skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Amazon's new show, Making the Cut, is just another fashion show. But it's also a big Jeff Bezos flex, and a glimpse into the future of its content-to-commerce efforts. One day, Amazon will create shows built to sell every product category.
I was somewhat disappointed to find a 2020 time stamp on this article. It could've been written pretty much word for word 20 years ago, and it still would've been reshashing mostly resolved arguments. To be clear, I think the problem is with the people still making the tired arguments, not this article.
Explanation on why inflation is an old economic model that won't survive
Ask HN: Freelancer Rates in the US
Hello,

I have often been somewhat confused when it comes to hourly rates for freelancers in IT.
While it is pretty normal to charge more than 60€/h here in Europe I’m always shocked to come across postings like these from the US:

https://soshace.com/jobs/python-back-end-web-developer-remot...

This is a remote python job for an intermediate or senior developer that pays 20-30$/h. And not the first one of that kind I came across.

That would mean a freelancer makes less than half the money as compared to a 9-5.

Is this normal?
Substantia Nigra
The parent's point – though ideologically charged – is that care should be taken to ensure taxes are used for maximum public benefit, rather than being wasted on things that don't benefit the public.

The current crisis is a demonstration of why this is important.
Without a blink, McAfee.

This abomination has the ability to put more than decent computer into a miserable slug. I cannot imagine how much my client would have saved in productivity from all its employees and contractors if that thing was uninstalled.
I find gdscript almost excusable, as it has been similar enough to Python and had a fewer killer features (exported variables are available in editor, as are declared signals, etc). It's still not the ideal design decision and I often wish I was searching snippets of e.g. JavaScript. They do have C# support now!
Depending on how it's produced it's not even _a_ colour, it's three colours, or two colours, then the same two with a bit of blue. Perhaps my eyes lack a normal number of blue receptors, and a substantial amount of blue still wouldn't alter the perceived colour.
> And in the span of 3 weeks the US has spent $7,000 of every individual's future ($2T / 340M people).

You can’t really claim that. The reality in the progressively taxed US is the higher tax brackets pay the overwhelming majority of the total tax bill.

In reality, the payback of that $2T will fall on the top taxpayers. So it’s more like $10 for most Americans and $100000+ for the top percentiles. Bezos types will pay tens of millions.
Must be more than one kind of programmer.

With a little discipline, the "100-1000" memory issues in 'every program' is a vast exaggeration. I write programs routinely with 0 memory issues. Just match every allocation with a deallocation, in the same module. Be responsible. As a habit, it pretty much cures the problem. In certain programming paradigms where its possible.

So, the author and I inhabit different programming paradigms. I knew that already. Because they rely on a GC and don't mind its weighty issues, I could guess what space they are in.
I think you're assuming too much good faith on the part of the person making the argument. Sometimes people do find themselves legitimately standing in the 'obscure' camp (or even, say in academia, the 'completely artificial' camp). But it's often the case that a debator adopts a stance in one of those camps, without acknowledging where they're standing.

Sometimes it happens because of pedantry and sometimes because of incompetence, but it happens all too often.
Mastercard's FX rates are pretty competitive. Visa used to be expensive, but it seems they've caught up lately.

So in practice, the main difference is that Transferwise uses an instant "mid-market" rate at the time of the transaction, and then applies its fees (which are very reasonable on common pairs). Mastercard and Visa use a daily average rate that is not computed until the day after. In the end, Transferwise can sometimes be a little better, sometimes a little worse. They should all be within 0.1%. So, to answer your question, no it's not really worth it for you.

Only Revolut regularly beats everyone else since they don't charge any fee on top of their spot rate on most common pairs, except for the weekends.
Linux (and probably also the BSDs) goes beyond "case-sensitive": filenames are a sequence of bytes, giving special meaning only to the NUL byte (as the terminator) and the forward slash byte (as the path separator), and to the "", ".", and ".." filenames. From an implementation point of view, it's much simpler, and makes it easier to have high-performance code.

