skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Customers ask for all sorts of stupid crap that adds up to complexity.

Why as a software developer would I have an issue with that? Every stupid thing they ask for is more money in my pocket.
I thought that "Out of the Tar Pit" (Moseley & Marks, 2006) classified complexity excellently:

> Essential Complexity is inherent in, and the essence of, the problem (as seen by the users).

> Accidental Complexity is all the rest — complexity with which the development team would not have to deal in the ideal world (e.g. complexity arising from performance issues and from suboptimal language and infrastructure).

> ...

> For example — according to the terminology we shall use in this paper — bits, bytes, transistors, electricity and computers themselves are not in any way essential (because they have nothing to do with the users’ problem).

---

You can't reduce essential complexity without sacrificing your ability to solve the problem. (Of course, this isn't to say it's never a valid way to meet a deadline.)

Reducing accidental complexity is a noble cause though, but as an engineer, it can be difficult. It sometimes precludes using shiny new technology, or even making it yourself. Maybe the user's problem can be solved with an off-the-shelf solution. Or maybe you don't need a full website and database because a spreadsheet will suffice.
Any USB-C hub, I'm using an official Apple one. It's a well documented issue.
Still, I wish you could see specific years vs this year. For instance there were fewer deaths in Michigan in March of 2020 than in 2019, but I'm sure that would be different if you averaged it over the course of four years.
I agree generally that at some point we will cross the line where the economic and financial harm will outweigh the harm from Covid-19. (The trick is know when that line is reached. Apparently the EPA values a human life at about $7m. Other calculation come to about $130k/year.)

Couple of point (all my opinions):

1. Without the "hoaxers" and deniers we would be able to trust the people to "observ[e][...] sanitization & social distancing measures". To some extend the strict measures are necessary due to those groups.

2. Concussions are not contagious, so the NFL players are making decisions about their own health only. With Covid-19 you take responsibility for _other_ people.

3. The fact that one can be financially ruined this way points to deeper problems in society that should be fixed. Rather than forcing sick people back to work and putting the ethical dilemma of working vs. the safety of others on them, we should support those in need.
I had that exact problem, I had to settle for a secured credit card which wasnt the best experience.. $1000 security deposit and fees.

I'd could talk more in depth if you would like!
TV is still important, and the shows you mention are big.

But it's very far from how things were, say 20 years ago.

An interesting question is what the zeitgeist is now? I have two potential answers:

1. Nothing. The worlds has diversified on the net, and most people focus on their own smaller interests.

2. In terms of what everyone is talking and thinking about, my best answer is, unfortunately, Donald J Trump.
I've never been an avid gamer, more of a casual one, but I am so glad I played Deus Ex: Human Revolutions all the way through. It didn't feel like a game, more like experiencing an interactive sci-fi book. The story, the settings, the _music_, absolutely fantastic. I still sometimes listen to the soundtrack when doing work (it is available in Spotify).

I would encourage sci-fi fans to give it a try, you can pick it up for cheap nowadays and you won't need top hw to play it (although it won't hurt either).

Edit:

Then entire soundtrack is also on YT [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyG6YMLEWus
ACSL is indeed a FSL. Making a standard FSL is a nigh impossible since it should encompass every programming language and its specific features.

For example, ACSL has built-in ways to talk about the side effects in C, labels, the validity of pointers, etc. and the semantic of those elements is tied to the C standard.

On the other hand, the syntax of ACSL is heavily inspired from JML (FSL for Java) which is pretty popular. So if you know JML, it's easy to learn ACSL (you just have to learn C-specific features)
Apple is pretty unsuccessful at most _software_ that isn't a commodity. They're a hardware and marketing company at their core. All the actual value from software on their platform comes from 3rd party providers, whether that's apps or SaaS.

The easiest point to make on this is that Apple has botched all of their SaaS offerings not related to content. And their office applications are borderline unusable for anything aside from education or the content industry. Everyone adopts either Google Suite or Microsoft Office (or a combo) depending on their use case.

It's highly arguable that Apple "empowers" people with software given that everybody uses software on top of their platform not provided by Apple.
Orbital mechanics
I reported the same bug about four years ago, with exactly the same outcome.
From your link :

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

I don't know what constitutes a good hacker, exactly, but I thought it was interesting.

Having read your comments before I read the article I was expecting something much more simple.
Something is either missing or just isn't accurate in the OPs description. The likelihood of this happening is extremely remote at best but frankly IMO highly improbable period. I honestly don't believe this happened as described, but that isn't to say surprise bills don't exist on all the cloud providers. So I could see maybe the OP got a $500 bill unexpectedly, but most likely because someone found/stole an old account credential out of a public git repository (or similar) and the OP just didn't realize/know it. That makes a ton more sense and I have seen it happen quite a few times, it is an honest but costly mistake. If that is the case though, usually AWS is wiling to work with you if you just talk to them and are honest. So I am not saying the OP didn't necessarily get a surprise bill but maybe he/she is misunderstanding what happened or is just anti-AWS for whatever reason and is trying to make some point.

