skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The only reason your room gets messier and messier is because you are messy, there is no law and physics has nothing to do with it. It just makes you feel smarter because you can use "thermodynamic" in a sentence
How the Dumas family turned a leather store into a luxury empire (2019)
It will be interesting what the fertility rate of new frontier worlds might look like. Technologically advanced but in constant need of humans to build and push further.
What I'm trying to say is that it's not just some simple linear trade you can make where "less quality" implies "more features" or "more quality" implies "less features". Usually when I encounter this line of thinking, especially when it simplistic, it does a lot of damage. The biggest damage tends to be when people who are less familiar with the fundamentals of software construction use this line of thinking when allocating resources or making planning decisions.
Not all educated women who are in control of their lives decide against children, far from it.

If all women are educated and in control, every child of the next generation will have an educated mother who decided to have children and those mothers will likely pass on the cultural traits that lead to this decision. The result will be a generation whose reproduction rate is much less impacted by education and being in control than previous generations who to a large part had mothers lacking education and control. Reproduction rates will stabilize as motherly role models adapt.
Excuse me?

Someone said mm-waves cannot go through skin. I mentioned that the scientific consensus is that babies' skin is thin enough that mm-waves penetrate the dermis. I was absolutely not starting a "think of the children".

>> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

The established consensus is that mm-waves do penetrante the dermis of babies. Even recent research can agree on that. Here's one recent source.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334078749_Millimete...
My 2c is that it's not only your customers that you need to keep happy, but also your own employees.

Engineers look for projects that don't give them headaches while working on them, and those that help them learn the right things.
At the same time, they do look for maintainable and extensible codebases that they can enjoy working on.

The problem with bad code that is a clustermess is that things leak everywhere, and fixing one bug will lead to another. You won't have a product that is stable for your users either. At one point your engineers will make a point of rewriting things from scratch, but management may stop them. This will force them to quit ultimately so you'll have to deal with loss of resources.

On the other hand, using your users for QA is terrible. They do not report bugs at all, they get frustrated and spread the bad word.
If they're paying users they will start looking for alternatives at one point.

This is all a part of your business.
> For me, part of "boring" is being like a 2x4 or a claw hammer: simple, solid, reliable, well understood. A lot of the Java world is nothing like that.

Strong disagree. This is exactly what most of the Java world is like: well understood and reliable. I wonder if people who say things like you did actually use it for their day jobs, or rely on things people using other technologies claim in their blogs.
I often feel like I should write a "things you can skimp on, and things you can't" for a startup. There are are some things that if you do it right will immediately start paying dividends. For example, I worked at a startup that didn't take the small time to invest in automated deployment. There was one guy that knew how to manually deploy things, with the only copy of the correct prod configs on his machine. And since there were no standards for deployment, the 5 different sub-apps/services were each deployed differently. They could have literally spent less than 1 day building a proper CI/CD system which would have immediately made all their deployments painless and immediate. Instead when I got there it took many months to finally get CI/CD in place because (a) everything was always on fire so it was difficult to carve out the time to do it, and (b) retrofitting all the different systems to use one way of deployment meant I needed to retrofit 5 systems.

More importantly, my time at that startup was some some of the most stressful in my life, and for what, someone else's shitty code? I refuse to be a "code janitor" anymore. Of course all systems build tech debt over time, but it's not that hard to see which systems were built with a modicum of forethought, and which were just slapped together. Imagine if people building a house got a group together, gave everyone some tools and some lumber and said "go!" instead of actually creating a design, laying a foundation, etc. That's what a lot (not all!) of startup code is like, and I for one refuse to touch that from now on.
what worries me is the code-monkey idea behind everyone can/need to code. I don't want coding to become the blue-collar skill of the next decade.
I’m Black and I am very uneasy about this move. I can’t figure out why. I think I would be more comfortable if they had some type of “economic empowerment Zone” that just happened to cover majority/minority communities. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would just feel better to me.
Link should be changed to: https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/12/against-teaching-ki...
Source article: https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/12/against-teaching-ki...
tl;dr: "Instead of teaching syntax, you should actually teach kids to problem solve, be curious, and care about quality! Because those are underlying skills with more value to programming and to life in general.

But, also, most people should not become programmers. No comment on why."

I'm torn between anger at the clickbaity title, agreement with and enjoyment of the majority of the article's valid work and spirit, and acute annoyance at that last bit that shamelessly, sans evidence, recalls the clickbait premise that I originally wanted. The author pulled me slowly out of my disdain, and then shoved me back into it again right before leaving.

