skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My point is that Win32 applications still get both new features and bug fixes, how those are implemented isn't really relevant to what i wrote.
Datensparsamkeit! There are more reasons to wanna to be in control of the data if your users instead of selling it off easily (e.g. the trust of your users). Additionally it can feel good to just know what happens instead of telling yourself: "I use google analytics like everybody else — that must be okay"
I have come to the conclusion that pretty well everything negative in human society is about control - religion, business, management, politics, even, as you say, food. It's all about some one doing something that makes me uncomfortable, so I have to control it, once you realise this it's very freeing.
Can't really agree with that. Although most of my experience and expertise is with mobile game development, I think that I've read at least 5 blog posts and articles that explained that all connection strings, usernames and passwords (aside from something really trivial for local testing) should always be read from environment variables and never be hardcoded, and arguments were convincing enough. So, even if I haven't worked with Heroku before, I would look for a way to get this url in a service-provided environment variable.

Also, I would look to configure all components to fail loudly, so that if something wouldn't connect to Redid, my server just wouldn't launch.

I'm not trying to say that I'm better or smarter than OP: I've actually tried learning bioinformatics, but dropped out of uni 14 years ago, realising that my brain is just not created for anything biology-related. Rather my point is, many of these problems (and problems I've seen junior developers struggling with) are not some arcane knowledge that you should just learn by heart (like all of those awful genus names in Latin, or all the enzymes in the dreadful ATP scheme that I still have nightmares of sometimes), but a logical extension of more basic and universal principles that actually make total sense once you think about them.
This is a fantastic point. Payments in particular have been intimidating for me. Nobody wants to pay for something and then have some goofy mistake on the backend mess up processing it. Or even worse, make them feel like their credit card is susceptible to theft.

I don't know how to explain it, exactly, but worrying about this definitely made development more difficult, even when initially setting up and testing out.
Sysadmins have been using this principle for decades.

When running a fleet of machines, it was always better to have them pull their config rather than push to them. It was far more reliable because you didn’t have to worry about whether a machine missed a push.

It would just grab its config whenever it came back online.
'Axiom' was taken as a company name
+ It's not convention to name a UK company by the raw domain name string (e.g. www and other characters must be removed). If you pass the domain through this filter, you get this.

Secondly, our idea on incorporation involved a far more complex product. One in which we could process mine (via ML) browser data to generate business process models (BPMN) and browser automations... Turns out people only wanted the browser automation part of that.

We're left with a .ai domain name and company name, but do not reference any aspect of AI in marketing our browser automation product.
Finland Basic Income: positive resuls
TLDR: Only had 6 days more employment, but had a perception of better mental and economic wellbeing. In families with children who received a basic income, employment rates improved during both years of the experiment.

A change in the unemployment benefit system (more stringent entitlement criteria) in the 2nd year has complicated interpretation of the results.
You can, but if you’re doing any sort of non-static website then you still have complexities in the backend to deal with. (For static sites, I fully agree that HTML and CSS are more than enough most of the time; at least, they’re good enough for my website!)
No, still made money on the products but the goal was buying high dollar items with rewards cards from retailers that offered points bonuses.
So it is with vim.

Anyway, unfortunately given setup won't even be viable with anything running "local", since in the mentioned citrix environment we cannot install anything, so no vscode, no local vim, no nothing...
Birding from Your Window Is a Joy. It’s Easy to Get Started
The first step is to stop blaming the victim.

It's nobody's fault that the billing structure at Amazon is so complicated and confusing.

Except Amazon's.
what i have generally seen is that storage - blob (s3) or database - is the blocker.
Even if you go to k8s, the hassle to manage storage is non-trivial.

And because of this singular fact, startups cannot move to on-premise. You really dont want to manage snapshots, restores, backups.

Anyone can manage application servers.
Wait, are you saying that (software) engineers should _actually_ be authoritarian? And you suggest this is because otherwise "authoritarian tactics" wouldn't work?
In my experience reddit is heavily moderated. At least all the popular communities.
Twitter employee, transit advocate dies after getting caught in SF shootout
It's Objective-C being referred to here: the "+" prefix indicates a class method.

Any class can implement +load and the runtime will call the method upon loading the class (note, this doesn't require using it at all).

