skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I’m constantly amazed by these things in daily life. The charger is just barely large enough safely house a USB jack, and that safety margin is large enough to fit a high-efficiency converter.

If you are curious how it works, the Horowitz and Hill book, 2nd ed, has an extended section dedicated to describing how the power supply for the Apple II works. The iPhone uses the same technology, broadly speaking. Switch-mode power supplies were fairly new at the time, and older computers will generally use bulky, inefficient linear power supplies.

Every once in a while I come across something from before the era of small SMPS, like a constant-voltage transformer that was bundled with my color photographic enlarger. The idea is that you regulate the voltage for the lamp to make the light color more consistent, but since the technology was old, it consisted of a massive, heavy ferroresonant transformer. I ended up selling it for scrap.

The general way that you make power supplies smaller is by increasing the frequency they run at. For SMPS, this means increasing the switching frequency, but there are also some AC standards that run at higher frequencies in places where space and weight is at a premium. For example, AC power within an aircraft might run at 400Hz rather than 60Hz. The transformers are correspondingly smaller.
It depends on the use. That last sentence is fine, as the complete thought is apparent. But I just split this sentence from the one prior to it. Do any of these last two make sense? Likely as much as this sentence does.

The best approach is to think about the way we read aloud, as I have with this sentence, the words and punctuation we see on a page. This paragraph makes better use of sentence structures that frame a complete thought. That said, the prior paragraph did the same but separated too many closely-related thoughts that would have been better understood in fewer, more additive sentences.

Key takeaways: News anchors vary the pitch and phrasing of their speech because a typical monotonous speaking voice is too predictable to our hearing sense, so we naturally pay less attention to droning speech. Writing works similarly for the brain. Failing to work with subordinate and additive structures, vary sentence and paragraph length, and start and end thoughts with unexpected phrases, makes any writing more difficult to sustain interest.

So, start your sentences with hieroglyphs, smoke signals, or whatever works to engage and re-engage a reader after every period. Just make sure you frame complete thoughts and limit the number of breaks mid-thought.
What percentage of the general public do you imagine could give a coherent summary of Cambridge Analytica scandal? I'd be amazed if it were as high as 5%. I get that a lot of people here know about it. But it had no direct impact on most users. It's not surprising that they don't understand this any better than a host of other subtle but important things.

People can't all devote time and energy to everything that's important. It's too big a world. We shouldn't conclude that those things don't matter to them. Our current emergency is a fine example: until a pandemic happened, few knew enough to worry about it. But that doesn't mean we were indifferent to the outcome.
This is the manual I needed the last 20 years.
That's a story invented years after the fact without historical basis. The actual conversations amongst Debian developers went rather differently.

* https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=444678

* https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=659891

* https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=659853

* https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=703677

* https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=914287
I never thought I’d meet the ‘nice guy’ stereotype on Hacker News!
This sounds like an opportunity for someone to kickstart a whole new post-petroleum industry.

How? Use the sun, wind, tide, nuclear, geothermal, space-solar, anything, to produce electricity, in order to crack hydrogen from water, and jumpstart the hydrogen economy. And will also need to begin mass production of fuel cells to get it cheaper.

This proves that the world does not need oil, if an alternative energy source can be harvested.

And along the way, it can possibly topple the biggest superpower on the planet. As well as effectively neutering the major countries with massive petroleum reserves.

I can only think of one player that can achieve such a monumental task. And even then, I doubt that they are that bold.
I agree with the grandparent comment. The parent comment sounds like a random and non representative sampling of what makes Clojure unique.

Both parent and grandparent correctly identify that many Clojure ideas come from elsewhere. Lisp and hosting on the JVM were not new. Immutability and persistent data structures weren't new ideas.

But putting them into one and making it performant was a paper published by people in the Clojure community (Rich was the lead author).

Clojure describes itself as data-oriented. That means not just the primacy of data, but of plain data, unadorned: https://youtu.be/VSdnJDO-xdg

What I find almost unique Clojure is that there's a philosophy to it that resonates throughout in it's design decisions: simplicity. Data is simpler than code, and code is simpler than macros, so prefer data and leave macros so a last resort. Libraries are simple, frameworks are complex. Plain data is simple, and the knock on effects of every library converting to & from plain data is powerful. But it only reveals itself after using Clojure for a while. Immutability allows for simpler code that you can reason about. Isolating state into containers allows you to characterize, control, and reduce touch points with state, which is necessary yet a source of complexity.

