skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Linux was always a disaster in terms of user experience and isn't improving

I'm honestly pretty baffled as to what keeps this meme alive, as KDE and GNOME are both very popular and provide simple, intuitive interfaces for the typical user. Plasma is only complex if you're the type that really wants to customize, but there its complexity is (mostly) necessary for its wide range of possible configuration. People have this idea that desktop Linux users are all a bunch of dorks playing around with Arch and tiling window managers all day and then posting their anime wallpaper setups on /r/unixporn, but that hasn't actually been true for a long time.
Behind the paywall:

https://outline.com/Y2nTEK

(Copy WSJ link, paste into bitly to shorten, then paste shortened url into outline.com)
No, the reason the believe persists is because of all the people who have wispy unshaven hair, who think they're improving things by shaving it, but then who have more visible hair than they had before but now have to keep shaving it. This misconception leads you to do exactly the right thing.
We've been ordering through them once every couple weeks during the pandemic. It's really cool. Even though the robot itself is really slow (takes a good 40 mins for a 1 mile journey), they're usually pretty available and responsive, and so we'd get things faster than human-based platforms (who has to be available, then go to the pick up point, then deliver).
I wonder if this will affect the Hertz graduate research fellowships. I'd guess probably not.
I can't seem to find documentation about AirDrop installation of .ipa backups I have. Also that Apple Configurator 2 process appears to force me to update the apps before they are backed up (I have automatic updates turned off because of how often app updates tend to be regressions rather than improvements)... Also, how do I "sync it with Finder"? (what is "it"?)
Opportunity can come from ideas that are correct but not generally accepted as correct.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4783265/

If it were to work it would be a useful new modality. I am not promoting it, but it's on my "watch list" due to efforts by AYTU at Cedars Sinai.
And now we've gone full circle. One of the proposed use cases for containers when Solaris Containers came about (and probably also FreeBSD Jails before it) was that you could easily give a software developer a full OS instance to play about and break stuff or to do whatever they desire, instead of restricting them to the confinement of their home directory.
He has an eccentric personality to say the least. I don't think any other CEO would Tweet their stock price is too high...or name their child X Æ A-12.
I switched from a pretty sweet thermoworks probe with remote reader to an app and the app is so much better. It’s cleaner and easier, doesn’t require an extra device in my pocket, and lets me manage the temperature on the smoker.
(That was an invitation for you to explain why you thought the article showed some sort of ulterior motive, if you didn't catch it.)
Apple is a phone company that has a side business in personal computers. This is good for Apple, because the personal computer business as a whole has been pretty stagnant for a long time. The article would have been much improved by at least making a nod to the fact that their beloved computer make was now in fact primarily making other devices
I can tell you about a WebAssembly killer app for a small niche. lichess uses WebAssembly to run a state-of-the-art chess engine inside your browser to help you analyze games [1]. Anyone who wants to know what a super-human chess player thinks of their game can fire it up on their desktop, laptop, or even phone (not highly recommended, it's rough on your battery life).

Obviously very serious chess players will still want to install a database and engine(s) on their own computer, but for casual players who just occasionally want to check what they should have done on move eleven to avoid losing their knight it's a game changer.

[1] https://lichess.org/analysis
Lifting works faster. Trying to change your posture by noticing and correcting it is just brutally difficult. You need to mindfully check in multiple times an hour. Lifting you only need to attend to your posture while you’re doing it and your posture will improve without conscious effort as your tendons and sinews stretch and you get more muscle. Running or dancing will do the same thing but the returns on each hour of work are going to be lower than for lifting weights.
This is just tiddlywiki, no?
I recognise his accent, but few people have experience associating long term with South Africans.
It's a worry all right!
> The Playstation 5. 8 CPUs at 3.2GHz each, 24GB of RAM, 14 teraflops of GPU, and a big solid state disk. That's a lot of compute engine for $400. Somebody will probably make supercomputers out of rooms full of those.