Case insensitivity adds a whole set of complications. The operating system has to either canonicalize all filenames, or preserve them (case preserving) but have an equivalence class of filenames. Canonicalization can be problematic (like ß -> SS, or perhaps ß -> ẞ? And let's not think of the dotless i), and to make things worse, can change with newer versions of the Unicode standard (as new characters and their case mappings are added); at least NTFS works around that by storing a case mapping table in the filesystem metadata, so a filesystem created by a newer Windows release can have a different case mapping (and you can have different case mappings for each filesystem in the same machine). It can also confuse software: even with a case preserving system, a program can open a file named FOO for writing, and not find it later when listing the directory (because it already existed as lowercase "foo"). This kind of thing has led to security issues in the past.
If your corona test has an error rate of 1% and you test 1 million people 3 times, what are the propabilities to get true-false-true instead of true-false-false?
Ya.

Your example makes me think of error tolerances, uncertainty, fuzz factors. Sometimes precision really matters.

FWIW, If you were reviewing my code, I'd readily adopt your method, if only to expedite convergence on a common understanding, and to signal I appreciate the input.
> They basically use the HTML pages instead of the APIs.

For Twitter in specific, isn't HTML scraping vastly preferable to using their official APIs? Otherwise you run into pretty arbitrary usage limits and missing features.

There's a small list of services where I think I prefer HTML scraping and browser piloting for a 3rd-party client: Twitter, Patreon, Facebook, LinkedIn, a few others. Services where the official APIs are underdeveloped or crippled to the point of almost uselessness.
In over 20 years being on the client side, I have yet to meet a software sales leech. I can't think of a single sales person who has tried to get me to buy their software that hasn't been helpful or responsive to my questions, regardless of if I purchased.
Show HN: Ldd as a Tree and Much More
All the same - "obscurity" is determined by context.

If you happen to be in the "obscure camp" (without knowing it) in which GC is a problem, not a solution - it sucks for you having listened to the OP.
vscode supports all of these and is free. The go language server has been buggy in the past but it's been improving quickly.
So actually this is one thing I found when embedding Lua recently in a project was that it doesn't really have a REPL. There's projects to add one, but it is not as eval-loop friendly as a scheme or a Tcl.
Show HN: c_options – A poor man's 'option' types in C
When I see people do this, I just think of the scene from the big Lebowski:

Walter Sobchak:
Am I wrong? (Belligerently arguing a bowling rules infraction at league night)

The Dude:
No you're not wrong.

Walter Sobchak:
Am I wrong?

The Dude:
You're not wrong Walter. You're just an asshole.

Walter Sobchak:
All right then.
I thought they'd made it available free-of-charge now. (That's the only reason I mentioned it here.)

That said, the only times anyone has ever asked me to work on large enough projects involving Tcl that I care if I have an IDE, I've been integrating very expensive, very proprietary software. I don't enjoy that work, my fees for that are high, and no one's ever flinched at the cost of the IDE in that context.
It does not transmit "an ID". It transmits random IDs, that cycle often.
You do see those concepts everywhere.

monads : stuff which kind of encapsulate other things, but you can still nicely manipulate both the thing and the stuff. Let's say, lists.

monoids : set of things where you kind of can add one to another. Let's say, numbers

isomorphisms : functions where there is exactly as many outputs possible than there are possible inputs. Let's say, adding 1 to a number. It's kind of useful knowing whether or not a function is an isomorphism (hello, hash collisions !).

Those concepts aren't specific to any programming language in fact, and are in fact everywhere. You just don't need to explicit them to use them, expliciting them is an option (even in Scala) which allows you to do meta manipulations on them (which Scala doesn't require, and doesn't even really suggest since none are part of the standard lib).
Kava also means coffee in one of the European languages (Lithuanian).

On top of that it is legal in a lot of pacific islands.
There is a list of reasons why they decided to go with DSL. And I like it, it's even easier to use than lua and well integrated.

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.2/getting_started/scriptin...
Instana. It helped me troubleshoot some really nasty bugs in production but it always takes me ages to find the information I'm looking for.
I just used TransferWise for the first time last night. I was legitimately impressed with their well-designed UI/UX.