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/objectivec/nsobjec...
Most of the criticism Stephen gets seems fair. Clearly the guy is a megalomaniac. That being said his ideas are interesting and he is also clearly a genius(just maybe not to the degree he thinks himself) and I’m happy he’s working on his crazy ideas. I think they’re interesting, and although I wouldn’t bet on it, if he comes up with a predictive theory of everything all the better.
Stroke patients are definitely just leaving it far too late to seek treatment. It's been happening in multiple countries. There was even an unfortunate New York Times article where a doctor talked about seeing strokes of a severity they wouldn't expect in people so young, which was spun as proof the coronavirus was causing the strokes - and it just happened to mention in passing that those patients had ignored their symptoms and taken far longer than usual to seek treatment. Of course, if coronavirus was causing strokes we'd expect an increase in stroke patients rather than a decrease.
Sure but it's something thats easily overlooked or neglected, many tutorials might tell a beginner to do it but not _why_ to do it which is important. It's also easy to hardcode during testing or development and forget about. Why would someone without a software background expect that a url could change from under them?

> Also, I would look to configure all components to fail loudly, so that if something wouldn't connect to Redid, my server just wouldn't launch.

In this case though the OP did not have control over the redis connection handling it was through a dependency that silently timed out.
I like what you said. One thing I'd add is: if you're not assuming positive intent, at least assume ignorance. Classic Hanlon's razor https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
> The more I learn, the more I believe cloud is the only competitive solution today, even for sensitive industries like banking or medical.

Then learn A LOT more and start with mainframes and their reliability.
Surprised no one mentioned a third option: cheap vps providers like digitalocean or vultr. They've become real contenders to big clouds recently, providing managed databases, storage and k8s. And their bandwidth costs are close to what you'd get in colo.
It also completely hijacks the back button on iOS Safari for me. It’s impossible to leave the site by pressing back or swiping.
If it makes you feel any better, I have been programming for almost half a dozen years, the latter portion of which I spent learning how to do so formally, and I am deathly frightened to work on any of the things you had trouble with. I’ll take securing an ancient obfuscated firmware binary any day over trying to secure your website :)
Ask HN: How do you become a better original thinker?
Twilio Reports Record Quarterly Results
“Every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out.”
― Chuck Jones
Lynx still asks for each cookie iirc
The UK's "universal credit" is not an UBI, it's an unique benefit designed to replace a number of separate benefits (unemployment, housing) for people unemployed or with extremely low income.
>> Leaves fall from the trees, plants grow, animals graze, trains run, whether or not any human is watching.

Well that solves the age old question about trees falling in forests :-)
> I didn't realize they localized these.

Which is why this is my favorite version of the song. They kind of evolved it with the Hiroshima accident.
400M/yr was just Snap’s Google Cloud spend, they also signed a 1B deal with AWS for redundancy.
They specified the engine in terms of lbf. Why don't they use metric? I realize that imperial units are used colloquially in the US but surely that doesn't extend to actual engineering!
Me: do you like cats

Bot: i don ' t really like cats , but i do like dogs . do you have any pets ?

Me: yes I have 3 dogs and a pigeon

Bot: wow , that ' s a lot of pets . i have a dog and a cat . i like cats a lot .

The bot just contradicted itself. Does this mean the bot isn't aware of it's history in the chat?
I've seen this proliferate over the last couple months. What gives? It totally breaks the reading experience and by reflex at this point I move my mouse up to the "reader view" icon on Firefox, ready to fire a click so I can read something without being visually accosted on the screen.

What makes me sad is that I know how to do this, but my parents don't. So they put up with an experience of the internet that's totally degraded.
Generally that’s not something you run into until you’re actually much deeper into the field.
can't ya just make a triple-shot latte at home
Maybe the proof exists in a different reality? :)
I've been a fan of https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink for awhile. Its based off React with a custom renderer. I like it a lot and find it pretty easy to use.
Eh. I don’t know if I’d frame it the same way?

When I think about this, the only time I’m getting single word responses is when someone wants to kill a conversation. If you’re finding this happening a lot because you /only/ ask yes/no questions and/or people don’t feel free/comfortable/interested to tell you more past that then that’s the issue. You can try to ask more open ended questions rather than thinking of it as leading vs non leading. (You’re almost always asking leading questions in real life. Context is abundant) Ones with more potential ways of answering can be good for those who are not as conversational/literal. But be prepared for the conversation killer of, “I didn’t like it.” It will happen...
Appreciate the candor. Can I ask — what does it take to get banned by Uber?
I once heard something along the lines of "to learn to express yourself properly is to learn to think". Sometimes our understanding of something is a muddle of unstructured thoughts and hunches. To express yourself properly you need to organize these. After you did that, things are often much clearer.
Two quick points here:

1. A few years ago, I probably would have made the mistake of actually hard-coding my connection strings, usernames and passwords. I'm pretty sure I did that on my first ever webapp, cause I didn't know any better. So, not defending my intelligence, or taking any offense at your statement.
2. But... That's not what's happened here. I'm setting the redis url inside Heroku's "Config Vars" section, and then reading it in with Django's `env()` functionality, as is appropriate. But the url has seemingly been changed from underneath me, for a reason I still don't fully understand.