I often hear this idea echoed around my social network that most people should actually not learn to program. That it is not a literacy. That it isn't useful for your kids' minds or long term status or for society. But then I often find people slyly avoiding explanations as to why, like here, or merely asserting that the arts also have value (which isn't an exclusive claim!), or mumbling over some hoakum about learning styles and not everyone being capable of being a programmer.

Occasionally there's someone saying, "of course many people will program, but they won't be programmers. But the other things they do will require them to do programming", which is exactly how literacy works. I'm ready to agree with that idea, but it's often similarly wrapped in a "don't teach your kids to code!" label, which it seems antithetical to.

Does anyone seriously feel that developing the skills involved in writing code (and learning to be comfortable using code and computer tools to solve problems) isn't broadly applicable to people's lives at this point? I'd love to hear and discuss a qualified explanation for that belief, and I've been looking, but (as with this article) it seems not to be found where advertised.
Kids find what they like and don't like by being exposed to things. Giving your kid a book is not forcing your interests on them, its okay if they don't like it. I think the author is expressing concern over feeling pressured to teach his young child coding. I don't think its probably that helpful to teach young kids syntax. My 10 year old recently started playing with Scratch on her own, bought herself a book about it at a book fair. I think the Scratch approach of putting together the steps you need to accomplish something is much better training than learning specific functions or where to put a semicolon.
I always use Zoom in a browser to avoid stuff like this. Zoom has repeatedly shown itself to be an untrustworthy app by an untrustworthy vendor.
Maybe you don't care about open source browser engine monopoly as much as ubiquitous monitoring?

Without this project, there wouldn't be a way to really make use of the fact that chromium is open source. It frees the world's best browser engine, which IMO is awesome.
Are UUIDs Unique?
I gotta say, I had this same thought twenty years ago when my kiddos were pre-teens. Be creative! Make beautiful things! Don't haul up the data on the Xerox line like your old man! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsDkmVo2fg4

Man, was I WRONG! What a MISTAKE. My spouse and I fouled up some lives by teaching that attitude.

My youngest wanted to do game dev. So she got Masters of Fine Art from an A school concentrating in 3D animation and motion capture. Now she doesn't make enough money to afford to live in a tiny apartment in the Bay Area exurbs working a full-time temp job for a big game dev outfit.

My oldest also went to a A art school for an MFA. Now she's an office administrator, almost forty, raising a family.

We're super-proud they don't have any debt. That took hard work. Still, there's no way they're going to have the opportunities my spouse and I had.

Who has the labor market power to earn enough to feed their families in the overpriced coastal areas? Engineers, lawyers, executives.

My mom was a classicist and really wanted me to spend a lot of time learning to read the ancient greats in Latin and Greek. But she didn't push me too hard; she let me make my own choices. That was good for me.

Please, please, young parents, be careful about how your ideologies affect the small people in your care. Don't let your ideologies make them think their choices are limited.

Seriously.
I’m 45. I haven’t seen it. I’m getting just as many offers and doors open now as I have since 1996. I’m very focused on keeping a network warm and keeping my resume buzzword compliant.
and an insane president (both usa and brazil) we have a lit of big problems and no ability to make progress on any because the majority or congress backs the insane president and even the most innocent of ideas becomes political immediately. masks? fascism! insane president has a good idea on accident? liberals hate it to spite him. :(
There are much easier ways to fix this:

Option 1) You could make it easier to afford and raise children.

I realize this seems a little extreme in a US context, so here is a more affordable option:

Option 2) You could encourage women to get an abortion if they're pregnant with a boy.

All we need to maintain the population is that each woman on average produces one new woman. Plus a few men, perhaps acting as sperm donors.

I jest, of course, but my point is that there's more than one way to be authoritarian.
Modern browsers support very long URLs. Chrome supports URLs up to 2mb for example. Probably makes sense to think about the impact on users before using such long URLs, I have found it confuses people, and can also make sharing things on social media impossible.
So-called "security by obscurity" is critically important.

I must disagree emphatically with open-source enthusiasts who believe that "security by obscurity is bad" advice applies to everything. In my opinion, it only applies to a small subset of certain types of software - packages that are meant to be used on extremely large scale, such as web servers, encryption algorithms, and the like. Attempts to apply it to other areas are foolish.

Obscurity is the only possible mechanism for keeping a highly popular link-aggregating site's story ranking reflective of what the community of genuine readers wants to see when under attack by "content promoter" types.
The Amish win.

Among the best farmers in the world, with huge families, a healthy lifestyle, and they're non-violent.