My bank doesn't even have an online interface for international wire transfers, plus, their UI looks like something developed in coldfusion by an ex-myspace engineer.
"fairness to customers is non-negotiable" .... yeah, unless you run a VoIP company. In which case you get told VoIP is against TransferWise AUP and you get told your business account is suspended permanently. And yes, we are talking about a reputable long-established VoIP company here, not some fly-by-night spam operation.

Similarly, the TransferWise business account is a bit of a joke. Features that should have been there on day one were not there, and are still not there. Things like multiple signatories, the sort of thing you take for granted at a real bank.

Additionally "Borderless" is marketing hype. You can only actually deposit in a small number of the available currencies. You're better off with a real bank.

Or the half-hearted implementation of M-PESA. Using Transferwise you can only pay private individuals on M-PESA. Paying businesses on M-PESA is impossible because TransferWise are not correctly integrated.

Need I go on ?

Not saying avoid TransferWise. I'm just saying caveat emptor, look beyond the marketing hype.
Excel.

Mostly because it makes you think you can do anything, and you can. It's a rope to hang yourself with.

While Excel is a great prototyping tool, it's really not great for production use. I've seen so many financial calculations attempted on Excel that ended up creating a huge ball of spaghetti, references going all over, VBA code mixed in with DLLs, VLOOKUPS all over, sometimes $A$1 sometimes A$1 (copying behaviour), huge Rube Goldberg contraptions.

And people love it, they often don't think about maintainability or ease of understanding for newcomers.
I'm aware that it's proprietary. I thought it was also available gratis for individual developers.
A JVM Does That? [slides] [pdf]
https://colornames.org/color/dabad0
Ask HN: What’s the incentive to mark yourself as COVID-19 positive?
In the Apple-Google and Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing schemes, an infected user has to mark themselves as infected. But by that point, the user has had all the benefits the app can provide; they face nothing but potential costs, e.g. potential loss of privacy. What stops people from being “free riders” of these systems?
Is it though? I recently compared it to Revolut (during a series of large-ish transfers), and TW turned out to be quite a bit more expensive, and no faster.
Top Crypto Currencies to Buy in 2020
> this doesn’t change the nature of the psychology behind the behaviour.

The "psychology" behind the behavior isn't the problem with hoarders, it's the actual hoarding. The reason we try to change hoarders' thinking is because of the physical consequences of their hoarding - we define this as illness because of its distressful results, if it had no consequences it wouldn't be illness.

edit: I think you're accidentally using circular logic to rationalize a bit of magical thinking (person who obsessively collects garbage is ill, therefore person who obsessively collects anything is ill.) It's not the obsession that's the problem, it's the garbage and the distress.
I live in Japan and first heard of TransferWise from a friend moving to the States, but since I became a contractor last year most of my international clients use it, and it's always just worked.
TIL: CSS list-style-position property
Can Godot produce 3D games that are 10x more performant and efficient than Dreams on PS4?
C was tied to unix and C ++ was on the coattails of C. Java was actively sold to every major corporation in the early aughts. I will agree, that python came up without a platform to support it.
I've suspected for a couple of decades now that the most significant science aboard the ISS is simply living in space.

What are the impacts on individual human bodies, on equipment, crews, projects, international collaboration and cooperation.

But mostly uman-body effects so far as I can make out.

Transfer of which to terrestrial use is nonzero, but likely limited.

I've periodically requested lists of acievements in other fields -- the supposed actual intent of the station. Answers have been ... vague.

Nasa's own list:

Space Station Research Goals, NASA Research:

- Space Life and Physical Sciences

- Research and Applications

- Human Research Program

- Science Mission Directorate

- Advanced Exploration Systems

- Space Technology Mission Directorate

Similarly here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080123150641/http://pdlprod3.h...