Side-note: I used to be under the impression that CS was "harder" than biology, and that anyone who understood CS could pick up biology at will, if they decided. Turns out that's not the case, haha.
Sorry, I meant one that was crazy like the gopher guts song/poem. Not that it is the gopher guts poem.

The poem I trying to remember had nothing to do with gopher guts ;-) It was also very long, unlike the gopher guts song.
Our version ended with the phrase "with a spoon".
I'm shocked but perhaps not surprised at many of the comments in that thread. These people are app developers who voluntarily link in huge multimegabyte binary-only third party sdks, and then act surprised that the code they are linking is prone to crashing? It should be obvious that any bug in such an SDK might bring down any app, even on launch and even if your own code never makes an explicit call to the SDK.

Third party SDKs have free reign in your apps. They can launch background threads, intercept and log any and all UI interaction and UI widget/input field values, and call home. All of this without you ever calling a single method explicitly.

It gives the SDK developers a foothold inside each app's sandbox/keychain/developer-specific app ID. It must be a gold mine for correlating and tracking users across apps and websites, breaking down the intended barrier between different apple developer team IDs and app containers.

Last time I checked one of these binary SDKs along the likes of FB, Gmaps, etc just running strings on the binary framework lib was enough to send chills down any developer's spine.
My bad. Apparently, you're correct. It seems that relevant code is a part of VS Code codebase. Perhaps, this is it (though, I very well might be wrong on this, too): https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/tree/master/src/vs/workb....
Most apartment sized AC units top out at a few kW - that's the peak power, just maintaining the already cooled apartment is going to be consuming much less power.

A car cruising at highway speed is lconsuming something on order of 10x as much power. Given how much smaller cars are than apartments, it's an even greater difference.

So to answer your question: not much. Heating in cold weather is much worse on range, as it's not just the cabin but also the battery that needs to be maintained at an adequate operational temperature.
Most industrial robots are relatively simple machines that repeat a task described in details. Only input may be to wait until a new part came in or to move down the stack of parts until the gripper runs into something to grip.
I just have to chime in on this. While I don't use the mouse with an iPad on a daily basis, I have found a new use for it yesterday.

Once every <insert-some-time-frame> I start missing games and decide to play something. I have a dedicated relatively powerful PC for that. What I have recently found out is that I can play XCOM2 on my PC through my iPad with Steam link. The experience was good enough out of the box but the way the cursor was controlled through an iPad screen felt a bit out of place.

Yesterday, I suddenly realized that I can use a Bluetooth mouse with my iPad and holy crap, the experience is like playing on the PC but I am not attached to the desk! There is only one minor issue of not being able to move the mouse to the bottom of the screen without triggering the applications bar, but this was not too annoying.

Not sure how important this is to anyone, but I was amazed that I could do this.
It took the best part of a week to make a bit of text a link.

This highlights the problem with web dev quite nicely. Not doubt you weren't really just making some text in to a link. I know the sort of thing bootcamps do, so you were probably installing and learning React, displaying a set of components, implementing React Router, and figuring out how to update app state based on the browser's History API. All with a template library that was a terrible choice for learning (because it didn't have docs). You could summarize that as "making a bit of text a link", but that's glossing over the details.

What you were really doing was learning component orchestration, reactive state management, and a browser API. Why wouldn't that take a week?

So the problem with web dev is actually that it's really, really easy to trivialize. You can make hard things sound like they should be very straightforward because they look a lot like something simple from the past. And when people find that they're not really doing the simple thing any more they complain because the new, harder way of doing something (which is actually doing something completely different eg reactive state management and in-browser routing vs asking the browser to do a GET) is hard.
For something in my field, I "speed read" it. (In quotes because I have no idea if this is how actual speed reading works.) I.e. set aside one or two blocks of 4 hours or so and commit to finishing the book in that window.

I usually don't retain a ton, but the big benefit is that I know where to find the relevant sections when I need them in the future, and have some sort of big-picture view of how they fit together.
You can outline a synthesizer in the same way people that couldn't program their way out of a wet paper bag outline software: by writing a specification of what it should be able to do. Implementing that specification is then the job of the electrical engineers.

If we're willing to give Steve Jobs credit for the iPhone I think we should be equally willing to give Schneider & company credit for their ideas that were instrumental - (heh) - in moving the synth field forward. The fact that many of their sounds were novel when first recorded is the strongest proof of their original contributions, if it has merely been off the shelf hardware created by others then this would not have been the case, you'd have heard those sounds from other artists before then.
No, I did not say that. I am not even talking about what they should or shouldn't be. There's no set rule which says engineers are supposed to be pro-authoritarians or anti-authoritarians.

