skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> your favorite language prevents you to copy paste code, have variables shorter then 4 letters

"here's one place that PHP doesn't prevent poor quality code that is the same as other languages, and so all languages are the same"

No languages prevent these things (that I am aware of), but not all languages have the same number of edge cases that PHP has.

> and also fixes the bugs for you, let me know this cool language so I can try it.

I've written a lot of languages over the years, but right now I'm enjoying Go, which kinda does help prevent me from writing bugs with it's static typing, but also it's simplicity.

> I am also sure that in your first years of coding your code had no issues similar with the ones you described.

What's your point here? Noobs write bugs and bad code? Sure, we agree! But that doesn't mean that PHP is a good programming language.
PHP. Most of the Hack features are now in PHP core, and more and more libraries are dropping support for hhvm now.
The story seems off (temporally) for someone who got incarcerated circa 2010. Nothing very interesting has happened to technology since then.
Proptech startup Propzy banks $25m from SoftBank, others
Yes, and that metric is distorted out of all utility by the necessity of maximizing the specifically monetary value of labor, as a condition of survival and stability - and even then, those are frighteningly contingent if they're achievable at all.

There are other kinds of value, too.
Researchers uncover a new mindset that predicts success
we can debate if that's logically or morally right, but there's no doubt spite and hate are powerful motivators
Tips for creating a quick start guide
A quick start guide (QSG) is a document that helps the user to get started with a product or service.

1. Identify the objective(s)

What problem does your quick start guide help the user to solve? It is important to identify the objectives before starting to write it.

2. Show don’t tell

Have you considered imagery and visual indicators? Users may depend on illustrations or imagery to show them the equipment they should be using and how to complete the actions.

3. Define the scenarios

In order to cover and explain everything required to solve the problem, the guide must consider the user perspective.

4. Research the user

Do you really know your user? Carrying out research into the user and scenario will help you to understand their experience.

5. Assume a low level of understanding

Quick start guides are written to help guide non-technical individuals to a setup solution. It is best to not assume that a user will understand.

6. Add headings and timings

Have you clearly separated the steps of your guide? Writing clear, succinct headings can summarise the step in the process. Adding a time scale can help a user to accurately estimate the time it will take.

7. Keep it simple, but descriptive

A QSG guide should be simple and succinct but simultaneously descriptive and add context where it needs to. Technical language should be avoided wherever possible.

8. Be clear and consistent

The design and the language of the guide should be clean and clear, adhering to the brand tone of voice and optimised for the readability of the guide.

9. Test with real users

Have you checked that your quick start guide is helpful to the user? User testing will confirm that the guide solves the problem and fulfils your objectives without adding to user frustration.

10. Keep the content up-to-date

Quick start guides are only useful if they are accurate, up to date representations of the product or service.
Wages for the bottom 3 quintiles have been stagnating or growing well below those of the top quintile for decades. It is because they have lost their ability to negotiate for higher wages, due to an unfavorable shift in demand and supply curves.

They are contending with additional supply of labor from other countries where people are willing to work for less. In addition, software and the ability to scale at zero cost has made people more productive, so one person can do much more than before. And it also leads to big companies getting even bigger meaning people only have a few employers to choose from.

This change also happens at a faster rate than before in history, so while in decades past, technology obviate people slowly enough that they were able to retrain and do other things, now it could be moving too fast for people to retrain (or perhaps they’re simply not capable of learning the new task).
7organic – Russian Ecomarket
Экомаркет натуральных продуктов питания с доставкой на дом
Young workers can thrive after coronavirus layoffs by leaving big cities
Actually, it's pretty simple, just include https://github.com/markushedvall/plantuml-encoder and call

"https://www.plantuml.com/plantuml/img/" + encode(text);

That's what I did on collabuml.
Senior management are the ones making these calls about enforcing standardised systems, and they do not take advice from us pipsqueaks below.

Right now everythings in emergency mode anyway so as far as they're concerned outsourcing everything to Microsoft is one less problem. Everything can be justified by the state of exception.

Kudos to MIT for leaving their staff to make such calls for themselves. I know Sussman is a superstar but still. I'm sure a culture like that helps contribute to MIT being the world's most highly ranked university.
Finding Hidden Corona Symptoms Through Google Trends
We Switched from Yarn to Pnpm
>How is the electoral college perceived here?

I don't know about perception, but in practice the electoral college has decided 2 elections in the past 20 years in favor of the Republican candidate when the Democratic candidate won the popular vote.