You can see the same set of ideas that underpin the design of Clojure to be present in follow on library additions (reducers/transducers, async, Datomic, etc). There's simplicity, often manifested in immutability and the associative model of information (everything is a map), at least.
edit: i should add i know both the internal ones of Firefox, and Chromium. They usually don't work for me, that is why i disabled them, apart from the usual cargo-culting paranoia to only open documents with native applications ;)
Dear SlackHQ, I have a bug report for you. Slack is messing with my beer
there's plenty of breakdowns out there of cheap chargers. some with shoddy soldering work, or faulty chips that does not stop overcharging, etc -and a safety hazard if you leave it plugged in overnight.
For interested applicants, here is the correct link

https://www.demandcurve.com/hire-marketers

P.S. : The original one is a typo.
Really, as you just implicitly pointed out, we could easily come up with more and more examples of how the Amazon train fails consumers no less than Walmart or any other big box retailer.
Christopher Alexander
> you'll need to prepare a USB stick with them downloaded onto it

Not really. Debian also offers one with all the firmware included but explicitly labels it "unofficial" (though very much official in practice and hosted on debian servers).
The "pain" is thus literally to click on another download link.
IMHO a decision maker (say a CFO) will
1) choose battle to pick depending on his/her burning priorities
2) make investments where he/she can maximise ROI

Also keep in mind she/ he has limited Bandwidth for new initiatives.
> Also I'd suggest to anyone to potentially avoid using CSS vars if you're looking for enterprise browser support due to old IE.

You can trivially process your css files through babel + postcss to support arbitrary browser targets. In this case, postcss will inline the vars letting write modern css while shipping css that works in old browsers.
My CS college program made me take a programming language fundamentals class. I still remember it. The class was one of the most difficult classes. We had to learn 4 programming language paradigms: imperative, declarative, object-oriented, and functional. In each paradigm, we learned to write programs in a chosen language.

I find the experience very useful for my software career. It helps me learn new programming languages quickly. When I see functional operators, I remember Haskell.

I'd recommend to master one language in different paradigms. It pays dividends.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_para...
It will help the legions of people employed to do contact tracing manually right now in places like taiwan korea and singapore..
dd if=/path/to/iso of=/dev/wrong_disk

Killed a windows install (which had the first partition on the disk) only a year ago with that one.
Digital World: 5 Simple but Useful Apps for the Drivers
Do all apps use cert pinning? I think it got popular some years ago but I remember some downsides existing

(I know things like Google Apps and such use it, but I'm not sure about less popular ones)
All You Should Know About Energy Engineering
Have you considered FreeBSD? ZFS support by default, and none of the junk that recent Linux distributions have been moving towards.
If you have only read the wiki pages, written to summarize arguments by their various proponents, then you do not know why Debian people made this choice. The wiki pages do not relate that. Start by reading Debian bug #727708 in its entirety.
“Weathering the Storm – 30 Days to Solve Covid-19”
I agree with your finer points, but

> In this case, I used the subtitle, which wasn't exactly editorializing.

Technically it is, in the sense that it's the editor's job in a publication to select exactly which citation best summarizes the content of the whole piece.

So I suggest to perhaps change the "don't editorialize" part to rule to better reflect the nuance of the subject.
The OP is abusing the term "context free". He's saying it avoids "the lexer hack" [1]:

Context free grammars. What this really means is the code should be parseable without having to look things up in a symbol table

That's NOT what context free means. That's a narrow view from someone designing a C-like language and trying to avoid a very specific property of C.

Another example of being context-sensitive, which has nothing to do with symbol tables, is that resolving LALR(1) conflicts in a yacc-style grammar can make the language not context-free. To resolve ambiguity the parser is doing stuff "outside" the grammar.

----

"Context free" is a mathematical term with a precise definition. It's a class of languages that's part of the Chomsky hierarchy [2], which was discovered and described by linguists and mathematicians before any programming language existed, and has applications outside programming languages. Wikipedia does a good job:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-free_grammar

A formal grammar is considered "context free" when its production rules can be applied regardless of the context of a nonterminal. No matter which symbols surround it, the single nonterminal on the left hand side can always be replaced by the right hand side. This is what distinguishes it from a context-sensitive grammar.

Simple examples of languages that's are context-sensitive (not context-free): Lua string literals, Rust raw strings (see other comments in this thread), and shell here docs:

http://lua-users.org/wiki/StringsTutorial

Yes:

[[ mystring ]]
[=[ mystring ]=]
[==[ mystring ]==]

No:

[=[ mystring ]] # mismatched

Matching this language requires a context-sensitive grammar and can't be done with a context-free grammar. It's not all that easy to prove: See the posts from Trevor Jim regarding proofs.

The C language is also not context-free.

[1] http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/12/15.html#appendix-lexing...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy
Author here. I've written a couple of articles about counterfeit chargers. You are correct; people cut every corner possible to make a counterfeit charger that looks exactly like an Apple charger. (If you buy a $3 Apple charger on eBay, this is what you're getting.) The power quality of the knockoffs is awful. They also ignore safety, so the fake chargers occasionally kill people.

