far below its 1980 peak.

The thing in this article is caused by falling silver prices. Silver is down 50% this week. It's used in industry, as is gold, but the population of deranged gold hoarders is just a lot bigger, so they are propping up the price of gold somewhat. Goldbugs must be used to losing their shirts by now, since gold has been a terrible investment for more than 40 years.
It may be well-built, but my recent experience with DBeaver was a database server that went down due to aggressive background column option fetching on a table with some 4 * 10^9 entries, soaking up all available IO. Partly the fault of the dba using the tool of course, but dbeaver has these 'small' features that suddenly become very costly to use when administrating production datasets.
Glad to hear it :) If you have any feedback we'd love to hear it, as well.

We went 100% all-remote at the start of the year, and historically over 50% of over our team has always been remote. This has been a really good boon for us as we started writing down and documenting even more of our processes, etc. in a handbook: https://about.sourcegraph.com/handbook
I've never seen a hot water line to a toilet in the US. If people are doing it they only started doing it very recently - maybe for bidet options or something.
I can't imagine what you're going through, but i would suggest taking a more positive outlook on the "ghosting". Some of these companies are going through some significant challenges, and priorities and attention may have shifted to their employees. There may be a chance that IF things turn around, they'll reach out to you again.

I guess what i'm saying is stay positive and don't take it personally.
How the next recession could save lives (2019)
> Just for reference when the Nazi party...

This is an absolutely insane analogy -- not to mention grossly off-base. No one is scapegoating the Chinese people (or, even less so, Americans that happen to have Asian ancestry). Calling it the "Chinese Virus" simply points to its geographic source, i.e. Wuhan, China.
It's hard to imagine that the kinds of people who bought bitcoins as an investment have anything leftover with which to influence the gold price.
I work at Flipdish and I have to agree, best company culture I have ever experienced, great people and product.
Among countless other possibilities. From trivial like rude graffiti in the halls to criminal like direct sabotage. There are documented cases of this whenever shtf and people are forced to keep working. It's the reason that liquidators bring in scabs to replace displaced staff during store closures at announcement.