skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
JetBrains products help me understand a new codebase more efficiently, and basic use of ls and tail on unix based machines help me parse log files faster. SelfControl on mac helps me block distracting websites and Klokki helps me track my time. Bear is a great note taking app that I've mostly switched to from Evernote. I like GitHub's new Android app.

In terms of actually being a better programmer, I believe anything that helps you collect or parse information about your running code and debug it will improve your life. Sometimes that's print statements, sometimes that's a remote debugging session.

My most regularly used commands are probably `ls -lt | head -20` and `tail -f' or `tail -1000 | grep`, so maybe learning a bit about pipes too.
If you want to count back to its initial development, we're going back to 2001, almost two decades.

I remember being optimistic/hopeful about the project in its earliest days (following its progress on OSNews).

I wanted to see something like BeOS on x86 hardware after seeing how fast it ran on my first PC (after a long stint with Apple IIs and Macs).

A lot has changed in those 19 years, but still, kudos to the team for sticking at it.
If you're suggesting there were several months worth of backlog prior to COVID-19, that would imply pretty massive inefficiencies...
Unpacking tech’s response to the killing of George Floyd
What do you mean by lexically scoped functions? A nested function?

My point is that instead of reusing the term closure, one could use the term anonymous function. To rephrase my question: Do you have a specific example where a nested function (or an anonymous function) is not lexically scoped (In a language that is otherwise lexically scoped)?
> "auto unions are why American auto companies are failing since they protect workers who work 30 minutes a day and slack off the rest".

I grew up in Flint, MI and my father was an electrical engineer at one of the 3 major automakers. We would frequently go to the auto plants for school field trips. I remember one particular trip where we were walking around the production floor and there was a guy just sitting in a chair sleeping right in the middle of everything. Nobody seemed to think it was a good idea to wake him up. Everyone just worked around him like he wasn't there. It was kind of surreal.

I'm not saying that proves the point in your quote above, but the unions were notorious for making it impossible to fire employees even if they showed up drunk or high or didn't do their jobs. They also didn't seem to be protecting workers interests very well, as their wages have stagnated for decades and they've lost the great benefits they used to have. It doesn't mean unions are a bad idea, but the auto unions seemed to be a particularly bad implementation.
My first co-op in 2016 was 6 months at Desktop Metal. They're worth at least $1.5B (Forbes article from 2019). I got the co-op through school--Northeastern has a well established co-op program and they have lots of connections to companies looking to hire college students. I'm pretty sure I found it through the school's own career planning tool. When I joined they had only been in business for around a year and half but were already doing very well in the metal additive manufacturing space.
160k Robinhood traders now own Hertz stock
Undeadly.org

DRM update committed

Contributed by Paul 'WEiRD' de Weerd on 2020-06-08 from the faster pixels dept.

Jonathan Gray (jsg@) has just committed an update to the DRM code to the tree. This update brings support for newer AMD and Intel graphics parts.

[1] https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20200608075708
This image was shocking. Thank you for sharing. I feel like Treebeard, from the Lord of the Rings, coming across Saruman’s destruction of Isengard.
Intel forced Apple to support 32bit computing for almost 10 years because they couldn’t meet deadlines.

Apple has been dreaming about this day for years.
Show HN: BBC vs. Fox vs. CNN
(Reposting with permission from dang)

Hi, OP here. I started working on recommender systems in 2016 during my
undergrad, specifically doing music recommendation (I was dissatisfied with the
quality of Pandora/Spotify recommendations). I spent about five months in 2019
trying to make a music startup based on that. However, during that time I
realized that there would probably be more value in having a really good
general-purpose/cross-domain recommender system. i.e. if you're looking for
something specific, use Google, and if you're not looking for something
specific, use Findka. That's the vision anyway.[1][2]

More specifically, the benefits I see from cross-domain recommendation are:

- More data per user => better recommendations.

