skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Around the end of 2016, I replaced almost every incandescent in my house with Great Value LEDs from Walmart, when they had some sort of arrangement for an automatic at-the-register rebate from my power company that made them $0.17 each.

The only one that has failed since then was one that I dropped from about 8 feet up onto the concrete floor of my garage. I gave to a curious coworker who took it apart. There was some component (an inductor I think, but don't remember for sure) that was attached to the PCB only by a couple thin wires, and one of those wires had broke.

I measured the output of all of them with a lux meter. A few months ago, I measured again and they are all about the same as they were when new. In particular, I didn't see any definite difference between ones that I've used for hours every day for 3.5 years, and ones that have seen maybe 5 minutes use in that same time.
He was fine with it the president of his company wasn't.
Thanks for the response! And I agree, it's like some sites just don't have content. I have nothing against videos, images, CSS, and JavaScript (hey, I am professionally a frontend developer :)) but often it is just not motivated.

In a way, I think this trend is downgrading to people if you can say that in English. Most people are not stupid, they see through it - I think, or I hope. It would be ok (even extremely motivated) with spectacular imagery and so on if it for instance was a Design site, but quite a few sites where there is no such link seems to think that visitors can't 'see' that they have nonsense Stock-images instead of real content.

Nicely put btw: 'sensory overload'.
I enjoyed the article until the questions at the bottom and then I got nasty flashbacks to high school English.

School killed any love I had for poetry for years. I thought poetry was this thing where you spent a minute reading a page, then spent an afternoon over-analysing it, looking for hidden meaning and writing 10 pages about it.

I think the best way to appreciate poetry is to simply read it, and that's it. Your mind will naturally ponder on it, if it wants to.
Normally this wouldn't necessarily be HN material, nor would I usually want to use Buzzfeed as a source. But, a prior story featuring this doctor's quote got a lot of front-page time & discussion at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23269396

And, a lot of the discussion was about the thin sourcing, or different indications from elsewhere.

Well, it turns out the doc was just speaking hyperbolically from a transient impression: the real data isn't anything like the multiples he implied.
Here’s my favorite so far: http://bash.org/?5273
Absolutely they keep whatever they took under the license they took it. Obviously.

And they better have that well documented. Legal might have something to say about it, for example.

It gives then a headache and it tells them you don't like what they did.
Be generous and you will be rewarded by the universe.
Has anyone written about how exactly the acquired company (McDonnel Douglas) was able to take over the acquiring company? Sounds like it would be an interesting story.

I also wonder if there are similar accounts of the same happening in other companies.
On a related note, I recently discovered that when you use semantically styled HTML, the difference between a JSON payload and an HTML payload is almost negligible (basically, the close tags). Why not transmit in a format that the browser already understands natively?
JVM languages now on Google Cloud Functions
I don't think the primary motivation for wearing masks is to protect yourself from others. It's to protect others from you. That's why there's shame involved in not wearing one; if you don't wear it, you're advertising that you don't care about the health of people around you. That's truly sinister.

Unfortunately, something as innocuous as mask wearing has been politicized in the US by certain unsavory political and media figures. In more enlightened countries and cultures (see most of Asia), wearing masks in the midst of a pandemic is just common sense. America is broken.
Agree with your thinking, few why points:

- anti-fraud

- sales conversion verification

- bot filtering

- ads and ads network policies

- heatmaps and session recording

All above brings money/revenue to home.
> In those two decades there have been hardly a hand-full of convictions for mail fraud related to ballots that entire time, with millions of mail-in-ballots cast. And there are no indications or notions of any subversive fraud.

But that's the objection. Mail in voting is problematic because the fraud is so hard to detect.

Suppose someone obtains and submits a bunch of mail in ballots. Ballots of people who don't normally vote etc. How would they even get caught? "We haven't caught very many of them" is the problem.

> The only reason to oppose mail in voting, much like supporting rejiggering districts (gerrymandering), is to rig the vote.

You could say it's to prevent someone else from rigging the vote.

Also, this:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-is-no-evidence-th...

So if it doesn't really affect the balance of legitimate ballots and only makes fraud more difficult, why would somebody be against it unless they're legitimately concerned about fraud?
> It worked on the same major platforms

Not true. silverlight never supported linux, unless you count the mono-based moonlight, which was buggy and didn't support DRM, so didn't work for the most common sites that used silverlight (like Netflix). Flash, on the other hand, supported linux for a long time.
I found a very detailed description of how absentee ballots are handled in Orange County (CA) here [1]

It’s a complex and laborious process, including multiple partially automated steps both in sending, receiving, and processing an application for an absentee ballot, as well sending, receiving, and processing the absentee ballot itself (in one of several possible languages, as requested by the voter).

