skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It didn't take me long to get in the habit of saying “Next slide, #18” or whatever as I moved through the talk. If you try this, be sure to put numbers on the slides!

Slide numbers are an atrocious skeumorphism. I've given several presentations where I click several times to advance the state of a conceptual "slide," before it eventually moves to the next conceptual slide.

Some examples:

1. First show a misconception, discuss it, click strike out the misconception and show the truth.

2. Freeze-frames in an animation: each click advances to the next portion. Sometimes you'll want to breeze through on the first pass, and then jump around to highlight different features.

3. Slides with complex information. Gray out the whole thing but for one piece. each click grays out the previous focus and brings the next section into focus. Finally, show the entire slide in its full glory.

4. This one's big. Sometimes I share my screen, not some dinky slides, to show off an interactive interface.

The author suggests that humans should communicate through external channels, reduplicating the effort of transmitting presentation materials. Furthermore, this wastes valuable speaker time and effort on communicating slide numbers, and similarly, distracts audience members as they fidget with their interface to stay in sync. To what end?

> The audience can see the speaker.

Yeah, okay. That's legit. But, for example, Zoom allows the audience to change their view. If they dislike the disembodied voice, they can arrange their views to make the speaker's face visible in addition to the shared screen. If they want to be immersed in your slides, they can do that, too. Other tools allow for a picture-in-picture mode (which might require you to tweak your presentation; annoying IMO).
I once worked at a company where the bulb in the projector burnt out. For some reason that bulb became a weird symbol of thrift so the bulb was never replaced.

The company would do a summary of the financials for the year for the employees. Since there was no projector the president rounded up all the whiteboards, uncapped a marker and just started writing. Since he was intimately familiar with the numbers he could talk as he wrote about what what they meant with respect to what was happening both inside the company and in the external business environment the company existed in. It was the best presentation of that type I had ever experienced.

So not just maths and physics...
Not exactly, Unreal the single player game is also from 1998.

If you meant Unreal Tournament, it was released November 22nd 1999, just a few days before Quake 3 Arena that was released on December 2nd 1999. UT was also mostly a multiplayer arena type game like q3a. It was a really hyped up battle of giants back then between those two. Good times.

EDIT: corrected release dates after checking wikipedia
The ,.; line endings are a PITA when you refactor. I've heard them referred to as 'ant turd tokens'. It's a minor nitpick though, I still like Erlang a lot.
I'm on the east coast, but I'm participating in a mutual aid network that does exactly this kind of thing. Try googling your local branch of the Democratic Socialists of America (I think you're in Silicon Valley DSA's territory). Each chapter is independent and not great at communication with each other, but I found a web page that said SV DSA is doing grocery delivery mutual aid for elevated risk people. I don't want to post it here because I don't want them to get trolled, but it's easily to google.

I only mentioned DSA because I'm member of the national org, but there are probably many other organizations doing similar work. Please be safe and stay healthy! Good luck!

Edit: Just want to emphasize to people in a similar situation, that the key words to search for are "Mutual Aid" on google, facebook, and twitter if you don't know someone already connected to an organization. Many of these orgs are also looking for volunteers.
What I have to comment?
We know what is the death rate in Germany, France, Spain, Italy, South Korea. 1500 cases is ridiculously low to take any conclusion, they are far behind the curve.
Letting masks sell for $25 a pop so that companies are incentivized to build infrastructure to churn them out at an optimal rate 6 months from now just doesn't seem like a realistic solution
To any other non-amazon stores out there: have toilet paper in stock and I'll give it a try!
I tried it too and it wasn't the best. But I have a general feeling it was because those particular games weren't really well optimized for the phone. Then again, they were a it more complex than the other games on the phone at the time... but alas.

I'm not sure if it would have grown into a competitor either way. But some people definitely tried to - Kongregate at one point built an app specifically for mobile flash games. Naturally google took it down (you aren't allowed to host 'app stores' on the 'app store'). But it had quite a few downloads. That's just for something on the app store, not directly on a website, but I think the point is that maybe if things had gone a bit differently it might have been more competitive.

For PWAs, yeah, today, they definitely are, but it's taken a long time for them to come that way.

Hope your having a good day.
Best Buy's ecommerce site is great; they don't have the absurd levels of info overload and upselling of a typical Amazon page.

In Canada, Amazon's electronics offerings are rife with awful Chinese brands sold by dropshippers. Amazon seemingly doesn't carry any of the inventory themselves unless it's a Fire tablet or Echo.

