skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Reading this article as a millennial really hits home as I remember entering the workforce as a teenager mid 2001 as soon as I could drive (months before 9/11), re-entering the workforce as a young adult early 2008 as soon as I had a degree (months before the great recession), then building a company as an adult for two years and launching it January 2020 (months before the end of the world).

There have been no breaks. Nothing has been easy. I don't really know what true success looks like... I struggle and by the skin of my teeth (and now my family's teeth) and the hits just keep coming. We have a house, but I literally fought for it with every ounce of effort I had and got extremely lucky.

This is our version of success; we enjoy rays of sunshine from the eyes of hurricanes.
> Statistically you have a 0.00029% chance of being shot and killed by a police officer in a given year ... the American system is still relatively safe

What do you think is the chance of being killed by shot and killed by police in countries that don't arm their police like they're in a war zone, like the UK?

A lot lower, at around 0.000005%.
Looked this up and saw the promos. Anything endorsed by both Steven Pinker and Alan Sokal is bound to be bad faith, intellectually dishonest hackery.
The same machine but in action (time lapse)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lva3bm3psyI
I think you are expecting too much from 5 year olds if you think they can go hunting by seeing their parents given their motor skills.

On the other hand, depending on what you are doing on the computer. They can learn it by watching you unless you are doing something very complex which most people using their pcs or devices don't. It's not hard for them to learn to comment on HN.

And two anecdotes isn't plenty of evidence.

I can provide more contrary to yours.
Thanks for both of those! Super helpful
Income Inequality (go UBI!)
Climate Change (go Tesla?)
Authoritarian Rule (go...Democracy?)
Disease and Aging (go science!)
Racism and Religion (go education!)
Hey thanks for this, its really good one , though paid, the one I am trying to retrieve was free.
That's great you've been successful. However, since your story doesn't mirror the majority of your peers, consider yourself an outlier.

What can you do to help more people become as financially successful as you are?
Air Force to Test Fighter Drone Against Human Pilot
This isn’t actually a contradiction unless you misunderstood one of the two sentences. Try assuming both statements are true at the same time, and then think about what that implies.
TLDR: These items are conversation starters, questions to ask oneself (and each other) when considering something.

Ya, I liked this list. It has some personal faves, which drew me in to read the whole list. So that worked.

These are cliches, parables, observations, open ended questions. They're barely descriptive, much less prescriptive.

Just more tools for the mental toolbox. No different than 48 Laws of Power (which most definitely are not "Laws", but marketing FTW) and the like.
Tbf self improvement content is as old as Web 2.0
Hackers Jammed Chicago Police Scanners with Internet Classic ‘Chocolate Rain’
Beautiful compilation :)
A rule I use for testing: If a feature doesn't run correctly the first time it's manually tested, then an automated test should be created which checks if the feature is working. This rule typically means that tests save time, and that tests are created for the code that's likely to break.

I bypass this rule when I think it's obvious I'm going to want automated testing. For example, I needed a customer facing DSL for importing data with a lexer/parser/interpreter; manual testing was bypassed from the start.
>> The world always makes sense. But it can be confusing. When it is, your model of the world is wrong.

That was my mistake when I first heard about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

I was assuming that the economy was efficient and relatively fair and that made me see Bitcoin as a bubble. My assumption about economic efficiency was very wrong... Then I took the time to learn everything I could about the Federal Reserve Bank and money printing. I'm not going to make that mistake again.
It was related to programming interview, computing only and there was a very well structured path as well.
Why remove it? It's interesting!
It makes sense if you’re bullish on the current model of power and control persisting forever. These graphs and curves rely on underlying stability.