This includes a manual step of comparing the voters signature on an outer envelope, which is scanned by machine and presented to remote data entry techs for side-by-side comparison with the signature on the scanned application for the absentee ballot. If the signatures aren’t a good enough match as decided by the human, the ballot is rejected (and the voter eventually notified).

So if you’re not sending applications for an absentee ballot out to voters, where is this signature coming from that you are comparing against? It can’t possibly be the electronically captured signature on the drivers license, because that one is chicken scratch...

[1] - https://www.ocvote.com/election-library/docs/2007%20Grand%20...
Agreed you can try it on others too if you know there carrier and you can even find out
If they were the only way to communicate, no, but they’re not, and even if they were, the solution is still to pass a law, not reinterpret the First Amendment to say something it doesn’t by looking at it funny and reading it aloud in your best Al Capone as a chipmunk voice in order to draw out a spirit that isn’t actually there.

I’m okay with Twitter and Facebook doing whatever they want to their crappy websites. They aren’t the web, they’re not even all the social media apps on the web. They’re just a couple of large fish in the Ocean.

The mistake you’re making is assuming the discourse on Twitter matters. Arguably the President’s tweets do matter as much as anything the President does, but outside that scope it isn’t as representative of society as the site’s core users believe it to be. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t punch above its weight in driving discourse, but it is just one more tool in a world that is not lacking in ways to send what is effectively a text message.

I mean arguably this forum post I’m writing is hardly distinguishable from a text message. I’m typing this on my phone, and there’s a decent chance you or someone else is reading this on their phone.

On any given day someone might be participating on Twitter, Facebook, an IRC channel, their email, Discord, Slack, Reddit, whatever. They might even write a blog or publish a podcast. At the end of the day it is all communications, as much as saying a toast at a wedding or a cheers at the bar. It’s not important to me that Twitter shoots itself in the foot so long as they’re not the only way for people to gather and communicate, and they are objectively not the only way for people to gather and communicate because that’s an enormous chunk of what people spend their lives doing.

EDIT: this occurred to me after my original post, that I didn’t really address your gather to protest point.

First, the kind of protesting that you’re talking about taking place on Twitter falls into two categories: coordinating a protest in meatspace, or collectively whining.

Second, actual protests still happen all the bloody time in meatspace. The March for Life, the Women’s March, there was a controversial protest in Virginia a few years back with a controversial counter protest which ended with someone driving an automobile into the crowd. There was a drive-thru protest in Michigan a few weeks ago, and people gathered to protest Newsom closing the beaches in Orange County not long after that. Protests, in the free to assemble sense, are still a largely meatspace event with some coordination taking place using whatever modern comms tech is convenient. Back when modern comms tech wasn’t convenient and available and safe to use, Hong Kong protesters turned to mesh networking applications last year.
Star Burst: 3D printer and generative code and pens [video]
Good to hear that, Pandemic to endemic
AIs already pick up other abilities that nobody expected them to learn
AMP makes work easier for Google (their indexing and content presentation process). However it's presented as something that makes it easier for us the general public.
Would anyone dare touch a stock market if they were personally responsible for liabilities of companies they invest in?

Particularly in the case of stock indexes - where a single company with a $xxT poorly written contract could wipe out the entire index and everyone who held it.
With free community edition if you register for it.
https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi/starter
Absolutely. But the game we use to choose a president does not seem to be at all related to the actual job of president.
> subways, nursing homes, masks, the relative safety of being outdoors, etc.

OK... go through that then? All that stuff seems like areas that have been broadly agreed upon for months. You're going all the way back to March for a bunch of recriminations (some of which I don't understand -- nursing homes were early hot spots and have always been seen so). No one doubts that people got stuff wrong. But that's not a reason to argue against the same people now that they've corrected themselves.

I mean... you ARE wearing a mask, right? Right?
The example on the front page already hints at the type of bad programming this may encourage. When clicked, the button sends a POST (this seems ok), and then the backend sends new html for the button. The idea of having random snippets of your frontend markup being returned from api servers seems questionable.
Draft of Executive Order on Online Censorship [pdf]
Rules around mail in votes vary by state (some disallow entirely for legitimate reasons). My imagination can not determine what you mean by ‘hardly a handful of convictions‘, but here is a list of quite a few specific convictions for fraudulent absentee voting (along with other forms of voter fraud): https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...

That is some evidence that mail-in votes can be abused. And you should consider how hard it is to detect such abuse. I’d love to see some evidence on why the benefits of mail-in voting outweighs the risks.