It's actually a big relief to shop online via at a proper outlet (even Walmart.ca is more reliable) than through the Bezos flea market.
Yeah, this "oh wow, look at that" reaction to the particular media personalities in the clip is borderline hilarious.
This article is good, but to go a bit deeper, it seems like part of the problem is ultimately capitalism or the commercial nature of the modern internet. As long as there are these incredible incentives to game the system, people are going to do so. And those same incentives apply to Google, since they are advertising driven too. They used to fight more against this stuff, but I think as they've realized they get their cut either way, they're less inclined to do so. And even if they were so inclined, it's sort of asking them hold back the ocean in my view, because the incentives are so stacked against them.
Sounds like League of Legends to me.

(Edit: at the casual level)
Yep.

Say I want a recipe. A tried and true delicious recipe. Can I search and just find a recipe? Nope. Through the magic of SEO, I now have to scroll through 15 paragraphs of somebody's life story before being able to examine the time and ingredients.

How much time and energy was wasted on building "tag" systems? All those fun little term link clouds that sites used to have. I know I wasted time on it. I had something that would scan for words and their synonyms and tag articles, a rescan feature for tags that got added after the fact, and various other utilities.
I agree with you. Erlang is not as hard as people make it out to be. However...

Look at this piece of code: https://github.com/erlang/rebar3/blob/master/src/r3.erl#L32-...

In this example the keyword "end" ends with "", ";", and "." all within 6 lines of each other.

In this example the keyword "ok" ends with "" and ";".

In this example `Self` "exclamation marks" `Ref`.

All of this is easily understood with some experience but you have to admit that `erlang.send(Self, Ref)` is much more easily understood than some symbol that has to be googled. And consider this, a junior dev is going to be overwhelmed with all the syntactic sugar. They're just learning how to define and call functions.

All of these issues matter if your goal is to on-board as many hobbyists and juniors as possible. (Which shouldn't be the goal of every language).

I'm very happy with Erlang. I don't want it to change.
Especially since they have data on the entire Uber user base.
No, it isn’t an exaggeration. They ceded one particular competency, systems administrator, and now pay cloud providers to do it instead. The job didn’t go anywhere. Capacity planning, change management, peering, supply chain management, all of that stuff is still happening, they just willingly tapped out of it and took another job (probably because the DevOps people came in with a slide deck and hand waved them out of a job at the SVP level).

That is not evolution (nor an indictment of those people, importantly). The side effect, which literally nobody is paying attention to, is a future where computing as a concept is concentrating on a few major companies. Every every every every single person who says “why would I buy a rack? There’s AWS” is furthering that outcome.
https://archive.md/tXRs6
There is a huge amount of evidence of mathematics undergraduates using interactive provers, which they weren't doing before. There are very few profs using any interactive prover, because currently these things offer nothing useful to a prof. However, if more and more undergraduates adopt software like this, or at least try it and realise that it's not scary, then within ten years there will be profs using it. We're playing the long game. We need to make tools for the profs, like automation that can check tedious lemmas, or a database of theorem statements which is searchable by a mathematician who doesn't know how to use the software. These are some of the goals Tom Hales is targetting with his FABSTRACTS project. But it will take time. All I know is that the software is now ready to do modern mathematics.
You talk as if that's a bad thing.

As a developer I don't want to wade into the details of systems I'm using, I want to spend my time writing code that solves the business problems I'm tasked with solving.

If there is a system that allows me to do that by abstracting away the details I don't care about, why wouldn't I use that system?
> How can you even claim an "average death rate" when you don't even know how many people were infected, had mild symptoms, and recovered without reporting it to anyone?

We can either throw our hands up and give up or we can do the best with what we have. So, what percentage of cases do you think are unconfirmed? You can adjust my math with that and see what those rates are. Those numbers still stay scary unless you assume a 90% unconfirmed rate, at which it equalizes for young people compared to the flu but is still 10x or more for some age groups. The point being, even accounting for underreporting this is still much more deadly and allowing it to spread like the flu would result in many more deaths.

I haven't seen any reliable numbers given about the underreporting rate, so if you have seen any that would be interesting!
Coronavirus school closures to continue in WA through end of year
You can now deepfake yourself into a celebrity with just a few clicks
I'm more sympathetic to the mainstream usage. People are (attempting to) use an abstraction: a "container" is an isolated process runtime environment without virtualization overhead. That abstraction seems useful to me. Ideally it would be usable without too much leakiness, in which case its users would not need to be aware of implementation details like cgroups and namespaces. In practice, all abstractions are leaky to some degree and effective use of an abstraction often eventually requires a more sophisticated understanding of the details beneath the veil of the abstraction. But that doesn't mean the abstraction is totally useless or completely a mirage or anything, it's just a leaky abstraction like all others.