I personally doubt the current state of affairs can continue, as technology is pushing down the costs of delivering key capabilities of modern society.
Any chance that Linux package managers will integrate this for their -dbg packages? I’d rather not fiddle with downloading those along with -src, untarring it, telling GDB where to find the code…
"5G towers won’t be “towers” – instead, they’ll be “small cells,” mini-cell sites mounted to light poles that cover just a small area"

I had the hope, 5G would finally solve the coverage problems in rural areas. sounds like it's just a vanity project after all...
Commercial application using wax cylinder:
https://www.sulasindustries.com/media
Timeless is just another word for "endlessly boring" which the movie isn't, but Helvetica is by now ;)
What does this have to do with this post?
To be fair we know from the Snowden leaks this is exactly what they do. Microsoft quite proudly cooperated with the NSA to backdoor it’s own apps.
I think SPA are overvalued. They are slow to load, clunky and the paradigm of loading "modules" is messy. I prefer web components and plain html /js .
What you call the moral imperative wasn't voted on, doesn't have a police to enforce it, doesn't have a judge to interpret it, doesn't have a media to debate it, and you just might happen to change your mind about it a couple of years into the future.

Even if you say that your strategy is to make people (including yourself) feel guilty about breaking this imperative, and amplify this feeling as much as possible so as to compensate for the lack of organization required for a proper law, it is not certain that that will ever work and I don't know of an example where it did work, although it has been tried over and over. And if I may say, it also corrupts human nature so even if it worked I won't be personally positive about it, but that is just me.
2,423 Ghanaians Abroad Have Reached Out for Urgent Evacuation –Ablakwa
> Arguably, part of the reason the police is so aggressive and distrustful when interacting with regular people is the higher gun density in the country.

The vast majority of police violence we witness in the US is against totally unarmed people. I think this gives the police far too much credit. Being a police officer is actually a very safe job to begin with, and violent crime in the US has been decreasing steadily for decades.

In fact, most of the worst offending police departments are the places in the US where the incidence of civilian gun ownership, legal or otherwise, is lowest: New York, Boston, Chicago, LA.

The cops simply don't need an excuse for violence, they're violent even, or perhaps because, the public they attack are unarmed.

The Black Panthers had it right.
> Storage concerns are separated and grouped at the top.

That's rather circular. That's what defines the style, it's not in itself an advantage or a disadvantage.

> Logic code is more compact, helping readability

It's slightly more compact, but it harms readability, as I describe at [0]. Using the new style, especially with the const keyword, can make code much more readable.

> Stack use can be determined at a glance.

It can't, that's up to the compiler. Perhaps all locals will be enregistered. Even if it were true, it's extremely rare to need to do this.

> Looking up a variable's type is faster in cases where a variable is used throughout the code block.

In certain circumstances this may be true, but there may still be multiple levels you may have to check. For short-lived locals, it will be quicker to look up the type using the new style, as that keeps the declaration close to where it is used.

Using a modern IDE, it's a draw - just hover over a local and it will tell you its type.

> Reflects that object lifetime of any stack storage object is the same regardless of where it is declared in the code block.

That doesn't sound right. That will be platform-dependent. I see no reason a compiler couldn't generate incremental pushes, rather than an upfront block allocation. Also, depending on what the compiler generates, different locals may end up occupying the same place in the stack (at different times), and a given local may be held in different places in the stack at different times. And that's if we're ignoring registers. No matter what we do, we can't rely on the generated assembly looking anything like the source code.

Beyond that, it's 'dishonest' about locals' real lifetimes, in a way that can be harmful. Compare:

{ // Old style
int i;
int j;

i = j; // Undefined behaviour
j = 7;
}

{ // New style
int i = j; // Compile-time error. 'j' is not in scope.
int j = 7;
}

> "-Wuninitialized" exists, but passing pointer and defining 'default' value style can still cause read-before-write.

I'm afraid I don't get what you're saying here. Are you referring to the danger of passing a 'default' value to a function, say, in a way that might be dangerous?
Hmm that is a good point :-)
In my last Startup, my cofounder pushend that we should write no tests until we had paying customers. Ultimately I came to respect the level of discipline that this imposed.
Go and React Development with Docker
I’m ok with reparations to former slaves, but AFAIK none of them are still alive (in the US). Reparations to their descendants (taken from all taxpayers) aren’t IMO any more “just” (or socially beneficial) than reparations from the rich to the poor (poor kids are also disadvantaged at no fault of their own... due to their ancestry).