Also some evidence on your claims that mail-in voting favors one particular party would be enlightening.
I discovered andy's notes in the past and has been trying to determined what he uses to publish those clean yet powerfull notes. The janitor is only one part. do you also publish your notes as HTML? How to you make use of the backlinks generated by janitor?
Thanks for the responses. I was half kidding. I depend heavily on all of these and need to double down on them! Some of the alternatives are at Facebook, which I also don't trust, for different reasons. It's hard to boycott FAAMG completely. I avoid getting hired by one of them or being locked into their proprietary technologies though. For instance I use GitHub heavily (just like I'd use YouTube if I made video content) but am not buying into all their extra features like GitHub Actions and GitHub Discussions.
Yeah, I wouldn't touch an Apple product either.

I get your point that people expect differently from Google, but Google brought that upon themselves by marketing Android as an open source alternative to iOS. Now they've got the market share and developers, they're no longer interested in marketing it this way and are now apparently more interested in cementing the walled garden.

The battery issue is a valid concern, but I don't buy that this policy is purely to fix that problem. They took the opportunity to make sure people are passing all of their data through Google services in order to have full functionality on their devices.
I totally agree. I’ve been mainly using the Silverlight-based SDK that powered Windows Phone, and the easiness to made an app with is still unmatched. The ability to make reusable components, complex layout (grids) and design without CSS enabled real productivity. Sure the web now got most of those things, a decade later...
Hot off the press:

> President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order aimed at social media companies on Thursday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told reporters Wednesday evening, a move that comes as the president and his allies have escalated their allegations that companies like Twitter and Facebook stifle GOP voices.

https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2020/05/27/trump-executive...
The integrity of all new sources have been challenged to such a degree that the real loser here is the average person. There is no way for many of us to assess who to trust and we are being mired in confusion and smokescreens created by the powers that be. There is no denying that it is being done intentionally and its just sad.
Jack Dorsey Responds to Trump
Bravo Jack! Thank you for standing up to bullying!
It wasn't only trousers but the entire outfit including the top i.e. the much reviled suit that saved people from these elaborate costumes

You think they could've invented the t shirt back then and been done with it
How does it compare to Emacs Org Mode?
> And yet no one has built anything like it since.

Because it's not the technology, it's the economy! You can't build another Flash, because no such product could exist. We're awash with talented content generation for the connected modern society. There's no niche for hacker students to fill, with any tool.
I'm not religious so I don't really support it, I'm just trying to play devil's advocate. It seems to me that there is a significant difference between "my religious organization was founded with the express purpose of supporting slavery, at a time and place when slavery was the most important political issue in the country" and "homosexuality is just one of a long list of things that are banned, but is not called out in any sort of special way"
I think hn is an exception because the raw feed is a firehose, and votes serve to filter it (I actually follow hn chronologically via RSS, but with a vote threshold as a filter), but most people aren't following 1000s of accounts posting to their timeline at once. Networks like facebook and twitter used to be chronological, you could scroll through in 10 minutes and catch up on all new content for the day if you were in a rush akin to RSS, and one day that changed.
Trying to Find a Hack
US Unemployment Insurance Replacement Rates During the Pandemic
ZuluOneZero Has Gone into Beta with Endless Elevator on the Google Play Store
https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.ZuluOneZero.Endless...
Some quick thoughts on the first two problems listed:

Inscrutability - use the `x` modifier and allow whitespace and comments, e.g.

/^(\\^+|_+|=)?([a-gA-G])(,+|'+)?(\\d*)(\\/)?(\\d*)$

becomes:

/^
( \\^+ | _+ | = )? # sharps and flats
( [a-gA-G] ) # notes
( ,+ | '+ )?
( \\d* ) # duration
( \\/ )? # fractions
( \\d* ) # more duration? I'd need to read the spec
$/x

and use different delimiters to remove escaping of slashes:

<^
( \\^+ | _+ | = )? # sharps and flats
( [a-gA-G] ) # notes
( ,+ | '+ )?
( \\d* ) # duration
( / )? # fractions
( \\d* ) # more duration? I'd need to read the spec
$>x

That's already much more readable, but then we have complaint number 2, composability. If you language supports it then use interpolation:

SHARPS_AND_FLATS = /\\^+ | _+ | =/x
NOTES = /[a-g]/i

<^
(#{SHARPS_AND_FLATS})? # sharps and flats
(#{NOTES}) # notes
( ,+ | '+ )?
( \\d* ) # duration
( / )? # fractions
( \\d* ) # more duration? I'd need to read the spec
$>x

You see how it could go on. I'm not saying regex are always the right solution and not all languages have access to the same tools but there's often a lot that can be done to mitigate the awfulness (and a lot more here, lookarounds, named captures etc).

The `x` modifier is the #1 fix, I never write anything above the most simple regex without it, and for the life of me I can't understand why it's hardly ever used.
We ended up here because Amazon can't scale. It's just uncool to admit you have to notice the pink elephant. Why? I don't know. Maybe it has to do with cred in engineering teams or for engineering teams in the broader org structure.

