skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>That said, I'll reiterate that keeping people from dying due to "economic devastation" is very much within our present capabilities and doesn't depend on global economic recovery.

Very true, but the most likely outcome is that people will not exercise their power to reduce the hardship in the third world. Most people of means did not bother to end starvation in the 3rd world before this, why would they be more likely when they are in worse economic position. How much have you personally donated to end starvation before this? If you haven't, what made you make the choice not to?
you could replace that with pretty much any major publication...
But you can feed the stove for warmth!

https://library.randolphschool.net/c.php?g=237930&p=1581974
Cartographic Puzzles Are Poised for a Comeback
I am not being sarcastic! The threshold for human controlled robots is much lower than fully autonomous robots.
Right -- consciousness is whatever it is that is aware that it is self-aware. In fact, anytime you pinpoint consciousness as any particular awareness, you beg the question. How can you be aware of your awareness?
Wow that doesn't seem very fair unless the banks themselves are exposed to major risks, mind saying which country?

On the other hand, sounds like a possible major opportunity if you provide a solution that is better for the people.
archive.fo is also very good to use.
I assume not just testing, but the existence of a stockpile of fissile material in general, right? Obviously it'd need to be more sensitive but id have to assume if you observe a moving gamma ray source on earth that's really valuable information
Are you proud of being a consumer rather than a creator?
I think GDP per person might be more informative. I found a couple of references stating it was $400 or $500.
At a guess, it's probably used as a textbook in some university courses (presumably law). This leads to absurd pricing, because students are a captive market; you want to do the course, you have to buy this book.
Can you elaborate on this? One of the main benefits of growing these grasses/grains is that they can grow on land that is otherwise unproductive (we have a lot of this in Australia). Do you have knowledge that this is not the case?
Not enough people to do they available work.

If the youth leave and don’t come back, rural areas slowly die.
Yes! A good point of comparison.

(n.b. I have only used SymPy, not Sagemath. I'm assuming they're similar)

I think sympy (and maybe sage) is a bit different because they're (mostly?) overloading operators for their intended purpose -- that is, the "+" operator does semantically add python objects that represent symbolic math.
Telling students about your anti-cheating measures seems like a health inspector telling restaurants in advance the dates when he'll show up. The problem is that most professors are not going to go out of their ways to employ anti-cheating measures; by catching cheaters, you are doing a service to the larger college community by removing them.
This thread seems to suggest that there are heaps of 20$ bills lying all over the world and accessible to any software engineer.

That they are not being picked up suggests that there's some other constraint. Either extracting this value is not really worth one's time, or the bottleneck is not the ability to automate things but some other rare skill.
Hey! I'm David, the editor of the post you linked to. If there are any other topics you're interested in learning about, please let me know! We wrote another one on Salesforce (https://retool.com/blog/salesforce-for-engineers/) that was well received on HN too (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20277115). We were thinking about writing about Marketo / marketing automation solutions next. (I'm david AT retool.com)

(As an aside — when we started Retool, we ourselves didn't expect the "custom internal tools" to be such a big market. As it turns out, we now have customers that spend $400M+ / year on building custom, homegrown, internal tools! While we [or any single vendor] certainly can't capture all of it, our goal is to capture some percent of it.)
> or use 4U and waste a half inch.

... or use 4U so you can use the half inch clearance to try and help cool them enough...

:-)
My company is using SAP so it is very familiar to me. But before I joined my company, I have never heard of SAP. There are some good industry process knowledge that gives them an advantage and the software is good once you get used to it. But it can definitely be 10X better (there is a big opportunity to make it easier to customize or integrate with other software) . However, once you become their customer, the switching cost is very high even though there is better software in the market. That makes it difficult for startup to break into this market.
Motivation to maybe get off my arse and actually build something useful.
that's not hilarious. some people just need the occasional face to face interaction, and can't tolerate being alone. i used to work in a kind of hackerspace where i'd sometimes pick the large kitchen as my workspace with others there doing completely unrelated things just because it felt better than being locked up in my room.
This is thanks to many of the React dev team being strong proponents of outsourcing to micro deps for everything & remained strong supporters even after the left-pad incident.

Imagine how much more enjoyable npm would've been if prominent JS devs took a sane approach to dependencies, like the TypeScript team who have no runtime deps.

The resulting npm deps of hell [1] means they need to rely on complex build solutions like Webpack to manage it all. My preference these days is to avoid npm/yarn all together and just use TypeScript watch (tsc -w) for incremental updates which lets you develop modern JS using modern fx's (e.g. Vue/React) without any of the npm/Webpack complexity & only requires a vastly simpler build solution to minify/bundle all UMD deps together.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6s0wov/hea...
I've bound my Caps Lock to Compose, it's really quite handy.