Mmm, this sounds like exactly what people said at the time the PS3 was going to be released, and I can only recall of one example where the PS3 was ever used in a cluster and that probably was not that very useful in the end.
Terraform is a game changer and easy to learn
What are some solid resources for learning more about optimization? I graduated from a bootcamp, and at both jobs I have had I ask my leads about optimization and making it run even faster and am often told that we don't need to worry about it because of how fast computers are now. But I am sitting there thinking about how I want my stuff to run like lightning for every system.
Teenage Programmer Makes Self Driving Car in Grand Theft Auto
His accent is also really mild, relatively speaking
How do you combine statistics-based AI with GOFAI?
Hey, I loved your 10 minute python tutorial!
Freer as in freedom. There would be less incentive to build massive centralized surveillance networks to serve targeted ads if ads did not exist.
Typically your credit cards are cancelled.
Some resources for that:

https://www.fossjobs.net/
https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources
Thanks, I have been thinking about this lately too.
What we’ee learning with General Flynn is that they don’t look at your locked screen at all. They simply ask one of their FVEY partners to look at everything, then pass it back. No warrant needed!

They say there’s risk that FISA authorization might not get congressional renewal. Let’s all hope so.
I had a blast writing a graph editor in Svelte but it was hard to debug. That was right after 3.0 came out, if it’s easier to debug now then I would love to build with it
Ask HN: What do you do online?
Zig. There's a Why Zig When There is Already CPP, D, and Rust? writeup at https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Why-Zig-When-There-is-Al...
This is an excellent question! I wouldn't be surprised if notifying someone that their subscription is cancelled due to inactivity would cause them to suddenly value their subscription.

I bet you're right.
I don't know about Ubuntu, but my experience with Gnome on Arch Linux and Arch-derived distributions has been pretty good as far as high-DPI displays go. I've only had to make minor tweaks to a few configurations here and there depending on the application.

If you want to avoid tweaking, stick to native applications, and perhaps more importantly, go for a manufacturer with proper firmware support for high-DPI screens like System76 (Adder WS), Dell (XPS 13), or Lenovo (ThinkPad P1/P53/X1).
Perhaps to eliminate old accounts that have the discounted subscriptions?
I'd love to have a browser without anything extra for my dad. No plugins, no questions, nothing that would confuse him.
I speak up against cryptocurrency because it's a cancer. It's a hype adding to climate change without any real world use case whatsoever.
The jargon of FP is crazy though! How do you learn all of that?
That article was somewhat disappointing, but maybe I've been watching too much Tesla battery investor day hype.

Between the tabless design patent, the maxwell dry electrode, and other chemistry improvements, I'm interested to see what the battery presentation boils down to in terms of improved density from the dry cathode and cost improvements from tabless and the various chemistries discussed.

That million mile reliability is nice, but I'm really hoping for under 100$/KWhr at pack level with improved density to enable 400+ mile ranges.

The Tesla prototype around the Nurburgring had me speculating about really dense batteries that enabled a much lighter racing car than what the Taycan was limited by.
If it's all about illegal immigration, why hAVE trump and Steven Miller decimated TPS, asylum, done the Muslim ban, etc. It's not about illegal immigration, it's about white nationalism.
Page Weight Test – Measure the Size of Your Website
I wouldn't call it minimal. It's got enough for many workloads.
Show HN: Life is Short – Game of Life in 203 chars of HTML/JavaScript
ICLR 2020: NLP Highlights
A few scummy companies put huuuge termination fees in the case of a customer's death. In one case it was equivalent to 100 years service for a phone setup my grandfather had!

In most cases I bet they get paid - usually whoever is overseeing a loved ones estate really doesn't want to be going to court etc.
Pack or cell? These days the $100/KWhr target typically refers to pack level costs, which is also what is supposed to enable price parity with ICE cars.
Do solar panels eventually stop producing any power?