Their biggest problem is that they are so good at farming that land prices around their communities go up and their children have to move farther and farther to afford their own farms.
I think the author is pointing at the crop of "learn programming" classes offered for elementary kids under the guise of STEM. And I have seen parents spending sleepless nights because their kid cannot and the neigbor kid can program in Python in Grade 4. Which I believe, is utterly pointless, and does not define how good/bad your kid will be at programming in adult-life. I think some this myth stems of the stories of great programmers whose parents got them an Atari at the age of 4 and so on. I think they are a rare exception, than the norm.

I can relate to this article -- my daughter went through programming courses in school (Bay Area public schools are full of these crazy STEM courses), but she did not understand a thing of constructing software. All they learnt was a bunch of syntax, and a bunch of solved problems. I think they will do much better if the STEM courses focus less on a "programming language" and more on "problem solving and thinking software" (I just made this up now). :-)
If you're reading these Nicholas, thanks for your super help in CS 161 Spring 2016!
Click-bait title, but many good points.
This is incredibly cool, finding almost 200 bugs in SQLite is a really great achievement. I'd certainly be interested in how often these bugs come up in real applications.
Can anyone read this?
This is true about enterprisey patterns, which for some reason plague Java more than other languages. I think it's a flaw of the moment in time when Java became ubiquitous -- I mean, it still runs most software than many fashionable technologies these days, but it's not as dominant as it used to be -- rather than the language itself. Modern Java doesn't look like that, but indeed older software built with it did.

These are fashions in the software engineering world. Had Ruby dominated the development world at the time Java did, you would have seen the same enterprisey patterns.
I doubt it. The A13 and successors are money printing machines.

Apple has always been about limiting SKUs to maximize their economies of scale. The original iMac was a great example of this... although they had no market share, they had like 3 SKUs vs HP and Dell who had dozens or hundreds of different PCs. It was the biggest selling model of computer at the time, and they make money on it because of that scale.

They do the same thing with the iPhone today. The SE has the same guts as the flagship SKU, which is in turn faster than any competing product. The control of the roadmap and capabilities of the CPUs is a huge competitive advantage that makes a lot of money. They save money on things they don’t control like batteries because the faster CPU uses less power, etc.

Everyone else is stuck with whatever garbage Qualcomm is dishing out.

Amazon is in a similar place. There remains a lot of on-premise server compute that AWS wants to conquer. You need to think about their actions today in terms of what they mean in 2030.
Five Pressures of Leadership in OSS (2019)
Ruberizing playgrounds leads to more injuries? Interesting, I didnt know that. Keeping kids who are not alergic to peanuts away from peanuts is stupid. I let mine eat everything but sugary things and junk foods. My nephew however is alergic to peanuts and was about to die once if it wasnt for an epipen at hand
Come on, don't twist the facts. We can do better than that.

Today I received an email from Coursera advocating for a black transgender man who was "executed". Or, as it turned out, he killed a person and then pointed a gun at the police. Before that, he also posted his intentions on Facebook. Is that your hero?

Second amendment allows you to carry a weapon. You will be shot immediately when you point a gun at the police. Both statements are true and are not going to change. They do not contradict each other.

Which part of that do you disagree with?
wired was instrumental in educating me about the "vertical knowledge" on this subject over 20 years ago with this article: https://www.wired.com/1997/02/the-doomslayer-2/

until then i had never been exposed to any of the evidence countering the "population bomb" hypothesis. not in education, not in media, not in personal discussion.
I was able to use Zoom in the browser with my first meeting, but now it no longer shows that option when I access a Zoom meeting URL. What do you do to force it to let you use it in the browser?
Yeah. Even Brave, a chromium browser with ad and tracking protection built in, has been injecting more and more of their own ads.

A browser that's Actually Not Shady sounds pretty cool. Though bummed to hear in a sibling comment that they don't provide builds.

Would be cool to see a service that provides UC builds, updates, and sync in some kind of transparently secure way. Perhaps with optional ad blocking. Maybe $10/yr or something folks would pay. I would.
I agree with this. My family didn't have money to buy me things, but I found ways to get into computers and programming myself. In the 7th grade I started helping the school computer teacher run the IT systems because the school didn't know how to do it themselves. In exchange for helping the school manage the computers, they let me play on the computers after school and install BSD and Linux on an older machine that became my toy.
This is a tortured misreading of what I’m saying - and regardless is addressed by my argument.

> you are discouraging people from taking actions which might reveal such knowledge to them

If you are deliberately and knowingly avoiding that knowledge to escape culpability then that’s morally equivalent to having the knowledge but failing to act. A police sergeant who says “get a confession, and if you rough him up don’t tell me about it” might be protecting themselves from legal responsibility but certainly not moral responsibility.