I wish there were a Unicode lookup utility app that would display a character's compose sequences if any, but none seem to be under development / accepting feature requests or patches.
"Although the central causes of the depression are still hotly con-
tested, there is a consensus that the "passage of the Smoot-Hawley
Tariff exacerbated the Great Depression."34 Vice President Albert
Gore's assertion (in his NAFTA debate with H. Ross Perot) of our
consensus on this issue, has been corroborated.
On top of the profession's lack of agreement about the genesis of the
Great Depression, there is a disagreement about the effect of the New
Deal. In fact, the economists in the sample are almost evenly divided on
the question of whether or not when taken "as a whole, government
policies of the New Deal served to lengthen and deepen the Great
Depression." The consensus among historians is that the new Deal did
not lengthen and deepen the depression."

Whaples, Robert (March 1995). "Where Is There Consensus Among American Economic Historians? The Results of a Survey on Forty Propositions" (PDF). The Journal of Economic History. Cambridge University Press. 55 (1): 142–151. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.482.4975. doi:10.1017/S0022050700040602. JSTOR 2123771.
> Indian ethnicity

Small nit, this is a nationality, not an ethnicity.
I've seen this even at technology companies. It's like our devs hours are valuable so we can't invest them in something everyone is comfortable doing with a spreadsheet already.
It's a data entry script. If it fails they just do their job the old way until the guy fixes it. It's typing text into forms. Just make everyone do things the "old way" once a week so they still know how to do it if the script ever fails.
If you RTFA you'll see that these grasses grow well on degraded land. Wheat, barley etc does not. We have a lot of degraded land.

If you read Pascoe's book, you'll see that one of the reasons the indigenous agriculture disappeared so quickly is that stock sought out the delicious native grasses and destroyed them. Delicious means market opportunity.
Not that I know of; they're called kilobytes.
> Your argument conveniently assumes that H1s are only going to net new employees vs. those that fill the gap too.

I also conveniently assumed that global 40k headcount increase was sufficiently representative of the US headcount increase, even though it inflates the denominator. It's the nature of back-of-the-envelope calculations to be convenient.
VSCode is certainly one of the better (if not best) Electron application out there, but it is definitely memory intensive.
> there's something about having multiple copies that we like ;-)

With an attitude like that, you should consider running a backup as a service company! ;-)
I'm not sure how you figure? Have you ever seen slo-mo of a CRT television set? The pixel would be lit by the beam instantly and fade back to black before the scan line is completed; the only reason we see a rectangular image on a CRT instead of a scanning dot is persistence of vision.

Wikipedia[0] confirms that the response time for a CRT was 0.01ms on the top end and could be less than 1 µs; typical LCD panels have response times between 1-8ms.

I could definitely perceive a 30-Hz flicker as such on an ordinary CRT television. You may be confusing that with the fact that thin 1-pixel lines of alternating colors tended to smear into blended colors on a CRT in games like Sonic the Hedgehog because the chroma channel of a composite signal was of lower resolution than the video hardware's output.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_CRT,_LCD,_Plasma...
It's sales and marketing.
Indian universities outside of the top rung (IITs et al.) have been issuing worthless degrees for at least 3 decades. In my state during the 90s tech/outsourcing boom a lot of corrupt politicians realized that engineering education was a gold mine and opened degree factories all over the state. I graduated from a supposedly "reputable" university in 2004 and was basically unemployable on graduation.

Looking back here are a few memories of my college education experience that stand out:

* 1 computer "lab" with 15 PCs shared amongst 720 students. Only 1 PC had a dial-up internet connection that rarely worked.

* Majority of the courses taught by industry rejects who were unemployable.

* Hilariously we learnt standard nix command line tools (sed , awk, filesystem commands etc.) by writing the commands and their outputs using a pen and paper never once using a real terminal + shell because the college did not have a single nix machine.

* "Systems Programming" professor walks in the first day and declares she cannot code in C and 8086 assembly which the course mandated. She encouraged us to seek external tutoring (coaching classes as they are known in India) instead of relying on her.

* There was small cottage industry that sold finished projects to students - including source code, project reports, electronic circuitry where applicable. About 30% of the class bought these “projects” off the shelf.

Thankfully my family was able to send me to an American university for a graduate degree allowing me to have a shot at a tech career. Now having lived and worked in the Bay Area for 15 years I can say that quality of education at an average community college in the US is far superior to the tier-2 / tier-3 universities in India.
And ignores the fact that google already has images of millions of miles of road across multiple years / weather conditions AND the worlds largest real-time automobile movement database for that little app the call “maps”.
I'm not a teacher, so maybe I should just stay out of it, but I'm of the opinion that teachers should try to help cheaters the same way they help failing students. Cheating is really just a proxy for failure, so why not just treat it the same as failing?