If you say that a container is not a first class object but cgroups and namespaces are, I can just as easily say that cgroups and namespaces aren't first class objects, they are just terms people use to describe a combination of system calls. It's just abstractions with different amounts of leakage the whole way down.
Fair. In some years the 'effectiveness' (I have no idea how this is measured) is as low as 25%, when they 'guess wrong' as to what the prevalent strains might be.

However, it can also reduce symptoms. Shorten the flu, if not eliminate it. All of these things can make a difference at the margins; make a vulnerable person merely sick instead of deadly sick.

And most importantly for those vulnerable folks at the highest risk of dying, the vaccine makes them less likely to come in contact with someone who spreads the flu to them in the first place.
Totally agree with the question. _Maybe_ the discredited journalists get less prominent as they are discredited, but I wonder the same as you asked.
I mean we knew before the pandemic that Fox News has zero credibility. We knew that the President has zero credibility. We will soon see that austerity promoting economists never had credibility either. We will see UBI enabling a massive amount of entrepreneurship. We know all of these things and we knew them before too. Some people refuse to understand these things because their job And perhaps identity depends on not understanding it.
I'll be downvote for this but couldn't you say the same thing about this epidemic of unprofitable, over-valued "unicorns" propped up by VC money?

"The answer, I realized, is that they didn't think they could get caught. They didn't realize there was any danger in making false predictions. These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what they said."
You run multiple instances, one per CPU core.
One thing that’s weird about target is that they fulfill from stores. Usually when we get a shady packaging experience it’s shipping from a Target store from some unusual place.
Most apps that are not Google or Facebook owned:
Twitter, Uber, TripAdvisor, AccuWeather etc
This is a great post but I want to say that I feel there's space for both. IMO a DevOps Engineer would sit between the sysadmin/network folks and the developers who wants to be users of a system.

In my current gig we've moved from the DevOps department to the Platform department as it aligns more with what we are trying to provide. A Platform for developers.

That said we essentially can speak sysadmin and can speak developers. We trust sysadmins with network, linux image and more specialist topics. We make tools for both sides and try to make them work together often sitting in the middle and negotiating.
Desktop support is now in PR: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-react-sdk/pull/4348
Why 99% of Your Email Doesn’t Matter
That the media have (with some regularity) promoted the most catastrophic predictions, predictions that were subsequently falsified, is not exactly news.
Sure, but the comment I was replying to was suggesting that in 10 weeks, 300 million Americans would be infected... that is 91% of the population of the United States. We aren't going to hit that number.
Google used to respect search operators, and dramatically tone down query optimization for queries that contained operators. As I've written elsewhere, I suspect learn-to-rank is to blame[0], by optimizing ranking for generic sloppy queries despite your query being very focused.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22747889
Could the original 4SQ have become the universal loyalty card?
I've had trouble getting into it because the ergonomics are so incredibly, wonderfully, art-project level rough.

For example:

$ erl
Erlang/OTP 20 [erts-9.2] [source] [64-bit] [smp:8:8]
[ds:8:8:10] [async-threads:10] [kernel-poll:false]

Eshell V9.2 (abort with ^G)
1> 2 + 2
1> 2 + 2.
* 2: syntax error before: 2
1> 2 + 2.
4

Note the trailing whitespace(!) after the last `2 + 2. `, necessary for the result to be printed.

I was coming from Haskell which has its own very serious tooling and ergonomics problems. Trying Erlang made me realize things could be even worse. My internal model in my head of language designers/promoters is COMPLETELY wrong, I have absolutely no idea how people could spend time promoting languages with such strange tooling to a general audience with any expectation that it will work.[1]

[1] Not to say that these languages/tools aren't awesome. Trailing whitespace matters semantically absolutely not at all. But if you're trying to promote a language with meaningful trailing REPL whitespace to a general 2020 audience there is some terrible mismatch between your expectations and your actual chance of success.
Yes there is: Pray for a friggen miracle. Atheists, it's worth a try in case there is a %0.00001 chance you are wrong.
Of course not. It implements much (not all!) of the available semantics of CSP, but does so embedded in the C language with function calls and macros. Though macros can do truly disturbing things in C, these are not enough to truly implement the syntax of CSP.
Matthias Poehm essentially made this his personal brand: http://www.anti-powerpoint-party.com/
Even on higher difficulty levels - I think except for the highest - the classics aren't hard. Modern games have more timing mechanics, more verticality, more methods of movement or control to master. I'd gather most middle of the road FPS players these days could breeze through the hardest modes of Doom and Doom 2.

I think they were difficult at the time because they were so novel. Modern games are novel in different ways and challenging in that novelty. Doom feels somewhat more "solved".
Me: It's definitely an electron app.