- More potential users => (eventually) better recommendations. For example, to
get users for a podcast recommender, you have to find people who like
podcasts above a certain threshold. With Findka, anyone who's interested in
getting recommendations for at least one content type is a potential user.
(And even people who aren't above that threshold for podcasts might
appreciate an occasional podcast recommendation).

- Lots of potential applications. I'm particularly interested with trying to
use Findka for social networking (opt-in of course). Data from Findka could be
useful for dating, job opportunities, forming online communities, etc. This is
more long-term, but I also think Findka data could be useful for search.[3]

The algorithm currently is dead simple. Just collaborative filtering without
explicitly taking into account content type. So it's naively cross-domain.
Since the data set is still small, there's no need for matrix factorization. I
recompute the whole matrix every hour and store it in memory. See [4] for the
implementation (it only took 30 LOC). That's a little out-of-date but the
general approach hasn't changed.

For the tech stack, I'm using a Clojure web framework + deployment solution
that I made.[5] It's like a self-hosted version of Firebase (I'm running it on
DigitalOcean).

[1] https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/6/24/search-dis....

[2] https://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/view/2....

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23449754

[4] https://findka.com/blog/rec-sys-in-30-lines/

[5] https://findka.com/biff/
Glad it helped you! Thank you for the nice words :)
This is fundamentally untrue. Monopoly has nothing to do with product or service quality. This is proven by Google, which both has bad products and terrible service. Monopoly is built by using network effects and illegal business arrangements to gut competitors such that a better product cannot win in the market.
Some folks find that switching from WiFi to Ethernet for your home office can help:

https://www.jefftk.com/p/ethernet-is-worth-it-for-video-call...
Ask HN: Getting (re)start with automated trading in 2020
I'd like to try my hand at creating an automated trading system. I did something similar back in the early 2000's with Java and the Interactive Brokers API. But I'm sure the tools have evolved since then.

What are the easiest platforms/frameworks to get started with - preferably something all-inclusive for backtesting, optimization, and live trading?
It is an analogy..

Rider: Lean to the side

Training wheels: Hey! Whoah there. If you do that you will fall.

Rider: I know, do it anyway! (sudo...)

Training wheels: Your choice, I can only prevent so much.

Rider falls over...

If a user has sudoer privileges, sudo serves as nothing more than training wheels.

User: apt install APP

System: Access denied. sudo privileges required

User: sudo apt install APP

Sytem: Okie doke

And the age old `sudo make me a sandwhich` joke continues...
It was bonkers. I could barely play two videos simultaneously on my Pentium in Windows 9x, but I could play four simultaneously on the same box booted into BeOS. The OS was small and fast.
Or make it a shell function that operates on $@ in the same way, so you can put it in your bashrc with your aliases.
>Who exactly falls for this kind of scam?

Uhh the same people who fall for the scam that was steam, uplay, mmo's, etc... aka it's irrational to buy software you don't own or control. If anything the modern software landscape is an idiocracy. Windows 10 "requires internet" (wtf?) I mean come on, anything that "requires interent" is a giant red flag. The steam stats prove we live in an idiocracy.

Don't think so? Silicion valley tech companies are over the moon that the public bought into mmo's/drm/f2p mobile gambling games en mass.

They finally are going to close the PC as an open platform, which started with merely renaming PC RPG's in the 90's and calling them "MMO's" then they started applying that fake moniker to every game they wanted to client server to steal them from the public to deny ownership.

Whole industry is looking to setup the internte (aka the world comptuer) to trap software between the public pc's and their servers, so we get incomplete software in the future "requiring login" to remote servers (aka stolen software as a service).

https://tifca.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ClienttoCloud_V...

Steam software survey - windows 10 at 85%

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

Windows 10 privacy invading, drm defective app model (uwp, encrypted vm's). Making preserving old software using UWP/encryption impossible (aka encrypted files).

The average person in our society both working class and professional is dumb.

