skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Someone said that Slack was the "open office" of communication software. I think this is a good analogy - but at my work it feels more like working from a huge, lively dinner table. Sure - you can put on some noise cancelling headphones and ignore the conversation, but it will still be distracting, and worse, people will judge you for being antisocial.

Every once in a while, if you are lonely or your current task is sporadic and slow, it makes sense to bring your computer to the dinner table and casually work while being part of the party. However, if this is your environment 40 hours a week, its highly taxing to productivity. My only answer is to mute all Slack notifications or turn off Slack all together. This works in the short term, but in the long term I bet it will be detrimental as I wont be seen as a "helpful" person that answers questions. Ironically, I think it's exactly those types of qualities that will help you to get promoted. Our Slack rewards the developer that just "hangs out" and answers questions all day instead of getting meaningful work done.

That being said, I think the problem isn't necessarily Slack, but large, poorly organized organization. Personally, I am part of a dozen "catch all" Slack channels that put me into direct contact with over 100 people. That might make sense for some jobs, but it's absurd for a software developer. My actual day to day work involves mainly working with a few developers and a manager or two. My Slack should reflect that - it should literally just be a chat between these 5 people.

The rest of the organization should not be able to Slack me that easily, and instead only be able to contact me through a triage process. If there is really a question from someone that I am best qualified to answer, then I am willing to answer it, but they should have to first determine that from other, more external facing people. So I think the ultimate problem with Slack is that it makes it too easy for too many loosely related people to contact each other. It's like giving every passenger in the airplane a way to send a message to the pilot.
Is there anything like this for Rust or C++?

I like the idea of code generation instead of doing the work at runtime (like in ORMs). This is like making your database schema the IDL spec.
Creating and Modifying PDF Files in Python
The adjustments are still being made. I’d say your point would be stronger after more market corrections have been made- for example, the notoriously unsustainable and unprofitable food delivery app space is still being propped up by this crisis.
It's just a super key with a custom logo, every keyboard has one. Customize it to do whatever you want.
Well gosh. You don't undo 30 years overnight unless you have a magic wand.
Thing you are forgetting about the Mongols
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_conquest_of_China
Can we create cozy communities online?
Hey HN,

I recently started playing Stardew Valley, and I've been completely taken with the idea. For people who are unaware - Stardew Valley is a game where a person tired of corporate work moves to his grandpa's farm and builds relationship with the small community there.

The Shelter-In-Place orders have me thinking if we can recreate this coziness online. What if we are stuck with the same group of people everyday over many years, between jobs and we create cross boundary friendships over a long course.

One way I can think of is with a Discord group, with channels not crossing 25 members - and channels remain private.

Here's the Discord server I've created:

https://discord.gg/c89DMsC

Join in if you think the idea is worth exploring.
Show HN: Review, comment and approve all your documents in Slack
Just because it's possible in theory doesn't make it a good idea. In org-mode, anything that isn't plaintext is quite painful to set up and to maintain, at least until you've memorized two dozen arcane key chords. I would love for Emacs to get a Notion-like UI (still with plaintext underneath obviously) one day but until then, I'm okay with people using the best tool for the job, which isn't a text editor.

(I'm an enthusiastic org-mode user, by the way.)
There is an active forum and also a Discord server!

https://www.orionsarm.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=3500

https://discord.gg/gcBKANv
What is M-Windows?
> This is how you did compile time assertions in C before C introduced _Static_assert.

That's the biggest issue with autoconf... it tends to spend a lot of time basically asking the question "are you some weird Unix from 1997?" that no one actually cares about the answer to, because people don't take the time to curate their build systems.

At its core task of figuring out how to compile and install properly on a system, autotools can do a surprisingly bad job. One of its most frustrating habits is dropping flags from the linker invocation ("I don't know what -flto does, but I'll drop it from the linker even though the user explicitly told me to link with it because unknown flags tend to bad for the linker").

Yes, build systems are a complicated three-way tussle between the system, the developer, and the user, and we've done a very bad job as a community at finding good tools to mediate this tug-of-war.
Essentially yes, that's correct.
Regarding physical hoarding of bills, you should consider investing in a scansnap scanner - you can throw paper that's barely organized into a pile and it'll scan both sides into fully ocr'ed beautifully corrected duplex PDFs. Can't imagine life without it anymore!
it’s still LPC-ish, yes.

a lot of the work in modern codecs goes into good VQ for the codebook, and better bit allocations.

LPC10 sounds like ass, but damn is it cheap on bits!
>> This notion that time is just a fourth dimension is highly misleading. In special relativity, the time directions are structurally different from the space directions.

In "A World without Time" Palle Yourgrau makes it clear that Kurt Gödel didn't think so, and that Einstein himself, who was good friends with Gödel, mostly agreed with him on this. I'll take Einstein's word above Maudlin's here... I don't mean to make this an "argument by appeal to authority", but Maudlin starts out by making this dubious assertion about special relativity, which I think is the wrong move if he wants to convince anyone.