Again: there isn’t a loophole here. Constructing a loophole is itself immoral.

> By your logic, an activist that knows about the conditions inside the plant is also responsible for the safety of the workers

No - the manager has substantially more capacity to act than the activist. There is some fuzziness - is the activist is deliberately suppressing information about conditions inside the plant then they do share responsibility. But if the activist is merely ineffective then it’s not reasonable to blame them for injuries or fatalities. This is not a question that’s amenable to algorithms or flowcharts, which seems to be giving you some difficulty.

> and no action other than successfully protecting the workers will satisfy that responsibility.

This is not what my logic said at all! It’s such a ridiculous misreading that I wonder if you are arguing in good faith. I didn’t say the manager had to successfully protect the worker, but that they had to try. If machine maintenance is the responsibility of another team then perhaps the manager could do everything right and still have a worker killed. No one human can solve every problem that might come up. But if the manager knew there was a risk and did nothing, not even taking a look, then they share moral responsibility with the team actually responsible for maintaining the equipment. There is a huge difference between “the firefighters failed to stop the fire because it got too dangerous” and “the firefighters failed to stop the fire because they went out drinking,” even if in the latter case the fire was hopeless.

Again - you really can’t lawyer or logic your way out of moral responsibility, even if it works on a legal or social level. And no, there isn’t a foolproof algorithm for determining moral questions like this. But if your approach is “where are the gaps in this moral framework that lets me get away with bad things?” then you are not interested in acting morally.
I'm generally in agreement with this, but as I grew up programming and have 3 kids now will provide my $0.02 commentary-

* kids are shaped by what you share and demonstrate with them and what others share and demonstrate, and what takes root and grows in their hearts and minds is what you should encourage and support

* following the taking root metaphor, all kids have different soil and growth patterns and acquire different knowledge domains at different rates. A great deal of the domain acquisition is due tho not to IQ, however one defines it, but by EQ. That is, my observation is that feelings of safety, explorability, curiosity, satisfaction, and competition/conformance are what drive acquisition, and those are mostly or all EQ.

* programming as an activity is horrendously dumb, with stupid incantations and magical abstractions, and a complete disrespect of the human's time and engagement tempo. When it comes to kids, this is absolutely worst case.

* I have seen two very small, narrow exceptions to the above- some robotics kits, and Scratch. My son is 8 and found in Scratch a vehicle for exploration, curiosity and satisfaction, and has done some absolutely amazing things. It is a matter of curiosity for me that problems I found interesting in 6502 assembly when I was 13 and 14 he is tackling at 8 in Scratch.

* we don't have a voice interface tool in our house but I can definitely see voice-first being an engaging "programming" platform for kids, especially for girls.
Single axis tracking is typical.
How does this compare to AdGuard?
Do you have a link for this story? Sounds interesting. With h.265, VP9, VC1 etc it seems there's demand for better video codecs.
The Cookie Remover browser plugin helps with that sort of thing. In the meantime, here's an archive link: http://archive.is/onX5z
Software as a Liability
The website subscribe banner that keeps appearing makes it unreadable for me. I wonder if anyone at these companies actually tries to use their websites?
You maybe aren't appreciating the scale of the cloud companies properly. In 2019, Amazon had 6x the Capex of AMD's entire revenue. Google 4x, Microsoft 3x. Obviously all of that Capex isn't for compute, but given the cost structure of servers, a significant chunk will be.

If AMD can profitably build and sell a state of the art CPU in the world with that scale, why couldn't the cloud companies be able to?
A New Cold War Has Begun (2019)
I just love Feynman videos.

The way he talks, it shows how much of the subject he has internalized. I just love people who can flow with their thoughts. You know, at some level, that the discoveries he made, the math he did, the thought process he used, was effortless.

I wish the world encouraged and nurtured more such people.
I've been tracking reported cases and deaths from the ECDC[0] data[1] for some months now. I've added Brazil to the chart ... here is the most recent plot of deaths:

https://www.solipsys.co.uk/images/ECDC_DeathsLinear.png

The horizontal axis is in "days since reported deaths exceeded 100"

[0] European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control

[1] https://opendata.ecdc.europa.eu/covid19/casedistribution/csv
Hmm thinking about this a little more, a killer feature for me would be Brave-style untracked browsing by default, but with the ability to enter a fully tracked profile on demand (and perhaps by default for certain domains). I use chrome for all my logged-in stuff, and brave for all logged-out web browsing. It'd be kinda nice to have only one.
The Garmin Watches don't have DRAM for power reasons. The processor is a memory constrained microcontroller without a hardware memory management unit. Without the MMU you don't get as powerful memory virtualization or process isolation.