I've talked to programmers who've bought overwatch or sent money to quake champions, not realizing that their mtx money told the industry to steal games and client server them. We used to get level editors in every AAA game in the 90's before the game industry and software industry discovered 70% of society is computer illiterate to an insane degree.

The modern videogame and software landscape on the PC is an idiocracy, aka hardware dongled software by way of internet.

So for people to fall for BTC scams on youtube when they fall for all kinds of "regular" corporate scams and are oblivious to the corruption of their own society for instance... is pretty par for the course.

We live in a society of morons.

See George carlin on the american dream:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q
There are natural disasters and natural disasters.

Some are indifferent to location. Some are exacerbated by, or simply drawn to, cities.

An earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, flood, or wildfire is to a high approximation not particular to the level of urbanisation. It occurs, and strikes whatever happens to be in its path.[1] There's no real reason to see a one-off or random strike as part of a long-term trend, absent some compelling causal relation.[2]

There are phenomena which are exacerbated or directly caused by cities and their concommitant industries, populations, and activities: crime, corruption, pollution, and disease, principle among these.[3]

Looking at the COVID-19 data, greater incidence seems strongly associated with larger (and often poorer) urban areas. That concentration and lack of hygiene promote the spread of disease is hardly a novel concept, and there's a strong argument to be made that disease co-evolves with human social patterns of settlement, transport, and commerce.

You may be aware of a period of urban decline in the US beginning roughly 1950 and progressing through about 1980, as crowding, crime, pollution, soaring property values, and similar factors made cities less desirable, and open space, low housing costs, cheap and uncongested (for a while) transport, and high-paying jobs made suburban regions (Armonk, Mountain View, Walnut Creek, Pasadena) attractive.

The urban revival of the late 20th century, and continuing until ... recently? ... owed much to the virtual elimination of urban industry (and hence pollution), falling crime, and a small number of centres of largely informational work (software, banking, entertainment, some government contracting) favouring a small number of very large urban centres: New York, Seattle, San Francisco, London, Berlin, etc. At the same time, the recently-attractive suburbs themselves became crowded, expensive, congested, and obviously underserved with infrastructure and services. "Distributed cities" isn't a concept that works well, long term, I believe.

If COVID-19 isn't merely a one-off, but a harbinger of a future in which rapidly-disseminating novel diseases travel via airline and other transport systems to dense and highly co-mingled urban centres, then the calculus may well be shifting from the winning urban megacities of today. Whether or not that proves an accurate scenario of course remains to be seen.

________________________________

Notes:

1. There are factors which may make a city more likely to be in that path -- many urban areas are along rivers or in low-lying coastal areas, Because Reasons (mostly transport). But the city itself doesn't cause the disaster.

2. Climatic change and its related afflictions would of course be one of those causal relations with a plausible long-term trend line.

3. I highly recommend Kyle Harper's The Fates of Rome, which explores this for the Roman empire and its unprecedented urbanisations and wide-ranging commerce, including to China. Adam Kucharski's The Rules of Contagion, forthcoming in the US, published 2020 in the UK, looks at similar concepts.
Most car manufacturers haven't moved towards OTA updates, probably because they know exactly the risk you describe.

I think Tesla has done remarkably well and I suspect they were able to do it because they were small and nimble when OTA capabilities first became feasible.

On a different note, Nissan's manufacturing was disabled[1] a few years ago when WannaCry was endemic.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-39906534
HN mods. This looks very sketchy. I looked at a some of the Congrats messages and the accounts were 3-20 days old. Why is this on the front page of HN to merit a discussion?
Regular scheduled 1:1 meetings with those I work closely with. Does wonders for teamwork / relationship building.
Where's the comments? Mods deleting posts?
Great! Now everyone who already has an NFC U2F/WebAuthn key (e.g. YubiKey with NFC) can use it for the “advanced protection” program (which increases security on your Google account by enforcing 2FA, among other things).
Before this you needed to get a separate Bluetooth dongle that at least I have not found other uses for.
Good point.
So who should be responsible? Mr. Sakulevich/channel owners? Youtube/platform provider? Scammer (probably won't take responsibility)? Victims who fail for it? Educating all people (including channel owners and scammers) probably won't work/ won't be fast enough against fast paced internet technology and 'I want to use it now without effort' mentality.
Yup. But they brought it into the factory. No? Or am I missing something?
I'm the author, yeah I need to ditch Core. It's fucking massive. I would have thought Jane Street gave a shit about binary size, but I guess not..
Iceland Bans Sociopaths from Government
This is coming from creator of Redis so we better listen :)