Explicit discrimination should be proven and solved by the usual means (suing, courts, ...). If you mandate a generic white-to-black reparations, you might end up with a situation where a working-class white person (deprivileged) is subsidising Obama’s daughters (extremely privileged). Basically any time you try to project “injustice” or “privilege” on a single dimension (such as race), the result is certainly unjust.
Those last paragraphs hit the nail on the head.

Business often doesn’t seem to treat developers (or any workers) as a first class value. This is true in the small just as much in the large. Hence the grotesque term “Human Resources”.

Writing “clean” aka pragmatic, well abstracted, robust, performant and readable code becomes naturally less “expensive” if practiced regularly (who would have thought).

So it is also an investment in developers: their skill, communication, happiness and engagement.

Disregard of that is short sighted and cynical. Just paying someone (well) instead of investing in them and growing with them leads to unhappy, stressed, uncreative workers, erodes trust and limits engagement.
yeah no. one needs to take responsibility for actions. if you did something without thinking it through, you should experience the consequences. I am all for having a social net and helping people that are going through a rough time, but I believe the normalization of this will lead to more poverty.

instead, I could take the view that there are too many people in the world, that having an aggressive population growth is actually a good thing, and that technology could fill in a lot of gaps we fill in by throwing unqualified people at it.
Great perspective. Totally agree. We are using nginx to proxy to couchdb and do the ssl termination, and it’s great that we can proxy the DB traffic like this since it’s all just http, but couch has always felt one step away from being an absolutely killer dominator of the MBaaS space to me. It’s like a self hosted firestore, except it has no story around auth. If it also had a way to trigger user code on the server side in other languages that would be incredible.
How countries are using genomics to help avoid a second coronavirus wave
They don’t have to be so secretive. The Snowden leaks told us that companies like Microsoft collaborate with the IC to backdoor their software.
There were protests across the US just a few weeks before the current batch that were prominently heavily armed. No police violence was reported.

> The police so far haven't openly fired at crowds.

They have, however, been actively attacking, beating, arresting, and sometimes murdering people protesting peacefully.

I believe that the likelihood of all police abuses against large groups, from rubber bullets (that have fractured childrens' skulls in the last week) all the way up to the situation you describe, is significantly reduced in likelihood if they are made to fear immediate retaliation by the crowd, much the same way the crowd does not attack the police.

The police are humans too (it is claimed), so I would imagine they too, like the protestors, wish to go home at the end of their shift.

Look at it this way: every single cop in these things is armed with deadly force. There are already thousands of guns at these things, and we already know the police are violent, murderous liars, as evidenced by the thousands of cases of beatings, murders, injuries, and riots they've directly perpetrated in the last week.

The situation will not be worsened by reducing the power imbalance. If the murderous pigs can avoid shooting into crowds, I imagine the peaceful protestors will do at least as well.
Very small. I asked before and the consensus was that nobody wants to maintain it. There was a project before (Fedora’s dark server) which died.

That said, debian started indexing build ids in the repos so at least for dwarf files there is a barebones index now. Sadly not for the companion executables.
Quantum Mechanics: stuff that takes form only when observed. That's why you can't find your keys or phone sometimes, or plug in a USB cable. :D
Yep, in case of Linux the 'it's OSS. Download the tar.gz configure --enable-debug and deal with it' attitude hampered the development and use of something like a Symbol Server.

Microsoft has had it since at least 2005 - that's the first Visual Studio release I remember using it with - so it might have exited before that. It's things like these that separate MS from all others - Engineering culture of having to give 2 shits about other people - OEMs, developers, corporate IT, partners and having the chops to effectively address it at scale within their Engineering teams.
Software that incorporates silent and nonconsensual telemetry is spyware.