I have been using AWS almost since the public release and I have had a few clients who hit hard times and didn't pay their AWS invoice timely over the years, a few more clients where things went from free to need to pay and they didn't. Each of them had services terminated after 30 to 60 days max, usually a smaller dollar amount AWS will let go for ~2 months but you will have received numerous emails from them first before they will terminate the account. Also, if you contact AWS and ask for a payment extension they are also usually pretty decent about it, but no, they wouldn't allow an unpaid instance to run for years. If by some chance this happened (highly doubt it) it could be a software error on AWS's side and raising it to AWS would likely result in them forgiving the bill and fixing the issue because they don't want to miss out of revenue either.

My last soap box point, AWS is very clear you are responsible for the instance/service termination to avoid charges, so is Azure and GCP for that matter. They all are clear on how it works, you are responsible for reading the information and complying with the rules. IME all the cloud provides give you some latitude on payments though because if they were too aggressive with account suspensions/terminations they could get smacked for that as well, possibly even sued over lost revenue etc, so they have significant warnings/out reach which document their attempts too contact you and resolve it before they terminate to avoid that scenario.
Reflecting on that thread, this quote springs to mind

“A fool can throw a stone in a pond that 100 wise men can not get out”

Not sure we even ought to try.
Those are the graphs we really need.

Especially when you consider things like the dramatic drop in reported mortality from things like heart disease the last few months according to the preliminary data.

But preliminary data isn't very good quality ever, so it is hard to tell how much of that is just bad data, how much is coronavirus killing people that were going to die in only weeks anyway, and how much is misreporting.

But in six months or so, when the data start to settle down, we will find out which direction we are miscounting in. (Clearly we are miscounting in both directions by significant amounts, but it's hard to tell the comparative magnitude)
> If so, then they would be well on the way to herd immunity and, thus, essentially at the end new cases and the end of the epidemic.

Only, there's no evidence that folks who recover from COVID are immune. Herd immunity might never come, so lockdowns remain beneficial in reducing hospital crowding.

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0...
That kind of goes without saying, doesn't it?

The buck has to stop somewhere. If Jobs did not drive the company that way, you could have 100k people under him doing that stuff and it wouldn't be readily apparent. I mean, look at the slow decline of the company after he left the first time, as they chased more and more options for users.

He's also notorious (any of his bios will show this) at direct and obsessive involvement in product and even store design.
Netflix doesn't have the problem because they never had ads. Hulu likely signed a deal with ABC (or the production company who make the shows) for those three shows that still have ads before they had the idea to go commercial free. Changing a deal that had a provision about ads is expensive.

Hulu was a joint venture between several networks. There are three old shows that still have commercials due to old contracts that were made before they switched to the new business model.

Given TV deals are complicated (for example, the networks likely have revenue deals with production companies), its not worth a huge renegotiation.
Thanks for sharing - clear as mud now! ;)
I thought about it. I have a Quest. I just don’t think the tech is there yet

Not enough ppl (if anyone at all) online. The avatars are hilariously bad, but I get why they exist.

Maybe in 5-10 years
What is weird is that those figure were always reported in a lot of countries, including 24 countries of Europe with https://www.euromomo.eu/ .

I live in France where the statistics service does an accelerated counting since the beginning of the pandemic to publish a partial count of the death certificates faster than usual. It is published every week with the number of people diagnosed, and deaths in hospitals, etc.
Show HN:Jobboard to find companies hiring during covid19-Looking for suggestions
> hyper-competitive culture of major coastal metro areas of the US

I agree with the rest of your comment so I don't want to generally detract, but I think the qualification of major coastal metro areas includes a lot of places where your comment doesn't apply and excludes a lot of others (e.g. the upper Midwest).

I think there are aspects where major coastal metros are outliers, but grade school and public university quality isn't one of them.
Did anyone in Santa Clara County get Covid-19?
>>> That's why I think that any open source project that gets too popular will have to have a cloud vendor strategy,

This.

In fact sadly one of the marks of a successful OSS project is ability to pay yourself, and even perhaps commercial success. In Linus' day it was enough to have a whip round online to buy a faster Pentium machine, but these days it's a foundation and cloud offering.
Most people come around and realize that going to bars, where the common theme is selling you alcohol, might have results slightly different than polite society.
I don't think VR is any better than just video chat for socializing, and nobody has it, including you.