As for the rest of the interview, I don't understand his geometry, but he also goes on about "the problem of why things started out in a low-entropy state", and I think that there are many ways of envisioning cosmology and/or metaphysics under which this isn't a problem at all. I just started reading Carlo Rovelli's "The Order of Time", which comes down firmly on the other side of this argument, for example.
I thought the hip thing these days is to use Meson for C/C++ builds?
Like others I also used the RSS to email route, because my mail system has everything a RSS reader needs and then more.

It's at this point I realized I spent more time skimming over title and summaries and marking all entries as read than actually reading content that felt interesting. RSS is the ultimate form of information flood and it didn't bring as much value as it should have so I stopped completely and relied on "organic" link aggregators, namely HN and Reddit, because content is triaged by a community whose appeal to news I share.

Maybe I just wasn't subscribed to the correct feeds ? I saw a post a long time ago where RSS is not for feeds with multiple articles in a day or in a week, it's for those very low-volume little websites where authors publish one post per month but you still want to keep track of them. Maybe I should get into that again
My work has more than 100 slack channels (I once asked if there was a place to see a list of all slack channels and was met with laughter. Apparently that isn’t something slack provides?) Whenever I need a question answered by a particular team I’ll post it to what seems like might be the most relevant channel. 99/100 they will direct me to a new channel I’ve never heard from. So I’ll join that channel and post my question. At this point I have about 80 channels spread across 5... whatever groups of channels are called in slack. Frankly it is overwhelming. It would be a full time job just trying to keep up with all the channels (I’d estimate there are 3000-10000 new messages everyday across all channels). I haven’t figured out anyway to know if something has been posted that would interest me under the deluge. On occasion I’ll be searching for something and discover that on a channel a very important announcement or policy change was made recently that I missed under the deluge. Anyway, I’ve given up. I’ve turned off notifications and don’t even open it up unless I have a question that needs answered. Then I start the arduous task of trying to figure out the right channel.
Their model is around workplace communication in general, it doesn't have to be remote. And maybe they're just pushers, not takers.
The secondary question though is: Why does the energy always dissipate by 50% in both the electric and hydrodynamic models?

Is there some underlying physical explanation of this? Something that says that "in a dynamical system the maximum efficiency can be at most 50%".
Very nice! The hydraulic analogy actually works for electric circuits in general, and can be made precise (you can calculate how much pressure corresponds to one volt etc), though the numbers involved can get a little silly: http://amasci.com/miscon/voltpres.html
Thanks! I get fairly surprised by how handy JS bookmarklets can be, like when I was not experienced with Unix scripting. :-) Would you mind taking a look at this [question](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61973488/js-bookmarklets...)?
Explicit State Machines in React
I sort of wonder if I would like using Spotify for podcasts. One thing that I like is that I have one button on my phone which I press when I want to listen to music, and another when I want to listen to podcasts. If I have mixed content, and for instance if autoplay will sometimes play music and sometimes a podcast I feel like this will make Spotify worse for music as well.
Unless there's no physical office at all, and the employees are told to work from home (the article mentioned this), I think it's a hard sell for employers to pay their employee's share of rent.

If I were an employer and have rented an office space, whether the space is full or empty or half empty, I'm still paying more or less the same. Yes, there are coworking spaces where I can pay per headcount, but it's much more expensive (because the problem is now passed to the operator).
Most email clients have a 2-click solution to "mark all as read", which is more than enough in my opinion
See also Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. There's a lot of hacking going on in that one leading to some very interesting scenes.

Granted, they're not comatose, but the sensations their minds are receiving do not match reality.
Small Businesses Face Biggest Tax Increase in Years Under Biden's Tax Proposals
http://underactuated.csail.mit.edu/Spring2020/
Author here. Thank you. It's a bit of an experiment, glad you enjoy it.
I like the idea of Org Mode, but for me it is just a painful to use. Vscode with the "Markdown All in One" does everything I could possibly need. It is still plain text and it should be portable to any tool that can display markdown files. The biggest draw is the keyboard shortcuts are far less complicated and more ergonomic (though perhaps less powerful than emacs, but that is fine with me).

edit: Also interestingly Vscode feels much more cross platform for me. I have tried to get Emacs running on windows and it wasn't a good experience.
You might also want to check Kanel out! https://github.com/kristiandupont/kanel
Well, in that case the Qing (Manchurians) themselves would be consider foreign conquerors, the ones in control of China during the 1800s. Ghengis Khan was also born in what is today Inner Mongolia of the PRC.