If it's reporting telemetry silently, it's covert.

If it's not asking for permission first, for some percentage of users, it's nonconsensual, and is thus rightly qualified as malicious.

It's still malice even if the telemetry is just for product improvement, against the user's wishes for privacy. (It also has the side effect of informing the ISP and military intelligence surveillance apparatus of the user's usage habits.)

Tools that misuse the user's system to benefit the software manufacturer against the wishes of the user by exfiltrating their data without advance warning (covertly) are malware.

> It is covert malware, hidden in software that purports to do something useful.

You just described a software package with silent, no-opt-in telemetry, such as Visual Studio Code, Balena Etcher, the Adobe Creative Cloud, Mozilla Firefox, the Netlify CLI, the Gatsby static site generator, the Google Cloud CLI utility, and many others.
Maybe those qualities are what is making their society so successful and why ours is failing (in biological terms). Just a thought.
Interesting, I have always associated Romania (and most of post-Soviet Europe) with low taxes. Does it really have Scandinavian-level taxation?
Is there enough fertile land for everyone on Earth to live like the Amish? We will run out of land before we can all live that way, doesn't really work on a larger scale. And there is no way I'm going to live in a strict religious society.
I haven't tried it. But seeing as AdGuard is open source, I'll check it out and compare this week. If AdGuard is any better, then you've just saved me a tenner a year, so thanks.
Tetris (History)
Ask HN: What is the physics behind the GG Bridge “song”?
The Golden Gate Bridge now "sings" in heavy winds. Can anyone explain the physics behind this? Extra credit for suggesting a way to reduce this behavior.
Transitioning to Go
Overall interesting ideas, but I think he did a disservice to this one.

> 47. The Medium Is the Message: We pay too much attention to what is being said. But the medium of communication is more impactful. For example, the Internet’s impact on humanity has a bigger influence than anything that’s said on the Internet.

The concept here is that the character of the medium defines the types of ideas that can be transmitted through it. An example is how writing promotes logical and structures ideas, where television invokes emotion.

For more info, check out the wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

EDIT: a relevant example is comparing HN and fb. The are both internet-based and have high-speed responses. However, HK is text based and all ideas must be written in a way that is clear to the reader. FB has text, but also has the like/heart/laugh/hate button. I think this encourages "a response", whether you can articulate it or not. Also fb has images. Memes can be used, which are quite ambiguous and not a structured, logical statement. The different environments are a consequence of the rules that define the medium.
I am not sure why being zero-indexed is considered a feature. I have no problem using a zero-indexed system, but I've never really thought of it as a feature. Is there something I'm missing that makes zero-indexed systems faster, easier to use or otherwise better than one-indexed system?
Our AI reviewed 5k laptops and monitors in a week
Link? The eTag of an object is still the MD5 AFAIK.
How would code-signing help if NSA arm-twists you into introducing a backdoor in your code? Even for open-source, it is difficult for average-Joe to trace and figure out contributions (its like saying the automobile engine has blueprints available, so everyone should be able to figure out what's wrong). :-)
Pro-Trump bots 'spread anti-China Covid misinformation online'
Not an expert on the subject but I am sure when it comes to reform judaism this is incorrect.

Reform judaism started in the late 1700s and the numbers grew significantly until relatively recently. Having 2-3 kids among reform Jews was the norm.

The reason for the decrease in the number of reform jews (if there is one) is not because of a decrease in birthrate, but is instead because of the massive amount of intermarriage and the reason for the intermarriage is because in the West there has been a decrease in anti-semitism over the past 50-60 years (although anti-semitism has been trending upwards over the past few years).
> However, startups don't fail because the codebase is ugly, or convoluted, or not following best practices.

Could they fail because they fail to meet deadlines due to convoluted or buggy code or having to invest more money and time to fix those issues and bugs introduced by them?
>yeah no. one needs to take responsibility for actions.