I have a VR rig but never use it (because it requires me to reboot into Windows) and the vast majority of my friends don't have one.

Maybe in a decade if most people have something and cross-platform works well I could see it being compelling.
Seems you're misinterpreting my comment. Though I'm not sure how, considering I literally wrote at the end that selecting for it can make sense

As I said before, the iq test mainly measures how much the participant is motivated... Or so many other reasons which are loosely correlated with professional success such as enjoying puzzles and figuring things out etc.

It just doesn't say anything about "intelligence", and measuring that is pointless, because it's not even possible to clearly define it... like so many terms, there are as many definitions for it as there are people in the room.

But even if you use the official definition of it being the ability to apply knowledge I'd still disagree with the usual iq tests measuring that.
They're puzzles at best and measuring how someone can apply knowledge is not that easy to standardize.
This idea basically proposes to add one bit to the 32 bit addresses, i.e. use 33 bits. The notation is irrelevant, the money quote is

> We need to have a mark, a flag, in the ip packet header

You needed to end this bit also everywhere else -- in routing tables, etc. It is quite obvious that this "minor change" is actually quite a major change, in a world where a 33bit address requires 5 bytes to store, not only 4 bytes.
What I had meant was that when using vim configured with mouse=a, selecting with the mouse while holding down the Alt key would disable the terminal emulator's mouse reporting and allow the selection to be copied to the system clipboard.

But actually this depends entirely on the terminal emulator. The Alt/Option key works with the default preferences for iTerm2 on MacOS, but with GNOME terminal I reproduced the same behavior using Shift instead.
Dump them, those clients are not the ones you want :)

Ps. Raising prices mostly helps
Show HN: Use WebUSB to transfert music to MiniDisc player
There is snowflake's chance in hell libraries would be legal if introduced now. The only reason we have them, is they were grandfathered in from times with less corporate power.
If I understand you correctly, this is exactly the procedure that Stanford's CovidWatch is implementing.

https://www.covid-watch.org/article#contactTracing

They are pushing for a standard protocol that incorporates this mechanism. It may or may not be compatible with the joint effort of Google and Apple, and with Singapore's under-development BlueTrace standard.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlueTrace
The only time this quote seems to be used is on blogs and forums when people are trying to convince others to stay in the Mormon church. Is that what you're quoting or is there some other origin to this phrase?
Yeah, you can just have a couple of config files and spin up a shell that auto-installs everything. The packages are all on your system, so the next time you start the shell, nothing has to be downloaded, but they're not installed globally, and a you can do a garbage collection command at any time to clean up everything.

When I first started using NixOS I had a huge list of globally installed packages, but that has become smaller and smaller over time. For instance, my main browser is Firefox, which is installed globally, but if I need to use Chrome, then it gets fired up in a temporary shell.
Nothing about technically correct, just pointing out that I thought they had misread and failed to address the comment they replied to.

For a gun analogy, I go with it's like if someone said "We could choose to make it much more difficult to own a handgun" and then someone fired back with a rejoinder about that not helping the people getting shot right now. The rejoinder doesn't address the statement.
I don’t use Gmail for business purposes, which is the area where this sort of interface shines. Gmail is absolutely n.1 in personal email, but a lot (most?) business email still runs through outlook, and that’s where the money is.
> It must be nice to have a trust fund. /sarcasm

I'll let you know ... if I ever manage to find and marry a trust funded person

> It's one thing to churn out a book in your spare time, and its quite another to make authorship your main focus

Agreed. I am a hobbyist author. To pay the rent and put food on the table I have to do proper work with wages and stuff.
How commonly do people need to use swap in the first place? On my current computer, I don't even have a swap partition because I've never gotten close to filling my 16GB, even with a big virtual machine and hundreds of browser tabs. In my experience on desktop systems, it just makes your computer painfully slow when you write a program that allocates far too much memory. Without swap, the OOM killer gets involved much earlier and you don't have to do a hard power cut to stop the disk from thrashing.
Not tagged as a stub, but it sure could use some love. I wonder whether it's enough of an effect to be useful. Hall-effect sensors are all over in certain types of motors and encoders; might there be cases where they're not suitable and a magnetocapacitive effect would be applicable?
oh? I'll have to take another look - there was SOOO much good technical content!
Why Quantum Mechanics I have no idea.

Why interpretations: There is an experiment you can do that is hard to explain: Either particles are able to somehow influence each other faster than light (non-local), or the particle somehow doesn't exist except when interacting with some other particle (non-real).