Me: - visits github -

Github: "Official electron build of draw.io - https://www.draw.io"

Me: Yep.
At a previous job, I used a tool that really gave a sense of presence that Zoom/Discord/Skype, etc, do not. I wish they had the right sort of payment model for it, but I'd look at Sococo (https://www.sococo.com/). I think something like this would be key to feeling like you are talking to humans and not, well, playing a computer game.

I've been looking for alternatives. There's one called Remo (https://remo.co/) that's similar, but seems to have a large group and tables for four people at the same time, so I don't think it'll fit your needs.

This one (https://github.com/capnmidnight/lozya) just showed up here on HN the other day, and is a new project to add a sense of presence on top of Jitsi.

There are also, apparently, Avatar Chat worlds, in 2D and 3D, and they might be worth trying, but it does look like it could really be distracting as it appears more game oriented than socialization oriented.
JS & python both have:

'//'.split('/') => [ '', '', '' ]
'/'.split('/') => [ '', '' ]
'',split('/') => [ '' ]

so they indeed produce what parent expected.
Amazon was sold out of bakers yeast as were the local grocery stores. I was able to order from a specialty place. The order was delivered 2 days later. The price was very reasonable.

For certain things, I am seeing some serious prices. People are selling cotton masks 4 for $25. That seems a little steep given that a box of N95 masks went for $6 before this.

I just ordered parts for building a new computer. I had to order from 4 different places as Amazon did not have half of the items in stock. There are definitely some supply chain issues.
I’ve been sorting reddit comments by controversial. There’s a lot of junk sure, but it’s you also get away from people parroting the standard lines and sometimes get some unique insight.
I shared this with a coworker, who discovered that it dumps information about branches that don't exist anymore. This comment's alternate command doesn't list deleted branches:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22797911

And for those wondering "deleted branches?", check the git-gc man page for gc.reflogexpire (default 90 days) and gc.reflogexpireunreachable (default 30 days).
Certainly not. Mechanically repeating a stock criticism does. This one is currently the internet's cliché way to dismiss a study.

Generic discussion is shallow discussion.
...people who actually work in politics...

On its face, this could be hundreds of thousands of people. All manner of legislative staffing, bureaucracy, public relations, media content production, etc. could be considered "in politics", when viewed through a hazy enough lens. As you say, none of these people admit knowledge of the kayfabe. OTOH, the lobbyists who actually write the bills and pull the strings? That's a much smaller group and yeah, they know it's largely kayfabe.

As a relatively recent example, much has been made of the current president's suitability as "commander-in-chief" (or lack thereof). One might have had the impression that there was a disagreement over how much military power he should command. Yet, somehow both parties in both houses of Congress agreed that he should get $740B in military spending rather than the $600B he requested.
Early SEO efforts were actually good for the web. They forced you to make your content easier to find and more accessible.

But then that became the table stakes, and people had to start resorting to dirtier tactics. Or just more annoying ones.

During this shelter in place period, I've been reading a lot more recipes online. Every one of them starts with the person's life story. And I get it, maybe how that recipe came to exist is interesting. But at least put a link right at the top that says "skip to recipe" or something. Sometimes I want to read the story, sometimes not. Make it easy for me skip!

I put a recipe on my own website, it's literally a .txt file with just the recipe, ingredients right at the top. I posted a picture of the final product on the internet recently, and a friend asked for the recipe, so I sent him the link.

He replied "the format and delivery method of this is almost more satisfying than the recipe itself".

That's how I know we've gone too far in SEO.
That’s essentially the basis of modal studies. Learning the theory behind modes and how to play within them gets you pretty far fast.
I find this particular example particularly gross. Recipe's are no doubt a heavily searched category. Why does google allow pure CPM hacking garbage websites to win the top spots? does it have to do with the google ads from top to bottom?
This is sooo true, every time i look for a recipe online it's all i ever see.
SEO combined with Amazon (and other) referral revenue opportunities. Combined with human psychology and ignorance outside of the tech community of the wiles of online marketing. Honestly Hacker News is one of the few sources I trust nowadays, and that is of course not implicit. There is a lot of misinformation and a lot of reporting about reporting. A lot of hyperbolic and misleading headlines. Stay safe out there.
Tips for Founders Sales: Lessons from Starting Two B2B Startups
That's awesome! Maintaining the same project over 15 years, having gone through many transformations, has got to be an incredibly valuable experience.

I always try new problems with new technologies, but I can see the benefits of sticking to one problem over and over.
Agreed. The post feels a bit pedantic; I don't know any dev doing "cool things" with the underlying namespaces/cgroups. They're just using Docker. De-mystifying containers has value, but so does the abstraction.
Oddly enough, today I finally had to give my mobile number to paypal - apparently due to incoming EU PSD2 regulations. I was also automatically signed up to paypal "one touch", where my device is now able to make transactions with no need for a password. Another thing I have to turn off.