For point 2, I also wrote an article in the IEEE Spectrum about the history of switching power supplies and how we ended up with such tiny chargers.

Links: http://www.righto.com/2012/03/inside-cheap-phone-charger-and...
http://www.righto.com/2016/03/counterfeit-macbook-charger-te...
https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/a-half-century-...
Libreboot is making a strong case for using open firmware in systems, yet it supports only a limited set of mostly outdated system boards. Isn't that a sign that it failed? After so many years?

Don't get me wrong, I definitely support the idea of open firmware and I would gladly adopt libreboot and replace any BIOS firmware on all of my systems. But, not a single system (Intel ME in all of them) is supported. I could donate some of my systems, and money, but how would that help? 20 years of efforts (including the efforts of coreboot) don't seem to have generated any adoption rate. Or is there some info I didn't get?
Tailwind: A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom designs
This sounds like someone who thinks getting laid once gets you into some club..
You can say that, but there are enough hints that you'd be wrong:

- Tip habits differ a lot; various online debates and movie references show that there are "assholes" that don't tip (or don't tip well enough?). From this pov serving in a restaurant is more akin to playing music in the subway than working a regular job. This is, IMO, not how things should be.

- "if you try to include everything into the price, people will consider your prices too high": this right here tells you that people are not as rational as you paint them to be. Theoretically, the bill is the same whether you include & itemize all things, or not. In practice though, because the bills do not include everything, they can get higher than they otherwise would. Humans are strange and not always rational beasts - that's why prices like "$1999" exist. Because (false) impressions matter. So no, it's not easier to sneak in extra charges by presenting full price on the menu - it's quite the opposite.
Customizing Fonts in Firefox on Linux
Space isn’t easy. Going to the moon is significantly harder than LEO. I don’t think one can claim functional and performance equivalence between SLS to FH.

https://youtu.be/Y81vx__JngY

Now, if the argument is: Why go to the moon? Well, that’s a different conversation.
> time-and-time again bites organizations in the ass when there's a breach.

The bite isn't very hard though. The largest data breach of the 21st century in terms of users was Adobe and it cost them just 2 million in legal.

The only painful data breach I can think of financially has been Equifax. Everyone else just sent out a "reset your password" email, paid for a couple lawyers and PR people, and went on with their companies.

Can you name a company killed by a data breach? I can't think of one.
A valid point. Will fix!

The archive is intended to be like so by request. The idea would be caching. They count on people to clicking on all the covers. If it's this is the case or not, I don't know. But their target groups is very narrow on the other hand.

This 'argumentation' is not valid though in the case with the picture at 'about'. And that's my fault. I will fix this.

So yes, you're right. One could argue the same is true for the images at the 'about' page. But yeah...
This is why I have an Apple Powermac G5 or two stored in my basement. These run entirely free of that backdoor.
List of what the Facebook Board wants shareholders to vote against
like you i never reply , but my previous boss does- and i've seen him get caught in their sales tactics.

truth is the marketing works on a percentage of people, just like any other method.
This is super helpful, thanks!
How can this go unnoticed when it is common knowledge? There is difference between don't know and don't care. So far the people that care are a tiny vocal minority. Unfortunately.
> People can't all devote time and energy to everything that's important.

Well if the users can't spend any time on it, it isn't sufficiently important for the business to care about it as the users will be briefly miffed and then go on to what they consider important.

User unhappiness matters only so far as it changes behavior.
Slack is becoming more and more "smart" lately and it's getting more complicated for people to use.
Ask HN: Sewing
Are there HNers who sew?

I don't really mean "I try to fix a button if it gets loose", but making whole shirts, trousers, and so?

How did you get started? Can you reasonably learn to sew from books and YouTube videos, or is an experienced teacher the way to go?

What cool things can you reasonably make manually, and which things need a sewing machine?
This is what I thought too, but I’ve been told that there’s a lot of fantastic manufacturing expertise in the defense industry? Boeing, Lockheed Martin etc.?
There is a trick for indentation: Use a context-sensitive lexer in front of a context-free parser. The lexer serves indent and dedent tokens to the parser.

With this trick, you can parse Python with a context-free grammar.
You have wildly mis-spelled "KillUserProcesses".

* https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=825394#221
John Kay - The Long and Short of it
"In my European country, taxi prices were exorbitant and taxi usage was very low." <-- this is so true.
in France (to give another example), this is even worse: in Paris you don't pick the taxi, the taxi picks you (and if where you're going doesn't fancy them, they will refuse you... which they legally cannot do, but they still do it). Taxis were an entrenched rent-seeker, they were in need of disruption, for the public good. I'm not necessarily a big fan of Uber, but the taxis as a corporation deserve the competition.