I think generally people want to do away with it (my guess is the would be reflected slightly higher in HN than the general population).
The comparison is not even close in terms of numbers, we can see the huge difference at a glance if we check the stats: http://www.world-war-2.info/statistics/
https://covidbynumbers.com/
No, that was April 5, 1994... The end of the '90s
I can go to Flickr and download 3 million photos labelled "cup". How many cups have you seen in your whole life? Probably fewer.
Show HN: Covise – Advise and Consult your friends
Causality there goes in the opposite direction. Fatalism is inspired by existential crisis, not by practical considerations. And trading practicality for existential crisis is unwise: you only lose everything and don't obtain anything.
Or, from another perspective, what makes one think that forced confinement and ostracisation does not qualify as sufficient "consequences"? In a fundamental sense, this is the greatest punishment that can be given to a human being. We are incredibly social creatures.
Can you share it?
OK. I'll try to play devil's advocate here.

Disclaimer: I think of myself as an engineer.

I do believe your frustration comes from observing actual issues and you're right to express your disappointment. However, I can see a lot of cynicism in your tone, and I feel there's a huge amount of judgement on those "cons" without trying to peek behind the curtain on what makes them behave like that.

To provide a different viewpoint - I've often seen this desire to do tech in a tech-first way fail massively. Many of us consider ourselves techies, so we believe we work in the tech industry. But we don't. We work in Finance, Productivity, Mobility, Food and similar industries, even though we're engineers. Apart from developer tooling and some exceptions - those industries are not about the tech. Countless times, I've seen engineers spend valuable resources (their own time) delivering the perfect tech solutions for non-existing problems (or over-engineered and expensive solutions to real problems, which could have been solved without tech much easier) Without the "cons" of UX, business development and product management, people like those would always disconnect from customers.

I do believe we should all try to find what motivates us and for many people here, this would be tech innovation. But dismissing the other roles in the companies we work with is just an endless utopia chasing, never productive.

I've been lucky to work with some great non-tech people and learn a lot from them. And from 10+ years in the industries (plural), I've seen many more examples of over-engineered and useless tech than failure of "cons" to grasp why engineers should be put first.
Installing a program that modifies your OS is a good time to be concerned about backdoors.
At the time there were two issues:
- (I think) school teachers were better paid than now, relative to the average population
- People in communism mostly knew the US through Hollywood films, which portray a way more glitzy version reality. Especially so in the 80s in popular sitcoms like Dallas.
Which means that some representatives, elected by fewer people, hold as much power (1 voice) as others (elected by more people).

Which means their own voices are effectively not equals.

If you're fine with it, fine for you.
I like Graphviz, but it's sad that we get such a tiny selection of graph-drawing algorithms to go with it. For instance, I don't see a way to draw a force-directed layout that also tries to account for edge direction, like a more flexible version of dot.
So long as there isn't a bureaucracy in place to get in the way. That's a limit of Free Software.
Here’s some advice from a hacker-turned-MBA: find your passion outside of work.

Tech is great money. You can live a very comfortable life by putting in your 40 hours a week at a good company. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this; and treating it as a clock-in/clock-out type of job will keep you from burning out.

Use that comfort to explore your true passion. A lot of times this isn’t remotely related to tech — maybe it’s music, maybe it’s triathlons, maybe it’s building shitty robots. I spent a lot of time and energy trying to find a “meaningful” job where I could build things that changed the world. Spoiler alert: it didn’t happen because that’s not how it works. Once I figured that out I went and got an MBA, because if I was going to be part of a soul-draining machine, I might as well make bank while doing it.

The myth of the “hero engineer” is honestly one that those of us in technology management try to eliminate. A “hero engineer“ culture is basically one that doesn’t bother properly designing things so they have to be held together with duct tape and string. The “hero” feels accomplished and like he/she saved the day, but if they had done their job right in the first place, the heroics wouldn’t have been needed.

Don’t look to be a hero. Be a software janitor who has a life outside of work. You’ll be way happier.
Deep learning of physical laws from scarce data
I think you meant to say pterosaurs and dinosaurs (in particular, avian dinosaurs, including birds) evolved flight independently.
There's so much we can agree upon, right?

If you are the geerlingguy I think you are, Drupal sure had an exit after Larry, and Symfony decided to step out too. Laravel didn't really follow PSR to begin with.

I use Slim framework extensively nowadays, and it has a surprisingly PSR 2,4,7, AND 15 support.

https://github.com/php-fig/fig-standards

The repo is quite active.
I think this thread is, in general, engaging in a bit too much name-calling and snark, but I think your point is important. Maybe a little under-developed, but certainly not worth flagging.
From an outside perspective, 'degressive proportionality' seems to be the term to think about more thoroughly [1]. It's valid that you neither want a minority dictating the terms for the majority nor a majority dominating a minority to such a degree that leaves the minority's voices unheard.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degressive_proportionality
The appropriate extent of punishment is that you are not allowed your freedom. You are restrained from engaging in society.