I have some second hand panels that are around 10 years old, I'm sure they are less efficient and I have had to replace diodes etc - but it seems to me that if you have lots of space (as we do in Aus) you could just keep adding new panels without getting rid of old ones
Slack does this too, every month. (Maybe it’s more common in enterprise offerings?)
Do those companies have careers/jobs pages? I'd like to add them to this page:

https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources
Just give up on the idea that we can expect people to work many hours ~continuously, on a regular basis

This conflicts with the much, much stronger profit motive.
While we are piling on, Android's autocorrect is absolute shite. It won't suggest or correct for misspelled words that are obviously one letter off, and then replace correctly spelled words like "the" because it knows better than you. It's not smart enough to get that you typed.period instead of space and correct it. It's as if the devs that work on it don't even use it.
Amazon did this for me back in 2005 when they introduced Prime. I used the free trial for an order (to get it in two days), but then didn't order anything else and forgot to cancel.

They sent me an email that they weren't going to charge me because I hadn't used it, but I was free to sign up in the future if I decided I wanted it.

It was so refreshing, it made me a lifelong customer.
> Almost 16 million people created accounts in the first three months of the year, nearly double the new sign-ups it saw in the final months of 2019.

No doubt the quarantine was a solid motivator to sign up.
If you ever feel like someone doesn't care, just stop paying your bills. *typo fixed
Python ecosystem is precisely the one that does approach this level of simplicity, because it has turtle graphics out of the box. Here's one complete example from the docs:

from turtle import *
color('red', 'yellow')
begin_fill()
while True:
forward(200)
left(170)
if abs(pos()) < 1:
break
end_fill()
done()
They don’t do the same with EC2.
Shorter CEOs: "Dear doctors, who among you has no scruples and likes money? We'd like your help lying to the American people, because their deaths are a price we're willing to pay to keep our profits up"
Previous discussion 10 years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1111826
I ordered one in pre-sale and love it. It had a slight keyboard problem but I found the github issue in the open source firmware, cherrypicked the fix before it was released, flashed it, and it was great. They released it a week later. Pretty awesome experience.
No, but every comment I hear says exactly the same as yours - that it’s phenomenal.

It’s definitely the exception, though. Nothing else comes close, so I’m having difficulty justifying shelling out $1000 on something for a single game, no matter how exceptional.
How is that scummy? You bought something, and they're charging you for it.
I think the sweet spot is transitioning to remote after 2 or 3 years onsite. You have enough relationships and context that you can be more effective.
It means the original programmers of PAC-MAN didn't "understand" the game either :-). There was never an "engine"
Solid state nanopores: still in research: https://nanoporetech.com/how-it-works/types-of-nanopores

I'm pretty sure they will come out with it. The protein nanopores were the first wave of nanopore research - its tried tested and stable now so they stick with it.

A few years after they launched, the first solid state nanopores were being demonstrated in the lab. Commercialising solid state nanopores seems to be easier if anything than protein nanopores because they slot right into silicon fabrication.

On PCR/barcoding ..
Yeah, thats right - do it right in the PCR step .. sometimes we avoid it, if we are not yet sure about the protocol. I think what I meant to say is that the full promise of nanopore sequencing for me is achieved only when you can skip having to amplify/multiplex/barcode - just extract dna, wash, add sequencing adaptors and go - for almost anything.

I think the way they are talked about people generally come in expecting that TODAY .. they think they can literally stick a single sample with no prep and get 1gb of sequencing done for 10$ in an hour. I've seen quite a lot of that. (even from people with PhD's :) )

So yeah its more that the minute you go PCR, you're in for a minimum 20$ per sample, often its the highest cost line item in your whole process.

If you're doing things like 16S metagenomics, you get sequencing at 2-3$ and prep at 10 times that, starts to feel "wrong" after a while, if you get what I mean.

Why're trying everything we can to make sure we're running at full capacity so that we can always give low prices even if its single samples.

Also seeing if we can reduce prep cost with microfluidics/mems - they have voltrax for this, but there are a few other vendors in the market. That has the positive knock-on effect of also reducing labour cost.
Having been fully remote for 4 years now, I've had plenty of water cooler type conversations with other remote employees- humans are social creatures, and with an experienced fully remote work force we end up socializing remotely, including coming up with cool Gonzo ideas.