And that's not even taking about the phone app and its capabilities, which were just out of reach of regular taxis (even the taxi companies that own a large fleet, these are still very small and have no tech capability). IMHO that's another front where the competition was healthy.
I mostly get stuck on the function, func, fun, void, def, etc.

Most other stuff is very similar.
Yes. There is.
Pokemon Go for Work: Trash your productivity timer
West Coast Shuffle
The approach I've used and seen the most often is enforcing the tenancy at the ORM level so someone can't forget a where.

And then providing enterprise service for large companies that want their own installation.
> The only thing I miss in (Berkeley) Logo is a better fill function.

Thanks for volunteering! :) The code's at

https://github.com/jrincayc/ucblogo-code
Say, are you handy with lego?
Tips for Becoming a Better Software Developer
Removing /usr isn't all that bad in the grand scope of things. /home is where the important bits typically live, so this would be more of an annoyance than an unmitigated disaster.
I don't understand - what is the motivation here? The article is a little short, and it gives good insight into just how expensive this is (compared to other similarly classed potential space purchases). However, what I am failing to grasp is... why? Why spend so much when these other options are available? Surely not ignorance. Is it malice? corruption? Someone's ego?
Shameless plug : I coded a very small CSS library that will also be a good fit for a blog :D Check it out !

https://concrete.style/
Outside of the hellish ambiguities of C and moreso C++ it doesn’t seem like a big deal.
Now read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11798458 .
hard to say as most founders understate their credentials publicly, to make for a more satisfying rags-to-riches story
I haven't run into an app I've reverse engineered that didn't have it.
Hello, concent, hello, composition for react
My language gamut is similar to yours -- I don't disagree. I usually find it straightforward to pick up something new too. But there are still languages I know are going to take a lot more time for me to grok, like Coq. (I tried Coq a few years ago, and even though I already knew a fair bit of Haskell, the differences were enough to completely throw me off.)
Since everyone's really going on about Beat Saber, I have to say out of all the games I've played on my Vive, the one that I had the most fun with and kept coming back to was SUPERHOT.

The entire concept of the game (time only progresses while you're moving) fits _so well_ with VR. It makes you feel like a complete badass as you're able to perform ninja-like feats of dexterity and dodge bullets all the while being a just challenging-enough puzzle and providing a decent workout.

Everything else I've played was either basically a tech demo or felt like our old games built within the limitations of VR (what really differentiates Beat Saber from DDR, Guitar Hero, etc?). SUPERHOT was one of the few games I played that really felt like a proper VR game.
Last sentence: Politics.

> Men and women in all 50 states are hard at work..
Um, he "invented" a command design pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_pattern
time to search and destroy. lets not have another fucking killer bee fiasco.
That is absolutely not true. The contributors to helm retain full copyright. No assignment or even CLA is used (only a DCO).
Are you arguing the FDA was not involved in the U.S.'s delayed testing roll out?

Because everyone else I've read in the medical industry made the argument they (and the CDC) were a large cause of why our testing was behind other countries. (this includes a previous director of the FDA)
Yup, snaps are littering Ubuntu Server 20.04. They're in 18.04 as well, for that matter. Maybe not quite as much, but they're there.
Google has confirmed a Chrome update is at fault for a mysterious reported wave of unbootable Macs. The update was causing issues by corrupting an operating system folder, which prevented those impacted from being able to log in to macOS.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2019/09/26/goog...
Ask HN: Is it worth purchasing TailwindUI?
At the pricy tag of 250$ is it worth buying TailwindUI? Anyone who has already bought it. Could they share some feedback?
Every time that this argument comes up, people don't get their computer science right. The problem is not whether something has modules. It is the degree of coupling amongst and cohesion within said modules that is the metric.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19132437

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19028053
What would you do if you lost your Google account?
Not if other people are using them.

There are different value tradeoffs in different countries.
The US says it is okay to spy on employees for no reason at all as long as you use company equipment.
The EU says that employees like every other human being have rights and you better have a good reason and do so in a respectful way and be clear about it.
I couldn't stand Logo as a child--my entire childhood goal was to make a video game and Logo was just so slow. Turtle graphics made certain things easy (drawing circles) but there was no way to get some animated sprites on the screen. I pretty much instantly recognized this and stubbornly decided it was toy language for babies.

It wasn't until years later that I realized that Logo had a bunch of neat fundamentals (like functions, which were totally foreign to BASIC-fluent me). It's a shame it wasn't more attractive to a kid like me.
A Bug’s Life: Story of a Solaris 0day – Marco Ivaldi – Infiltrate 2019