But the problem with AWS, with a lot of the "cloud", is the pitch that remote centralization of a service scales ad infinitum. It's still subject to the same constraints as self-managed, even if those constraints appear at a higher limit.

The greatest constraint is the per-unit pricing. You buy self-managed, you have huge upfront and period costs, but with remote, you see the $.03/MB price and assume that variable cost is more manageable over the long run. And it is... until price changes, overhead changes, bandwidth changes, or worse, accessibility changes. And suddenly, what you had cost-effective scaling on 18 months ago now has a massive deficit affixed to it. Because that's how most people used the platform... or because removing A or B features reduced maintenance costs or freed up bandwidth.

AWS is an experiment. Does it work in many or even most use cases? Yes. For now.

I love engineers. A lot. In fact, being in sales, I would give up a deal with an engineering team unless I knew for sure my ROI basis was solid. That said, I do know sales and marketing rhetoric. And having spent hundreds of hours in meetings with product, marketing and dev professionals, I wish I could record the stress-induced breakdowns I've seen in engineers and executives who had everything running buttery, "and then [provider] pushed [update]..." and they then have executives breathing on the back of their neck 16 hours a day, entire teams offline or unable to do basic tasks, etc. I just want to play that shit to people and say, "This is why you don't overpromise."
Microsoft is likely looking for a solution that would allow easy distribution of software in enterprise context without having to repackage it.

Having a widely accepted and used package format would solve that. You could just pick the package for notepad++ and others and push them to workstations via Intune.
Because constitutional amendments are hard to pass, by design.

You need a supermajority in both the senate and house of reps, and then you also need effectively a majority vote in 75% of the states (so 38 states now).

There is a sufficiently large number of smaller states that it is no longer possible to change this.

There are some courses that cover the basics of US constitutional history, which might be instructive:

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/road-to-re...
In the game of whack-a-mole of false-information spewers I think it makes sense to tag those with the largest audiences who have the largest sway like Trump as this is the most efficient way to curb disinformation. Twitter is doing the public a solid by doing this and I laud them for it.
I agree with you that his view fraud tends to be committed by Democrats is something that can be determined to be true or false. Unfortunately for our president, most fraud is committed by Republicans and not democrats.

The single largest case of voter fraud in this countries history happened in North Carolina in 2018. That was committed by a Republican.

If you investigate the voter fraud instances in Trumps own listing you will find that the majority of them are committed by Republicans.

Combine this information with the efforts by Republicans to suppress the vote and you can see the problem. In North Dakota, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a law that required all citizens to have a physical mailing address to be able to vote. Sounds resonible right? Well, this was after a Democrat won a Senate election in that state thanks in large part to the Native American population. Most Native Americans live on reservations in that state and part of living on the reservations is a lack of physical mailing addresses.

Nothing about having a physical address is going to make voter fraud less likely. It's plain as day that Republicans are just interested in suppressing the votes of people who vote against them.
Linux, with its 2% users at best, is not a major desktop platform.
Is he even capable of learning after all this time practicing The Art of the Lie?
Zuckerberg Says Twitter Is Wrong to Fact-Check Trump
I genuinely mean this with no disrespect but how knowledgeable are you about this & if you aren't why do you think some data collecting from the internet & "back of the envelope" spreadsheet-ing makes you able to reasonably question world experts that dedicated their careers to virology and pandemics?

If you are a programmer how much would you appreciate a medical doctor with no training or experience in software development questioning your technical decisions about what to use when building a software service?
What Pike did is creation of language feature. Original post talks about library.

Libraries in well-typed languages are of about same power as language features and they are within reach of ordinary programmer. If you need a library, you can write it and use and publish. If you need a (change of) language feature, you have to convince others to write that for you.
Show HN: Production-grade configuration system for Node.js
I work on the Samsung Bixby API services, and the Yahoo npm cerebro library has been very valuable for providing a config management system. Internally, we've built wrappers to make it work for us, and I've always wanted a dev-friendly OSS version for my own personal projects.

As a result, I've forked the project and added the features that I've found valuable when we built our services - this includes adding first-class YAML support, and a revamped readme with lots of examples.
I wonder how many states are also cooking the stats amidst the flurry of reopening.
Jack Dorsey explains why Twitter fact-checked Trump’s false voting claims
There was this demo written in Silverlight that would basically show the complete Windows Vista Desktop UX, implemented in Silverlight, with calculator, explorer, media player.. anyone remember that one? It also ran in firefox.. I think it was made in slovenia, or so? Can't find it anymore, not even a video of it.. Update: here is an old link: https://savas.me/2007/02/01/amazing-demonstration-of-what-is...
So you care about voter integrity? What effect on voter integrity is there when the president of the United States goes around spreading lies about the integrity of the voting system?

The effect may be large or it may be small, but there will be an effect. If you truly cared about voter integrity you would care about this too.