That being said, some kinds of cheating don't deserved to be punished. The given scenario is bad for the cheater, but some students put so much effort into writing notes to cheat with that they just end up doing the amount of effort required to pass.
If everyone had to disclose their margins and we removed this information asymmetry, it could be a great thing for consumers, and a great thing for efficient markets.

There are a lot of grandmas and tech illiterate people buying laptops for incredibly inflated prices, from often smaller and more questionable computer shops. We're talking about 5 year old CPUs, 4GB of RAM, sometimes even a hard drive and no solid state drive.

If they had to disclose that the $999 laptop they're selling only costs $400 and they make a margin of $600 on it, and the consumer takes their money elsewhere and buys a genuinely reasonable laptop, I think that's a fantastic outcome.
there was a young man who said "though it seems that I know that I know, what I'd like to see is the 'I' that knows me, when I know that I know that I know."
Always happy to share what I know!
What happens with that data, though? Is this a non production data entry job?
> There must have been some groundswell movement amongst users all demanding that the boot process be made more "secure".

There wasn't. Users want security in general but most people would not even realize it if a boot process was insecure nor would they understand the implications.

> There must have been well-publicised cases where "bad guys" were hijacking the boot process.

Yes. The "bad" guys are the people running "unauthorized" software on computer hardware. Governments and corporations would very much like to restrict what users can and can't do. Widespread cryptography is viewed as an existential threat to law enforcement and intelligence gathering. Companies enjoy owning their users and being in a monopoly position with regards to the software market for their devices. So we get systems which control the user instead of systems controlled by the user.
We are always looking for ideas!

Can you give a few examples, please?
Want your mind to be blown even more? I worked for a multinational company, I would not be surpised that this company is among the top 10 SAP customers worldwide. Well, everybody hated hated hated SAP, it was a huge hindrance instead of any help.Any use beyond of a "dumb" database was a huge PITA, and I am not fully convinced that all in all it helped more than damaged the business. It was clunky, unintutive, slow, ugly, archaic and a long etc. There were these guys, that were trained as "experts" but they frankly behave more like witch doctors. SAP is coasting just by its name and legacy but from my POV is ripe for the taking. It is not easy though, ERP systems are hard, and changing them ever harder, but in my fantasy world I would like to develop some program and would be very happy to skim
0.00001% of their income.
> At the end of the day, people are there to come out with a degree and a good grade

I’ve been listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, and one thing that struck me is that early philosophers seemed to consider virtue the end goal of philosophy. That is to say, we should care less about if our physics students can do physics, and more if doing physics had made them more ethical human beings. It’s quite a reversal we’ve ended up with...
I don't think anybody would cheat based on how easy it is, but they would based on how common, normal, and socially acceptable they think it is.
For fun, I asked my mom if she remembers why we went to Holiday World more. She mentioned the free sunscreen (she didn't remember the free soft drinks[1]), and said that Kings Island was too crowded.

[1] and I hadn't remembered the free sunscreen until I read the parent post.
According to the link in the comment, apparently React has a total dependency tree with only 7 nodes, which is the opposite of what you are describing.

I'm actually surprised, I thought React had many more dependencies.

Edit: Removed comment related to typo, no longer relevant.
buy insurance (health and life) that will provide for your family when you are gone(disabled).
Pascoe's conclusions aren't really controversial in historical circles, only political ones. The primary sources quoted in the book make it pretty there was more extensive agriculture going on than most Australians think.
For sure, but sometimes the boss has a boss. Or takes you to HR. Or some other thing you didn't think of in advance. In all these cases it didn't matter tactically, but it did strategically.
Correct. His channel is here:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdcemy56JtVTrsFIOoqvV8g
What do you manufacture?
There are also alternate vendors of ERP. Microsoft Dynamics NAV for example. At my current shop I manage INFOR VISUAL ERP.
When I was starting school, my dad had informed me that SAP was HUGE, and consultants with SAP skills were pulling in 200k, back when even google employees were still waiting to IPO.
What's extremely different is how a toddler act when both parents are there vs. alone with one parent.

They often act out, try all the things, push the boundaries and run amok. One on one they're lovely.
Well, for a toy app, it's pretty simple, but once you begin to build real-world apps, with 30 or 40+ components, and their children, I just found passing state and props around a bit messy and hacky. Of course, then you introduce Redux, and all is well. But now you have to deal with transducers and actions, and so on. I just didn't find the tradeoff worth it, and prefer native development.

I'm sure every React developer has at some point found themselves banging their head on the wall trying to figure out why some child component isn't updating.

And yes, it's a personal preference, but I'm also not a fan of Javascript. If another client wants a single codebase app, I'm really gonna give Flutter a nice long look. I've read the docs, and it looks quite appealing.
Did you happen to explain why you were teaching this way?
There seems to be more people doing sales/marketing than software engineers (though I don't have any numbers).