Thank you for your work Salvatore!
I think the poster means consistent, rather than stable, or backwards compatible.
Someone suggested it (but then, the community is large enough that all far-fetched-but-not-impossible ideas have probably been mentioned at one point or another :)).

I don't really know what the differences between porting Haiku's userland to that or to Linux would be. Everyone loves to make arguments about how microkernels are so great and all, but there still isn't a major operating system or distribution with a significant number of everyday users on one. Plus, all of our same philosophical objections to using the Linux (or any other kernel) as the basis for Haiku would still apply.
If you can afford to pay four figures per instance per year, yeah
> C# and its structs, yummy.

Yep. Java should also be getting value types, hopefully soonish: https://cr.openjdk.java.net/~briangoetz/valhalla/sov/01-back...
Apple will announce move to ARM-based Macs later this month
I'm with you; 13 years(ish) now and I'm still trying to make something.
Well, some 'growth' happens just by raising your rates. Not a lot of folks willing to do IoT and firmware. I just charge more every year.

And yes its a mess. Folks resist using real security on their phone or desktop. Imaging an embedded device they buy and want to forget about. They sure don't want any passwords or keys that they'll promptly forget! How many times have I reset my router to factory defaults because, who knows what the admin password is I set two years ago and never used since?

I've put security into devices, and had the client want it taken out. Because their installers find it onerous. And, 'nobody is going to attack my pool pump controller!'
No offense but your account was created 18 days ago. Something seems very weird about this post.
Seems like it's exploiting a hole in YT's reporting process. I stumbled on a few of these streams last week and tried to report the accounts for "impersonating". However, on the reporting page, you're asked to specify which of the users' videos or comments are violating the rules, but you're not given any option to specify a live stream video. Since the accounts did not post any other videos or comments, there was no content for me to tag.

I submitted the reports anyway and, shortly thereafter, got an email from Youtube telling me "Unfortunately the information you provided in your report to YouTube does not meet our impersonation reporting guidelines." Seems they automatically ignore any reports without tagged videos/comments.
> For one thing, Go can be made memory safe if you avoid concurrent mutability.

golang's performance won't be as good as Java's.
How risky are municipal bonds? I feel like I always hear about cities going bankrupt.
>Most people have no idea of the amount of incredibly advanced signal processing that goes into echo cancellation and noise cancellation in videoconferencing.

We pretty much take echo cancellation for granted at this point. Using something better than your laptop microphone on a call is still a good idea but I'm not sure that wearing headphones/earphones is that big a deal at this point.

You don't need to go back that far until speakerphones other than very expensive Polycoms and the like were pretty mediocre at cutting out because of echo.
I'm pretty sure there is no business model. I see Haiku as a labour of love.
Google and Facebook have offices in SF proper, and YouTube is located just south in San Bruno. "none ... have a real presence" is a considerable overstatement.

Though yes, a large number of employees do travel south from SF daily.