Try this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs the AHA moment in the video comes when you realize you can entangle the light and that adding a filter by one stream of light somehow causes the other stream of light to also be influenced.
No, the point is that they may already be advising someone on how to manage a brand for a business, a business that potentially they didn't really know if that someone is actually a representative of the brand? They may be granting access to AdWords accounts to be managed by third parties, and they don't know if those third parties are who they say they are, or actually a representative of the brand they are managing? Their job is just to rake in payments from people they don't actually know? Again, did they not already have methods in place to establish some level of trust that the person on the other end is who they say they are?

Google already had a "Verify your local business" option, I wonder if this data was integrated into AdWords accounts as well. https://support.google.com/business/answer/7107242?hl=en It seems like this data should already be on file and verified if you are business advertising with AdWords.
> I will be forced to pay back everything I have pirated

There's nothing to 'pay back'. Rentier capitalism has us convinced copying is theft, but only because the propertied classes have created artificial scarcity and high exploitative rents. [1] After we move to Commons based peer production, we will have a new reality, and artificial scarcity will be seen for what it is: domination.

[1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
>How is this not a false advertising lawsuit in the making?

Because it says "A few excluded shows play with ads." And its three shows out many hundreds.
Hey all,
I built a jobboard to find out companies actively hiring during covid19. It is built using python django, mysql and bootstrap. Python based crawlers collect data from different sites. I am planning to rewrite in UI in react if this is useful and site gets traction.
Ohh..Something like that could be nice on my tablet. Thanks!
Using Mathematica with Orgmode
You're right. That may be a poor example given that their forte isn't software. I don't believe the process is very different, though.

To give another example: I don't think users really want Ruby's parser to be 10k lines of C or whatever, whether they directly know that or not. Nobody really wants to maintain that, nor do people really want to think about corner cases it causes. They do want a beautiful and expressive syntax, though, which can be achieved by cutting a few features. You can write an almost Ruby parser, or something better, in 500 lines and I'm not exaggerating.

If that's happening at the development level, then it's happening everywhere.
Big fan of the game and I actually liked the gold filter a lot. The designers described the art style of the game as cyber-renaissance, mixing the premodern larger than life characters and themes of remaking mankind and so on with the technical futuristic stuff.

I thought that was a pretty unique take and I found the art direction of the newer Deus Ex game to be bland in comparison.
This isn't the government brought to you by the same people who claimed the laws of maths didn't apply down under, is it? They call themselves liberals.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/malc...
Linux multiple monitor setup with HiDPI 4K monitor
I've read on HN before that Linux has shaky HiDPI support but after I setup my new computer and started looking into it I got really worried as my research indicated I am in trouble. I have 1070ti nvidia card, 3 older 1080p monitors and beautiful new 4K LG monitor.
It seems X server does not support different dpi setup and using Wayland is not possible because nvidia. However actually I managed to solve it quite simply. I have not tested it fully yet but maybe it will be helpful to someone too.
1. I am using Kubuntu so I went to KDE -> Display configuration and set 200% global scale. Now my 4K monitor is fine but everything is very large on 1080p monitors.
2. Do xrandr --output DVI-D-0 --scale 2x2 on all 3 1080p monitors.
3. Go to NVIDIA X Server Settings (I installed NVidia proprietary drivers) and align all 4 displays as I want (they all should be 3840x2160). Also check Force Full Composition Pipeline on all 1080p monitors. Go Antialiasing settings and uncheck FXAA (had some issues of blurry text that is out of focus).
Apply. Save to X configuration file.
4. Restart.
It worked! I was so excited that I had to post it here :)
You might need something beyond mouse=a to get Putty to report the mouse through to vim—maybe this option? https://superuser.com/questions/513014/moving-cursor-in-putt...
I think its half 'dumbing down' search, and half greed to push as many ads as possible...
What we know about Kim Jong-un’s health
My wife has a manual system for exactly the system in the screenshot, so I thought she would like it. "Nah, can't use it on my phone".
I was at a conference last year and talked to someone who said that the investors he knew were shying away from investing in open source software companies because anything that was successful would just be copied and operationalized by AWS/GCP/Azure.

I hope that isn't the case, but we'll see. Maybe the answer is niche operations that are too small or domain specific to be noticed by the big folks.
Listen, I just want one button to filter out these records, it can't be that hard!

Well, it wouldn't have been very hard if you had told us at the start of the project...
> But if the virus has already spread to 30, 40, heck 50 percent of the population

_If_ is the key part of this sentence. We simply do not know, which is why - as you point out - testing is key!

If we were strict on lock-down and on testing, we can be very effective with this:

After a few (say 6 or 8) weeks if lock-down we can know with high likelihood who is and who is not sick. Now test all the sick people (and their friends), and start testing the general public for anti-bodies. Then start tracing any new infections.

That requires folks following the lock-down and health measures and the mass availability of virus and anti-body tests.