Astronomy, planetary science, reconnaissance, and communications seem to make up the lions share of the remainder.
Not an Engineer? Because I used to find myself in meetings, trying to express why its a colossal mistake to introduce application runtime libraries into a kernel, driver or critical engine. I was on the other side of this argument at times like that - expressing the obvious and true, perhaps unkindly. And getting nowhere as I could be dismissed as a pedant or as naive (by newly graduated 20-somethings).
Minecraft has potential to develop creativity though :D
It's a hard one to quantify, but I think sometimes things like MineCraft, lego can boost cognition if used in a deliberate way and one actually takes some learnings from it.
Is it still connecting to Google Fonts?

Open Issue:

Remove Google surveillance #847

https://github.com/rust-lang/mdBook/issues/847
Can you image the government in charge of mobile phone design? The incredible innovation of Space X is primarily that it's a private company with accountability and incentives around it's customers, and of course run by someone who truly understands both the problem and the evolving technology.
I had a similar thought while reading this article.

A case that the article itself is "100% correct but [missing] the point" can also be made. Perhaps the speaker nitpicking garbage collectors works in a problem space prone to dangling references, which would make a "pedantic" point actually very relevant, at least to that speaker. Shutting that person down isn't helpful to that person, though perhaps in context a large number of other people would rather stay on topic.

Context and empathy are helpful. In most cases, clarification of context, especially through follow-up questions, can keep conversation healthy.
In Norway when a bank advertises 0 transaction fees they skip roughly 1.8% that Visa charges for doing currency exchanges.
I am embarrassed by too much competition. Honestly, although LearnObit is the most promising of all similar products.
I believe that you're right about why languages aren't chosen, but miss the alternative explanation. Languages are chosen for speed of deployment and ease of use, almost nothing else. From the dawn of time, when C and Unix beat out Lisp, all the way to modern JavaScript, the tool that solves a given set of problem quickest and easiest wins regardless of 'merit'. Worse is better, all the way down.
Microsoft Access. I think the main problem is I keep expecting it to behave like a normal database. Perhaps if you go in without those expectations you'll have a better time? I don't know, and hopefully I'll never have to find out.

When I had to work with it on a semi-regular basis I kept this list of WTFs that I'd add to each time I finished tearing my hair out trying to fix some seemingly simple thing https://github.com/bourbonspecial/AccessFail/blob/master/why...
Socratic method is not about two equals having discussion where both have different ideas. It is about one person (teacher) questioning another persons ideas. It is fundamentally unequal methodology.
Life may not be the only process that works counter-entropy. There are two lines of thinking emerging that the principles we see so clearly in life may be more general and appear in abiotic processes as well... that physical systems "evolve" to transform available energy gradients into a localized increase in complexity. So evolution in a general sense is more fundamental than life, and inevitably eventually leads toward processes complex enough to be called "life".

One comes from the work of Jeremy England[1], who has published some excellent papers showing what he calls 'dissipation-driven adaptation', natural selection working on phsyical and pre-biological systems. Englands work is really eye-opening and I have feeling if he keeps it up he may be a likely candidate for a Nobel in physics or biology some day.

The other line comes from Adrian Bejan's formulation of what he calls the "constructal law"[2]. This describes some specific patterns according to which physical systems evolve to dissipate energy more efficiently. It seems to me that Bejan is a bit under-appreciated in academia, although apparently people have found quite a few practical applications of his ideas.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_England

[2] https://constructallaw.com/
Exactly. I'd love something that works better but gave up on Libre/Open officer after sending people's dozens of docs that opened looking a complete mess.
There was recently a post on HN about a GIMP fork called glimpse which aims to improve UI/UX: https://github.com/glimpse-editor/Glimpse or project page at https://glimpse-editor.org/
Interactive Brokers have quite low fx fees and ability to fund/withdraw in many currencies. Problem is it takes a while a to open an account and to clear funds.
I'm living in Switzerland, and none of the EU countries would offer enough salary to be competitive, so the only country left would be the USA. But the US remote jobs are mostly limited to US citizens.