Why aren't they picking up the bills?
Dated, but Google Gears?
I'd be happy with a rule saying...

* Order total: $34.00

* Paid to restaurant: $16.20

* Paid to Uber Eats: $12.30

* Paid to driver: $5.50
I spent about a year writing a whole library of AHK scripts that could be mixed and matched to completely automate working within a legacy database system. Data entry people loved it and I even had a number of excel integrations for the people who keep everything in spreadsheets. Also GUIs, etc.

It beats the hell out of copy-pasting from one app to the other and hoping you're doing it right. 8 hours of data entry you are bound to make mistakes.

AHK also helped me move into more technical work, so I have a real soft spot for it. However, I am lamenting the move to SaaS websites because not only are there about 3x as many clicks as a native app, but it's really hard to automate with AHK.
I don't think AHK or python or whatever is the issue here, it's automating the consumption of a ton of data without consulting the consumers or vendors of that data, or enacting correctness guarantees. It seems like you're hung up on AHK vs not-AHk and that's not something I care about. I've seen and been involved in a lot of naive automation of human processes just to see all of the edge cases destroy a business for weeks or more on end.
Not that trivial. The Tesla P100D can break 600kw now, but has only been able to do it in the last month or so.
Why would you use ERP instead of a regular SQL database?

edit Got a lot of vote downs. This was a genuine question from someone completely ignorant on what ERP is. Not trying to say that SQL is better, but I'm asking this because I'm ignorant of what ERP is and the description makes it appear as if it's a database.

What's the difference? would be better wording I guess.
I don't think that is often trivial and it wouldn't surprise me to see junior programmers struggle with things like that, but maybe the average junior programmer is better than I expect.
You could theoretically place said cash in an envelope in the trunk for the exchange
In big courses at my university we'd print 4 colors of exams, with 2 actual versions. It was a little extra work upfront, but we almost never had to deal with cheaters.

Bottom line, my job was to teach, grade homework and proctor exams. The last thing I want to do is play piggie -- I don't wanna stay up at night worrying over my student getting expelled / deported. The easiest way to keep focused on my actual job is to take some precautions that make cheating feel risky to the students.

So I really don't understand the other professor in this anecdote. Your students are stressed, sometimes as a result of bad life choices, sometimes as a result of external issues like family death&drama, sometimes as a result of sadistic asshole professors... typically it's a combination of the above. So for each 200-person exam, you'll frequently have students for whom this is literally the worst week of their brief and sheltered lives. They might make a choice they'll regret. So you have a choice: add risk to scare all but the very most dedicated cheaters (and fuck those kids), or lay a trap for the vulnerable kids that the skilled cheaters will skate through.
Autohotkey is awesome. I used it as part of an automation workflow to remove an hour or longer of daily routine work each engineer had to do each morning as part of their job. Sometimes things failed, but it was used to automate, among other things, a GUI only app.

For "Fast Window Switching":

Linux: Use jumpapp: https://github.com/mkropat/jumpapp

OS X: Use triggers in QuickSilver: https://qsapp.com/

This is one feature I could not do without in any OS now.
It seems that for the most part these jobs require: low technical skill, physical presence, and low amounts of flexibility. These also seem like the types of jobs where a longer work week leads to more productivity, in that more "widgets" are produced (length of the work week is another hot topic here on HN). But these also seem like the jobs that are more vulnerable to automation.

I'll give some examples. I'm seeing entire movie theaters remove the box office and use touch screens. This can reduce the number of needed staff by 20%. We see similar things at grocery stores (a single person can man 6+ registers, just needing to check an ID, which this can probably be automated soon). Clothing sales are moving online to places like Amazon. Etc.

So how do we create a more fair economy? One where everyone has the opportunity to rise into jobs that they want? Get the education they need for that job? Do we let X% of the population just not be productive but still get a basic income? What's that do for mental health? Do we create meaningless jobs that are just jobs for the sake of a job? What's that do for mental health? How do we provide equal opportunities (not equal outcomes) for everyone? More importantly, how do we develop that kind of culture?
> And as long as your drive is backed up and you trust the backup, then who cares if the failure rate is 1% or 2%?

I would choose to pay a premium to reduce the chance of me needing to restore from backup as often. Not a big premium, but one that makes sense at the one or two drive purchase scale that might make a whole lot less sense at a one or two thousand drive purchase.

I'd pay an extra $20 or $30 on a ~$300 drive to drop from a 2% to 1% failure rate... (As it turns out, for home I pretty much buy drives in pairs and mirror them for all my not-in-a-laptop storage - so I guess I pay a 100% premium for reliability...)