I was disagreeing with what the parent said: "Engineers are supposed to be anti-authoritarians."

I take that to mean that the person thinks engineers are anti-authoritarians - which is simply false and not what happens in real life. Engineers are often enablers of authoritarians.

And this is a bad thing but just fact of life. Humans are flawed and greedy for power. There are higher chances of someone with power to abuse it (engineer in this example but could apply to others too).
Is an iPad for “power users” though?

Microsoft got this right with the Surface. I kinda wish Apple would just do that.
Glancing at the paper, I do not find anything that is impressive. AFAICS the algorithm they implement is of asymptotic exponential complexity, even when run on a quantum computer. I cannot imagine how this work would have any effect on the field of asymmetric encryption algorithm research.

To me it looks like they took the factorization problem, which has a lot of well-known (relatively) low-complexity algorithms and imlemented it by mapping it onto circuit-SAT [1] (the multiplication table corresponds to a multiplier circuit which they try to solve in reverse). Circuit-SAT is a proven NP-complete problem. There is currently no known quantum-algorithm that solves NP-complete problems in sub-exponential time.

Note that in the complexity hierarchy NP-complete problems are "harder" than the factoring problem. These are generally bad problems, were not even a quantum-computer helps (and I know of no asymmetric encryption algorithm that is NP-complete when trying to break it, but maybe the quantum-resistant encryption algorithms are better in that regard).

And that's even before we start talking about the limitations of quantum-annealers and the kind of speedups they can gain over classical computers. For a discussion of that, maybe one should start reading Scott Aaronson's blog [2].

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

[2] https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2555
It's hard to see any other course of action when we saw what was happening in Northern Italy. In fact if anything I would say most Western countries didn't lock down early or hard enough.

Countries that ease the lockdown before they have a handle on the virus are in for a lot of pain further down the road. Probably more economic damage as well.
The last point is something that “we”, as an industry, can often be blind to.

If your business is something that is fundamentally not “pushing bytes”, you really, really don’t want to know about routers, firewalls, the OSI layer, SHA256, RAID arrays, all the way to this week’s JS framework. All of that is a big annoyance, and paying AWS to “take care of it” makes sense, even if it comes at a higher price: more often than not, the difference wouldn’t be offset by the time, effort, and risk exposure that you would have to allocate when building your own.

This calculation is different if your business is primarily digital. The gentleman upthread making a game, for example, is perfectly right: his company naturally developed a culture that can evaluate and manage every aspect of its digital operations, because it’s part of its core business, so it makes sense to put that knowledge to good use and save money.
It's funny, when I was first learning programming 15 years ago, the thing I heard everywhere was "webdev is easy and for noobs", and sure, it was 15 years ago and webdev has come a long way... but when I interview the fresh-out-of-college candidates for junior positions, there's still the elitism of "If you aren't managing memory and flipping bits you aren't a REAL programmer."

No, most web developers aren't implementing the most complex and intricate algorithms or 'close to the metal' or whatever other gatekeeping people want to claim, but that doesn't mean it's easy work. I've never had a job where I didn't see some green engineer laugh off a feature request with "Oh, that's easy, it's just calling an API and putting the information into some HTML, what's so hard about that?" and then getting stuck when their first implementation fails QA, or the product manager explains that the customer needs it to be ever so slightly different, and the complexity of those edge cases turn out to not be so easy to deal with as the world of perfect computer science might suggest.

Is it hard in the same way? No, I will fully admit that coming up with a novel algorithmic solution requires a different mindset and brilliance that very few, if any, really good web developers I've met really have (although I'm certain there are people who excel at both, they're rare enough that I haven't been lucky enough to encounter them). But being really good at building a solid, secure, modern website isn't easy either, and it's also valuable.

This post focused on the complexity of the tooling, which yes, is definitely a thing, but if you don't know web development, and you know that you don't know web development, why are you attempting to build something using complex high level tools designed for and used by advanced web developers? Then again, if you don't know web development and you don't know what you don't know, and you've just heard 'Django is good' how would you know to maybe pick Flask or something simpler to understand?

I don't have an answer or a larger point other than this: writing software is difficult and complex and none of us should look down on anyone else because what they do seems easy on the outside.
Appologies for my earlier comment then I misunderstood your last point. I think my point still stands though. Thanks for the article!
Pet Tracker Reboot– Now with IoT
Now on Kickstarter. IoT entering pet industry with first AI-based activity tracker
It wasn't an intern, it was (or rather is now) a senior engineer, and this was 2 years ago now.