I'm not arguing it's a 1-1 trade off, but it also doesn't go anywhere near zero.
It's part of the keyboard. Just use another.
Immunity Passports and the Perils of Conferring Coronavirus Status
Opposite side of this. Back in the day there was this company called Silicon Graphics (SGI). They had this API called GL, it’s what you know as OpenGL.

Software was written for their workstations that ran their UNIX OS IRIX. This is where Maya and many other awesome programs were built. Maya now runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, etc.

Cross platform code is fantastic.
A walled garden is not the same as a curated app store. You could have the same benefit if apple would allow non-app-store apps to be installed after flipping a switch, tethering with a Mac or some other voodoo.
Have you looked deeper than just hodl memes and Bitcoin? Ethereum is a highly technical project that doesn't really care about money and lots of people here on Hacker News find interesting topics regarding it. Web Assembly will be the base programming platform for example, which is one of the reasons he included it.

If you read about the Baseline protocol (EY, Microsoft, SAP etc building neutral interconnections between consortiums), ENS/IPFS, or digital identity systems you might find something that interests you and is more relevant than the mindless hodl ancaps. It's actually a pretty exciting field to be in as a computer scientist with almost no end of boundary pushing experiments and cryptographic primitives to play with and build on top of.
This is why online consumer platforms should be treated as public utilities once they reach a certain size. Amazon’s online shopping arm, youtube, facebook, and gmail are products that clearly meet the bar. Search engines probably do too, at least with respect to web site owners.
I'm fine with your equation of plants with solar power. But it's not cheaper; look at the price of biofuels. Aren't they in fact more expensive than fossil fuels and solar panels?
> I include a decent package manager with homebrew

It it didn't come out of the box then it is not "just works" isn't it? heheh

Ubuntu is just-works too now. No apple-level HiDPI though.

However bad the lack of ports and butterfly keyboards are (which is now fixed). Nothing comes close to the hardware or the HiDPI handling in macbooks.
On a related note -- Audible free trial seems.. offered cyclically?

I seem to sign up every year or so, spend my credits, and cancel. They keep offering it though, and now I'm considering buying (as I enjoy the medium, turns out), so I suppose it worked.
Beta introductory quantum computing textbook [pdf]
One thing I like about C as a systems programming language is that it is easy for every other language to bind to it. I’m fine with C++ if the external interface is extern “C”, but that is often not the case. I don’t know how easy it is for other languages to bind to Rust. It would be nice if a language could automatically generate Swig definition files or something similar. However one is going to run into language semantics and impedance mismatches with richer languages. The simplicity of “C” makes a nice bind target. Although I have yet to see a thorough binding to Win32, so I suspect the preprocessor makes this difficult.
Rocket propulsion tech. Not just because of SpaceX, but I really hope we develop newer and more efficient propulsion techniques.
Imagine if gyms did this with memberships. They'd lose a fortune.
Yes. They were. :)
its a few days late so i dont know whether anybody will read it but my thoughts exactly.

there should be a significant more research dollars spent on this as there is so much unknown there. just that fact that we still dont know how general anesthesia works and how we regain consciousness back in itself is quite fascinating. IMO in all this philosophical debate about nature of consciousness we often overlook the basic starting points in front of our eyes what mechanishm are necessary to sustain it. we need serious research on this otherwise it will be dominated by psuedo science BS like deepak chopra.
This is where my mind went too. I don't think Netflix has generally grandfathered-in pricing, my bill has always gone up when their advertised price does. If there are some folks who are getting a year or so of promo pricing, I don't see how cancelling their accounts is advantageous.
Price point, access, quality of analysts.
~05 hrs ago: Nearly half of the Twitter accounts discussing 'reopening America' may be bots - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23277536

~11 hrs ago: Half of the Twitter accounts pushing to 'reopen America' are bots, researchers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23274079

~23 hrs ago: CMU Researchers: Nearly Half of Accounts Tweeting About Coronavirus Are bots - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23268521