The larger issue is that the Peninsula and South Bay have resisted housing densification and transport improvements for decades.
Is there anything like https://github.com/herumi/xbyak on the Rust side? I like this approach a lot for non-tivial high performance work since it lets you tweak your assembly for particular hardware at runtime.
Voyager probes are under the weight that is otherwise necessary for human life support systems (i.e. fully covering that "we" operative word), Voyager probe travel under the speed that may be considered useful in any way (for human travel or otherwise), and finally (and probably most importantly), the current speed of the Voyager probes is not only the speed buildup provided by their chemical rockets but also of gravitational slingshots around more than one planet.
Love this guy's story. Wouldn't downvote it for anything. Let's all be nice and say "you're welcome - keep kicking ass".
I see in the comments that a lot of web developers are frustrated.. what programs do web developers use that only work on macOS? or is it also because of the retina screen? I've been developing on Linux for years without issues so trying to understand why devs choose macOS.
I agree wholeheartedly. Especially when most of the work I do is on a remote server anyway, so I'm already in tmux. I still use i3wm on older laptops just for the battery life gains, but 95% of what I do is Firefox + Terminal emulator, and alt-tab is just as fast. My main workstation is just gnome and it's fine.

(Sidenote: is there any sort of linux libvte-based terminal emulator that has tmux integration a-la iTerm2? For when I do use i3, it would be really nice if I could spawn a new terminal on a remote server, attaching through an existing tmux session.)
It's a 4 month old account, not created to just post this.
Best Firewalls for Small Businesses in 2020
What was the market for Linux when it came out ? The thing was a copy of an existing OS, made by a guy in his spare time.

What was the market for php when it came out ? It was just a few helpers to write web pages, simpler to use than perl that already existed at the time

What was the market for go when it came out ? Yes, it did have a few modern things built-in, but there were already tons of widely deployed languages.

And yet here we are. I don't need to tell you how successful each of those is today. I don't mean to say that Fuchsia will definitely be useful or deployed in any large fashion; just that "there is no market" is not a valid counterpoint to the development of a new project.
Not really, the other reply is right. Most registers are clobbered. FreeBASIC only passes the asm code inside the asm block directly to GAS (using the .intel_syntax noprefix directive). As I said, the compiler is too dumb to figure out what registers are being used so as a safety measure it clobbers almost all of them (see Register Preservation here[1]).

[1] https://documentation.help/FreeBASIC/KeyPgAsm.html
What are your thoughts on Crystal?

See: https://crystal-lang.org/
Big if true.
I just report as a scam.
ifdef is your friend. used everywhere
I explained in another comment that Michael Moore isn't the first, nor most reputable, to make these points. He's the first to expose the casual consumer to the problem set.

Suggested reading: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/A-Rational-Look-at-Energy-E...

"pretty terrible" and "best available and most recent science" are squirrelly evaluations. To be specific, you're alluding to the idea that the most recent technology improves the efficiency of solar panels and may extend their lifespan, but these marginal improvements in efficiency and lifespan aren't enough to cast aside the incredible costs in strip mining (ecosystem destruction and fossil fuel energy use), manufacturing (energy use), transportation (energy use), installation(energy use and further processed materials), and operations/maintenance (energy use, e-waste). I mean, that's a quantifiable cost to balance against quantifiable (and intermittent) output and the numbers don't bode well for renewables scaling up/out and truly denting fossil fuel consumption.

The core problem is worldwide energy demand is climbing higher and faster than renewables will ever be able to address. For the fractional role they play, the payout of renewables is undercut by the fact that fossil fuels are used to produce and emplace renewable infrastructure, renewable infrastructure (at a facility level) has an enormous environmental footprint (read: habitat destruction), and has to be replaced in a few decades at best. They are producing energy maybe 50% of that time, and despite the improvements in storage tech (which has its own environmental issues), you still need to back up the renewables facilities with.. fossil fuels.

All this is to say that we need to be looking at other sources (e.g. safe nuclear) to displace fossil fuel.
I know and as far as I remember this is done using a small brush to trace the outline and then fill it. Apart from being kind of a hack you also lose the beauty and simplicity of using Metafont to describe the spine of the character and let it derive the outline from that. I always thought of that as the higher abstraction that is preferable to use, but unfortunately and unexpectedly it falls short on many common character shapes. As a bezier outline description tool I see little benefit in using Metafont.
, according to leaks