However, currently, in the US, prisoners are a) primarily incarcerated for non-violent crime, b) used as indentured servants with their labor sold without freedom to withdraw their labor, c) kept in prison beyond reasonable and appropriate sentences to provide the private and public purse of people's taxes paying the prison complex and their labor for profit.
I doubt that was intended as a threat (though I can see how you might read it that way). Instead, I believe I was an attempt to point out to you that an accusation of bias can go both ways, and that your view of what was typical/normal would change if your circumstances did.

If you were taking some position about money management and the response was "Yeah, just wait until you when the lottery" you wouldn't see this as a threat. Try reading it in that sense.
Possibly. I think some of that is a lingering cultural hangover of the Austro-Hungarian empire (which is also reflected in the cuisine of the nations that formerly composed said empire). My first reading of a Hungarian author in translation was when I was in grad school studying under Tibor Fischer. Despite it being my heritage, I only read Czech authors for the first time when I was working on a novel set in 1900 Prague. On the flip side, I'm fluent enough in Spanish now that I only read translations of authors writing in Spanish unintentionally (I hadn't realized that Optic Nerve was a translation when I read it) in favor of reading them in the original.
If you are into that, try learning Hebrew and join a Rabbi there are endless books and discussion interpreting the bible.
"go back to academia" doesn't mean you have to go back there and collect certificates, take classes and pass exams.

Find a prof working on something interesting to you and offer to help. Better still submit a patch to whatever source code they have put out in the public domain. Its a great way to get your leg in the door.

Lots of the labs in the country have techies on staff. It leaves the subject matter experts free from wasting endless amounts of time filling their heads with unnecessary garbage about software. DONT goto CS depts. Target multidisciplinary groups so when the Chemist is done with you, work with the Neuroscientist and then the Social Scientist and then the Astrophysicists etc. The longer you are loitering around one lab the more work will fall into your lap. After wasting my time at bluechips for few years, I moved to a univ lab, which morphed into working at the univ startup accelerator as various lab projects matured into startups.
"I think you want to seek out companies where the main business risk is technology risk still."

This is an excellent assessment. Any software product that depends on understanding deep first principles based complex systems has an ecological need to maintain a working engineering culture. At least in those parts of the organization that does product development.

I've worked my entire software engineer career in computer graphics and computer aided design (after getting my masters in physics) and while in these fields you've seen the usual MBA types poke their heads out, there have still been nooks where proper engineering was necessary.

So, find a company that seems to be needing internal development of non-trivial software.

But the original attention was correct as well - there are so many non-value adding bullshit jobs to keep things "professional" that they try to embrace all nooks an crannies, so even a healthy engineering culture is usually at risk, all the time.
> but in my understanding the opposition to UBI is not primarily about dignity,

Opposition to UBI (as well as healthcare for all, proper schooling for all, nutritional food for all, etc) is about not wanting to pay higher taxes and maintaining a competitive edge in being able to obtain resources over others in society (or the world).

Those with more wealth (or who think they are capable of gaining more wealth) want to prevent others from having it, predictably.
Interesting. With most land-based animals being four-legged today, it's tempting to assume that that would always have been the advantage over two-leggednes, with the exception of a few specialised long-distance runners (us, ostriches and kangaroos, basically). But maybe it's today's animal shapes that are the exception.
Not if you code a lot. It is not rare for developer to use vertical screen. https://img.devrant.com/devrant/rant/r_200135_Q9Fh4.jpg
Imagine if shareholders power in decisions were proportional to the amount of shares/stake they have in ownership of the company?
With current districting and gerrymandering frameworks a minority of rural voters have many, many times the electoral weight of someone in a metropolitan area so I have trouble coming up with something that is fair without overweighting one group over another. I see the problem with giving small parts of the country a monopoly practically, but when I see far more in common among constituents between Eastern WA and upstate NY than I see between Seattle and NYC I can’t help but feel that rural areas are far more united than cities are.
You didn't say anything about the output structure of these testing tools. That's the topic of this discussion, not the tools per se.
Apache NetBeans 12.0 Released
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_to_the_European_Parl...

> The allocation of seats to each member state is based on the principle of degressive proportionality, so that, while the size of the population of each country is taken into account, smaller states elect more MEPs than is proportional to their populations.

Anyway, it's not a direct comparison; MEP elections correspond to the House of Representatives, and there's no figure with the same centrality as the US President.