How can you predict if your partner will leave you in future when you decide to have kid?
An important aspect of the Coronavirus situation in Brazil that commentators haven't highlighted enough is Brazilian federalism. Brazil is a federal republic, although our federalism isn't as solid as the American counterpart (the federal government tends to be much stronger in Brazil). However, with Bolsonaro's weak response to the crisis, the Brazilian Supreme Court officially recognised the power of state and municipal governments to decree quarantines and lockdowns and to organise their COVID-19 strategies independently. As a result, things look very different depending on which state and city you're looking at. Some places have been hit hard, others are doing well.

I live in the interior of Minas Gerais, a state that's comparable to Texas in area and to Florida in population size. The mayor of my town locked down the city relatively early (late March). It didn't last long, with local businesses pressuring for it to reopen and low coronavirus incidence, but I think it helped. A more recent decree has made masks mandatory. So far the numbers look OK - there has been a single COVID-19 death (~80k population).

Other Brazilian states have not been so lucky. I can say with confidence that it would have helped tremendously if the federal government had taken this seriously from the beginning, and organised a nation-wide plan to handle the crisis. It is inconceivable to me that anyone would disagree. We were well aware of the situation in other countries - there was no reason to assume things would have played out differently in Brazil. While Brazil hasn't been as hard hit as other countries if you consider population size, no one has dealt with the problem as irresponsibly as we have. Tens of thousands of deaths could have been avoided. It is a real tragedy.
I've a friend who thinks drones are ultimately a better solution than tubes, which is also quite plausible. I don't really care much how it gets done, I want <10 minute automated delivery directly into my residence (hot food stays hot, cold drinks stay cold), and I imagine millions of others do too, if for no other reason than to make homes entirely without kitchens or refrigeration feasible.
I have to say it is quite cool how easy it is got it set up.
However, I for me the screen updates on my tablet were too laggy. I wonder how much it would improve if the stream had a lower resolution and limited colors.
Something I've noticed:
There's been some things that I initially thought were bubbles. But they seemed to work - I even started doubting myself. Turns out they were just longer lasting bubbles.
You didn't really want to write database did you?
I never knew pigeons could read

edit: I made a joke about a typo on the internet, fuck me right
Many in Chinese leadership have technical degrees in science. While science appears to be the enemy of some authoritarian governments, others see it as their national edge.
Are you sure you aren't underestimating the intelligence of your audience? ;-)
Masks as a Social Signal
Yes:

$ echo "1,2,3,4,5" | choose -f , 2 0
3 1
$ echo "1,2,3,4,5" | choose -f , 2:0
3 2 1

Note that the indexing starts with 0, "-d" is "-f", and a range is denoted by ":" instead of "-" which is used for indexing from the end.
Celebrating the Revolutionary Optimism of Iain M. Banks (2017)
Thermostat battle: Gender and temperature's effect on cognitive tasks (2019)
> Climate Change (go Tesla?)

I am waiting for around the 2050s to see if/when the climate change movement goes against EVs in their current form. We're really just shifting all the polluting in time and place. Move it all to the front and back of the vehicle's lifespan, put a huge distance between the vehicle user and how the energy is produced, and we call it green because there's no smoke coming out of it.

In practice the numbers seem to suggest the overall change in emissions is not better - at least not in the type of EVs that are popular now (e.g. Teslas). A much smaller vehicle, with much less batteries, perhaps.
XML as code can (and often does) work as intended.

It's much less annoying than "exciting" episodes and habits:

- let's see if our SSL certificate has been actually updated on all servers in the cluster
- let's find out what I need to restart after deploying my web app update
- who knows what the classpath loading order will be this time; if it's broken you can try a restart
- finish the test quickly before the sysadmin committee begins an application server upgrade and everything goes offline for as long as it takes, hopefully only a few hours
Love this website. The best part is clicking the arrow on the right and being able to fly the little drone around the web site.