After some time, it doesn’t make much sense to think about what it is to be under occupation by a foreign invader or not.
Glad to see the prices are getting somewhat more reasonable. Configured it the same way as my XPS and the price is pretty close (apart from the processor being a generation behind, but if you're doing CPU-intensive tasks on a laptop you're doing it wrong anyway).
I.e. increased usage of electricity, water, gas, heating, you drink your own coffee, eat your own fruits/yogurts etc.
That makes the assumption that the user is both happy with the "reddit app" even though they are being railroaded into using it and that the interests of reddit and the user are coincident.
Praat: Doing Phonetics by Computer
This kind of app architecture looks so disgusting, can’t be on board with this.

I posted this article earlier today, but it will probably get lost:

https://blog.usejournal.com/reducing-the-pain-of-developing-...

It does a good job of explaining why the developer friendliness of this architecture is an impediment.

Edit:

I just don’t know even know what to say about how common this actions/reducer stuff is. Like really? We went from:

fetch(url).then().error()

To this switch statement nonsense?

I’m at a loss for words at how little effort we’re putting into reducing boilerplate, and making good usable apis.
Grandmother’s Refusal to Remove Photos from Facebook Tests GDPR
What is the length limit on HN titles?
This just shows that a lot of company can get work done remotely if they have to. The jury's still out on remote work beyond that. How effective are people on individual projects? Collaborative projects? Long-term planning? How's satisfaction with work?
aren't you saving a good amount of money too though. I don't know if you and your partner drive to work, but I'm saving about $120/month just on gas, and I'd probably end up saving another $100-200/month on vehicle depreciation and insurance if this went on indefinitely. an extra $300/month makes a big difference in the rental market where I live.
> You're mixing up two very different things. When you talk about Sanders and "health care infrastructure" people naturally assume you're talking about hospitals, insurance coverage, etc. That naturally raises the response of "well, Italy has socialized medicine, like Sanders wants, and that hasn't really helped it."

Quite the opposite. You're the one doing that. I didn't name specific mechanisms and instead said "infrastructure" precisely to avoid this conversation. It doesn't matter how it's implemented; what matters is that effective medical care and clear information can reach citizens in times of crisis.

All the examples folks have named have clearly shown a total failure to do this. So despite how many great resources they may have amassed, they could not mobilize that into an effective civic infrastructure.

You're the one who wants to argue about socialized medicine. From the look of it, that's because you want to gloss over the profound failure of the US to do anything resembling a credible disaster response or address the profound inequalities that exist in American health care.

> South Korea's success does not have anything to do with left versus right

I agree!

> which is the topic at hand

No, the topic is, "Is Rogan a reactionary?" The answer there is yes, and even recently he's been sympathetic to the ludicrous claims that doing nothing is a reasonable strategy during this pandemic. The man is a conspiracy theorist. He has been in the past and he'll continue to be so in the future because he's a reactionary and that's how they operate.

> South Korea has experience dealing with respiratory virus outbreaks from China. It also has a population that is able to follow instructions and defer to authority, unlike people in western countries.

South Korea had to enact an emergency law letting cities detain people for violating stay at home and mask orders because compliance was bad. I don't know why you think these pacific asian counties are "obedient" but that's... Not a good characterization. I will follow the site guidelines and assume you have an unconscious bias there as opposed to an active one.

> Comparisons of the US to South Korea or Japan are "outrageous, bordering on disingenuous." In terms of social organization and ability to get things done, comparing New York City to Italy is actually very generous.

New York was a worse individual outbreak than any Italian city from the last numbers I saw, so doesn't this invalidate harryh's comparison?
SONiC – An Open Source Network Operating System
Your thesis really doesn't hold up to history. The Nationalists were winning the Chinese Civil War until WW2 put the conflict on hold. Had Chiang Kai-shek made a few different decisions, there would be no communist China.
but dumb ideas are often counterintuitive and not instantly popular, so how do you tell them from good ideas
A Blunt Brooklyn Response to yet Another “Problematic” Joe Biden Interview
Lets not forget they straight up supported Mao against the nationalist and American friendly Chiang Kai-Shek.
Ask HN: Is it possible to automatically track back end analytics?
Does anyone know of a product that provides backend analytics like heap.io does for frontend?

Ideally we'd be able to set it up and have it automatically track all database changes / function calls on the backend so that we can run analytics on it. Is this possible?
Meson is excellent and would have eaten CMake out of house and home if it weren’t for the stupidity of it targeting C/C++ but being written in Python. A lot of C/C++ developers cringe at the thought of requiring Python as a build dependency.
Only if you have chosen the wrong hardware. See Purism.
Duplicate from this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23246170

Also, the BC article is highly sensationalized coverage with no links to actual source. smh, today's journalists
Mmm, ass! My favorite!