~24 hrs ago: Nearly half of Twitter accounts pushing to reopen America may be bots - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23261815

~24 hrs ago: Researchers: Nearly Half of Accounts Tweeting About Coronavirus Are Likely bots - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23259645

~24 hrs ago: Nearly Half of the Twitter Accounts Discussing ‘Reopening America’ May Be bots - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23258169

~24 hrs ago: Researchers: Nearly Half of Accounts Tweeting About Coronavirus Are Likely bots - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23255283
10B Distributed Monopoly dollars.
C doesn't have "public" and "private" at all. Java has them for both functions and variables (so long as they are members), as does Delphi. The only difference between the two in that regard is that Java requires visibility on every declaration, while in Delphi using the keyword sets it for all following declarations, until another keyword changes it.

On the whole, I don't see a problem with doing Delphi (or Free Pascal + Lazarus) in school, especially if students have studied Pascal earlier - it teaches them many of the same concepts they'll later see in the likes of Java and C++, and it gives them powerful tools to create "real" GUI apps. There are better options these days, but it's not the worst one.
> Nobody cares if a solar panel is 2% efficient if it costs 100 times less to fabricate and install

I use a modern portable solar panel that's in the realm of ~25% efficiency when camping, and I certainly wish it were smaller for the same output. I'd be willing to pay more for that.

There's obviously segments that care more about efficiency than cost, not all solar applications have unlimited space.
I’m not sure I follow the question: when you buy a bond, you’re lending money to the issuer, increasing its debt.

There’s no shortage of buyers for government securities, anyway. In yesterday’s auction of 28-day U.S. Treasury bills [1], for example, the bid-to-cover ratio was 2.75, meaning that the total of the bids was 2.75 times the face amount of the securities actually sold, and the highest interest rate the government had to agree to pay, to borrow as much as it wanted in that auction, was only 0.091%.

[1] https://www.treasurydirect.gov/instit/annceresult/press/prea...
Because it's against their business model.
They want you to subscribe and not come.
IOS Autocorrect does all of the same shit. It's always been baffling to me that no autocorrect seems to be designed around the type of errors you're likely to actually make on a phone keyboard. Mistype the first letter? Nope, never gonna catch that. Being able to recognize simple prefix and suffix constructions on the fly would be nice too. If I put "re" or "pre" before any valid word, it should recognize what I'm going for.
Node Red is nice. I used it today inside of Home Assistant to automate some stuff.
The Apple I cared about died when the Macintosh arrived. Or was it when the rainbow logo was replaced by chrome? Or was it when they abandoned Hypercard?

Or when I had to spend hours researching how to tweak the serial port to do 31250 bps I/O MIDI? Or when the serial ports disappeared and my n x $1000 of serial-port hardware meant I should buy a new Mac.

By the time it released mobile phones with hard-wired batteries, the good Apple was a distant memory. Borged.
Oh c'mon now.

> The start menu can be customized to turn all of that off. If you want to pin your own things to it, you can.

Shouldn't be there in the first place, including all of the other advertising and telemetry.

> WSL2 is going to drop soon. Looks like a good move by Microsoft.

It'll be always a hack. Will never beat native Unix.

> What kind of work do you do exactly that disqualifies Windows from being a "serious option for real work"?

WSL is a hack, NTFS chokes on small files (web dev), advertising and telemetry.

Also, you're computer randomly shutting off and locking itself up, jesus christ what the fuck (TBH MacOS also has this but it's 100x easier to disable).
Not sure they have removed anything, but add something.
Augmented reality. With every major tech company working on it, the next fee years will be interesting.
Free Pascal is still around, and still includes a text mode IDE written in their own fork of Turbo Vision.
We are doing fine and V2 is coming soon with a ton of improvements. I just have to occasionally point out our existence again.

The pulldown showing other devices on a network does look spiffy but that wont scale. We have users with thousands of devices on a virtual LAN and the protocol will scale far larger. Not only will that not fit in a menu but any system that relies on a master list will fall down. That list and refreshing it will get huge.

We are doing the tech first, spiff second.