Most importantly, parties in the EU are primarily local and campaign on a local basis. There are trans-party coalitions like the EPP, but identification with them is weak. Whereas you can sample random Americans from across the country and find they identify as (and even are publicly registered as??) Democrat and Republican, and with a strong consistency across the country as to what those stand for.
Familiarity and momentum makes even convoluted and unusable software feel more usable (pointing finger at MSOffice).
This says the info was provided to ISPs back in April. Is this something that could be addressed by updating firmware on routers, like disabling certain kinds of UPnP responses? Or is it something that would have to be managed at the network level, like rate-limiting UPnP traffic?
Bell Labs was highly regulated, a state-owned monopoly. You can read more about it in "UNIX: A History and a Memoir" from Brian Kernighan.

And of course would Linus Thorvalds have created Linux without having known anything about Unix. LOL.

Regarding "innovation" in the industry: it's just another neoliberal fairy tale. An industry that doesn't risk their money in funding research (especially basic research) is neither an industry nor innovative.

We need another term for (yet another) neoliberal illusion.
European society is based on capitalism. It is disingenuous to claim it is based on socialism. And regardless, income inequality is also a problem in Europe.

The person you are replying to was making the obvious point that noone knows a better system than the current one. Adding a bit more wealth distribution just means tweaking the system, rather than creating a new one, which is what the parent poster implied was needed.

Maybe you should try reading some of those hundreds of books, because you clearly haven't if you think "What happened is that the rich got richer and the poor have to work shittier and shittier jobs, work longer, retire later, &c."
Amanda Lost 70 Pounds
The Senate is part of Congress, so “Congress and the Senate” is redundant and equivalent to just “Congress”.

And representation in both the House of Representatives and the Senate (moreso in the latter case) is not equal by population, so that just explains one of the way the voices are unequal rather than contradicting that claim.
Show HN: A free bot that understands WordPress
You're mostly right but I play a lot of games and Proton is good enough for me at least. I think it's a combination of not caring about games that don't run as well because they don't run as well or not caring for them in the first place.
I recently had someone in a restroom ask me how to flush the toilet. The toilets had IR sensors and flushed automatically. This person had been in prison for many years and had never seen that before.

I think part of the social reform that people are protesting for recently needs to extend to people in prison. Our system does nothing to rehabilitate people or to prepare them to re-enter society. We need to treat prisoners like humans and provide them with something, anything, to help them on the outside. Our system really tries to keep you in the system.

The OP got a harsh sentence but I don't particularly feel much empathy. I could have gone the black hat route too, but I didn't.
Well the bigger impact is that Steve Jobs may not have ever returned to Apple.
Paste your Postgres EXPLAIN ANALYZE here for instant readability
> Something about journeying to the deep ocean seems so much more terrifying than space.

What terrifies me most is the stuff that lives down there [0].

[0] https://www.livescience.com/16231-creepy-deep-sea-creatures-...
Never-Ending Niches
This all strikes me as extremely alarmist and far-fetched. The chances of COVID causing an indefinite pandemic that alters the nature of human behavior and the course of history forever in my estimation is zero. Business and economic difficulties for a few years, yes. Total destruction of the travel industry for all time? Not a chance.

Some of the stuff just makes no sense, for example; "There's already talk of a race to produce vaccines, where a country that has the vaccine will use the vaccine for itself in order to gain advantage rather than spreading it around the world."

I could imagine the country that discovers it giving priority to their citizens when there is, at first, limited supply but withholding it indefinitely for advantage seems like it would not happen because of the incredible profit motive.
She is the only human being to both travel in space and dive to Challenger Deep.
> I've heard a great argument from a conservative friend: it prevents densely populated cities like LA + NY for speaking on the needs/wants of the entire country.

It actually does the opposite. If you split up California into a bunch of smaller states, then some of those would vote one way, and others would vote the other way meaning they would effectively be cancelling each other out. This would weaken its power.
Can anyone recommend a resource for learning how to diagram?

Notably, I don't want to free-design directional relationships that are counter intuitive to what people expect. Eg, if Service A calls Service B, does the arrow go to Service B? What about the response? I imagine there are a ton of little questions like this and I'd like to learn to write what people expect to see.
The federal government is set up to allow minority positions to roadblock majority positions unless you have an overwhelming majority (look at basically every big social issue of the past century and you will see this is how it has played out). The purpose of this is to prevent people from moving fast and breaking things at the federal level. This is all fine so long as states have decent autonomy. CA can have all the weed and abortions they want and KY can have all the guns and christian values they want and neither has to bother the other. Unfortunately we've put of a hell of a lot of authority at the federal level over the last 120yr or so and as a result government's ability to do things is handicapped because more of the doing things necessarily has to happen at a level where the system was designed to only allow things to be done when practically nobody could disagree with them.
Russia’s space leader seems pretty bitter about SpaceX’s success
> I don't understand what he's saying here. I dual boot Ubuntu on my Windows 10 PC all the time (as well as using Virtualbox).

I think you have to disable UEFI before you can do this.