The RPE in RPE-LTP — which is also one of the two excitations in LPC-10 — is indeed fairly precisely a fart sound, although the usual euphemism is "quasi-periodic pulses". That's because your larynx sounds like a fart if it doesn't have a vocal tract glommed onto the end of it to filter it with its recursive linear resonances.

Fortunately sox has LPC-10 built in, so you can enjoy the tasty tasty 80s ass quite simply if you install sox:

sox foo.wav foo.lpc10
play foo.lpc10

The LPC-10 code in Sox says it was translated from Fortran with f2c sometime around 1998, and as far as I can tell, nobody's been changing it since then. That's a nice counterpoint to the fucking "this web page doesn't work because nobody has changed it in the last five years" WWW.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200420003350/https://www.jwz.o...
https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2/pull/5507 I think git will get a stand alone git command line client in the future with no need for perl and such
Is it less wonderful that, in moments of great danger and fear, this dolphin was a symbol of joy and good fortune for the sailors on the ship?

It's pretty magical to me to think that a dolphin, just doing dolphin things and playing in the wake of a giant wooden sea vessel, was enough to see those sailors through life-and-death situations.

Little reminders of good in the world, regardless of whether the reminders themselves are aware of it, can really change things for the better for a whole lot of people.
I don't get the love for video podcasts. I find it far more efficient to just listen while doing something else (such as driving or working at my computer).

As long as I can get Rogan on my podcast app, nothing really changes for me.
That's funny I use an IBM rebranded RAID card. In AHCI mode with ZFS.
I normally commute by bike so this isn't a factor for me. I'm also using more electricity, and I'm drinking the coffee I bought rather than the office coffee.
debug.com shipped with the original MS-DOS and every subsequent version, so you automatically had a facility to disassemble and/or manipulate any running application essentially. We have easier tools now, but the tools available then were basically on every machine.
> we can handle lock down for a few months. ... We won't do it for years

This is binary, black-or-white, false dicotomy thinking: either lockdown, or we all go to the pub, movies, gigs, football etc, like before.

I accept that it can't and won't be the full lockdown for years. But it won't be the other extreme until it's safe. It will be somewhere in-between.

> But if the only alternative that you can suggest is deleting 1, 2, ... years of the prime of my life, staring at screens or meeting friends behind plexiglass, you've lost me completely, because you're describing the actions of a paperclip maximizer, not a human being

You'd be surprised what people put up with in order to stay alive. Then again, I should say "some people" as there will be literal survivorship bias in that. People do need to realize that this is a period of relative hardship not seen in a few decades, and like WW1 it won't be "over by Christmas" and deal with it in ways that get us through.
No, it hasn't. Suggesting unutilized capacity is "our infrastructure" working as intended is a ludicrous metric. It can be gamed simply by refusing to provision some capacity. The numbers that matter are what actually prevents death and injury (and the count of death and injury that represents the human costs of these failures).

America still isn't testing at sufficient scale. Contact tracing isn't happening at scale. The federal government is actively discouraging these effective strategies.

Also: Italy faced a national outbreak, New York did not. It's simply a category error to expect overflows even if those numbers do matter to you.
History of Ideas
I'm wondering if your experience is even remotely translatable for random FAANG employees. I don't know what kind of consulting you do or how these people would translate into such positions where they can really keep earning their large compensations.

Your points about moving and college have nothing really to do with the discussion at hand - do they? If staying in whatever place you are is what you wanted then good for you. Many people don't like where they grew up or the people they grew up with. I'd also hesitate to imply that your experience with a high school only education and the employment opportunities that came up is going to be anywhere near common.
Honestly, after having kids of my own (two in <2 years), anyone with a large family is an achievement.

Budget, time, sanity, work - after having two of my own, I’m constantly surprised that people can work effectively and raise a family. Having kids puts you in a place where you have to teach, be calm & collected and provide — 100% of the time. It’s stressful and the vast majority of people (myself included) choose that life. It’s insanely impressive when I see a family of 4 with a couple successful parents (I.e. decent kids, good house/career)
If you know what specific skill you want/need to pick up (e.g., "learn to use Mosh to effectively do development on remote servers") that can be a simple web search for tutorials. I guess that the real issue is discovering what skills you don't even know about.

Where ever you work, it is fair game to ask people there for advice.
A very simple org-mode workflow that I use to great effect is to just use org-capture and org-agenda and basically ignore all the other features.
Than why are almost all his recent shows about how Trump is right, or how the media is attacking Trump. The media has a "right" to attack Trump for blatantly lying. Do you even listen to his shows?
Thanks for your insight that this is not going to change anyone's minds. And frankly, "being selfish" has lost a lot of its stigma, so planning to enjoy one's retirement while relying on the labor of the future generations raised by someone else can be a totally acceptable plan in many parts of our society.

Question to you - if you think current system is broken, what would you replace it with if you had all the power?
Try wearing a shirt that says "Power to the people" to your work and see how that works out for you.