Maybe look into swiss companies, probably the only market for you in Europe paying enough. Possibly after corona, there will be more remote jobs because before there weren't many.
Same in Sweden, UK, parts of central Europe and large parts of eastern Europe. This includes everything from wild mushroom and berries to wild game. In the years right after even milk had increased radiation levels sometimes going beyond acceptable standards.

This is the fallout map, please tell me how that is "the definition of local" https://www.unscear.org/docs/JfigXI.pdf
Looks like the website (and probably docs) was updated. Looks good imo.
That might be the primary distinction between the two.
>I think you're assuming too much good faith on the part of the person making the argument.

Naturally. I subscribe to the principle of charity and I practice it.

If you are just using me as a pawn in your argument, shame on you.
Witcher 3
Personally I use Bitcoin to transfer money to my home country monthly. It's not much, around 1000-1500 euro (hopefully for just one more month), and it's to pay my credit card debt back home. It's very convenient, fast, and I get the best market price for my euros. Using Transferwise is out of the question since my homeland uses an artificial price for the dollar, and thus if I were to use them I'd lose on about 25% of my country's currency.
Very nice, thank you for sharing this!

To try it with GnuCOBOL, compile it with:

$ cobc -F -x game-of-life.cob

The "-F" switch instructs GnuCOBOL to use so-called free format of the source code, and "-x" builds an executable program, "game-of-life", which you can run with:

$ ./game-of-life

Use Ctrl-c to interrupt it.

A major attraction of COBOL is the ability to quickly construct user interfaces for efficient entry and processing of records.
I'm with you. My org tries to do so many things with excel, despite that fact that is fails and breaks on us ever single day. What is worse, is that we use excel sheets and a shared folder to monitor projects, tasks, and even track casework. I hate it so much.
United, Delta Weigh Selling Miles Early to Raise Cash in Coronavirus Crisis
Inkscape 1.0 Release Candidate
In reality, internalised or not, TransferWise makes lot of money in fees.
On InteractiveBrokers for example, you pay +/- 2.33 USD in total to convert 100'000 USD to EUR (+ 1 USD extra for withdrawal if you already did one this month).

TransferWise charges end-user 900 USD + spread for the same operation, which is rather comical when you see their ads "banks are scamming you"
Like anything else you can find all ranges offered and all ranges accepted.
I thought the exact opposite was the norm, with higher rates in US companies than UK/europe.

Senior level rates in US range from 100-300/hr. I know it's a big range, but it comes down to speed, creativity, references, portfolio, fit for the project, availability.

As far as the half the money as a 9-5, it's actually the other way around-- as a freelancer, you need more money to compensate for things like insurance, taxes, risk that come with being an independent/freelancer. So they say to match a 75k salary, you need approximately 150/hr.
Release notes are being drafted here: https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/1.0
Awesome. I wonder how much control he has over the output. I assume it's easy for him to hit min or max, but can he be accurate in the middle?
Developing GraphQL APIs with Java Spring Boot and Postgres or MySQL
The Unity game engine. Backwards compatibility is low; documentation is scant or out-dated; error messages are misleading or opaque; stack traces for crashes are sometimes impossible to reason about.
SoftBank Expects Nearly $17B Loss on Tech-Focused Vision Fund
Tesla don't need one of these because they're starting out "with driver" for FSD. Like they do for AutoPilot, the driver is expected to take control if the vehicle is doing something unexpected.
> Over the last year or so it seems like TransferWise has rapidly come onto the scene

They've also increased some of the fees over the last year
People who write robust, performant, maintainable systems that don’t collapse under their own weight are talented engineers.

Most scrapers including this one lack these characteristics.
Framing this as an either/or choice (surrender some privacy or the elderly die) is a reductio ad absurdum.

There are easier and less blatantly intrusive ways of achieving 80% or 90% of the mitigation, like for example a combination of nonstop education of the public and issuing tickets for breaking social distancing rules as is being done in some places.

After the 9/11 attacks, Americans passively accepted huge intrusions on privacy that have still not been rolled back, 19 years later.

We should be very careful what we wish for. This tracking thing is a very slippery slope.