skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked with theatre folks in my community to build an online interactive theatre show about space. The actors are all acting from home using whatever costume, makeup and set they can cobble together, and they communicate with the audience via WebRTC.

We’ve still got shows tonight and next weekend if anyone wants to attend (you can attend from literally anywhere as long as you’ve got a working device) and I wrote it all up in a blog here: https://chrisuehlinger.com/blog/2020/06/16/unshattering-the-...
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_WvwHl7BXUPmoiSeD8G83JmS...
I’ve heard blind people (that weren’t born blind) describe it a similar way. “I don’t see black, I see with my eyes what you see with your elbow”
Ugly Duck

Rambling about web design and open source software.

https://uglyduck.ca
> Private schools are a bane to society.

Perhaps. In the US, there's the small matter of the 14th Amendment.
Why oh why do people abuse twitter to post entire blog posts. Do they also drink from plates, and shower in the sink? Write kernels in Javascript? smh
The amount of resources invested into this for so long is surprising - not to mention the risks that many people assumed in putting their own lives in danger for bones at best?

It's interesting how the regard for human life(s) in the city seems so small relative to the lengths which people in rural areas/national parks go at times..imagine if this amount of manpower, attention, and money were applied to all missing person(s) everywhere - for years and years.

I can understand the international traveler element, which further makes one wonder if the same amount of resources would have been applied were the missing individuals of American origin?

Also, the author's random mention of his pornography habits was cringey and only cheapened what is an otherwise enjoyable read.
I used Typescript for 2 years, and I'm happy to report I'm dropping it and encouraging my team to do the same. Types are for compilers, not people, and personally I think there's more disadvantages than advantages re: time.
Your opinion of "what works" is not universally shared by everyone.

You don't know the details of saagarjha's work developing on Android (unless, perhaps, you actually know them in real life, which seems unlikely given the way you responded), and neither do I. saagarjha is the one best able to determine what works for them.

If your point is that that having more resources avaiable to you can make you more productive, that's fine. It's always nice to have as beefy of a machine as possible.

However, not everyone has that luxury. Businesses have budgets, and most developers I know don't get to set their own budget for equipment. Sometimes you are lucky, and the money is there, and your management is willing to spend it. Sometimes that is not the case. Regardless, my primary development machine right now is a 5-year-old laptop, and I get plenty of development work done with it.

The way you worded this latest response makes it sound as if you are saying that I am not a professional, and my tools are just "toys", because I don't work on an 8 core machine with 64GB of RAM. I don't know if that is your intention, but if it is it is both inaccurate and insulting.
Dentistry is the last industry I'd watch as a harbinger of the economy. Going to the dentist is truly playing russian roulette with corona. The aerosolization of particles is inevitable as is inhaling them. If there is corona to be aerosolized and transmitted, it will be. I can't imagine anyone getting elective dentistry right now. Then again, many Americans seem to have a death wish right now and would risk their lives for a cleaning.
Sure, the hardware is great. Depending on what you do, it's the software that is miles behind. The Android app situation is worse to begin with and Android developers pay almost no attention to big screen tablets because so few people have them. The app situation on the iPad isn't amazing, but it is better. I think Procreate alone is responsible for a lot of iPad sales.

Plus Android tablets are deceptively expensive. They aren't going to receive updates for as long as the iPad and when you sell it, the resale value is as good.
Ctrl+Z [How It Works]
> The articles solution makes lifetime of the generator more explicit.

Does it? What's the difference between these two snippets?

with judgments_open('judgments.txt') as judgments
gather_features(judgments)

with open('judgments.txt') as f:
gather_features(judgments_from_file(f))

You still have to complete all the work within the scope of the context manager either way, right?

The code ehsankia presented combines the generator with a closure that includes
the context manager, and automatically carries the scope of the context manager
along with it, so that when the generator is exhausted the context manager's
scope also ends.
Reminds me of the Wave Function Collapse algorithm, although doesn't look to be that.

https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse

What algorithm is this using? Got a GitHub link?
How is one company operating a monopoly on software distribution a 'democratizing effect'? This is like saying an authoritarian government is increasing freedom by militarizing the police.
I wouldn't advise against making any big moves yet.

It looks like companies will slowly transition people back into the office, but with more flexible WFH policies.

Doubtful many will move to 100% remote.
Hang in there. These are strange times and the most we can ask of ourselves is to get through them.
Yes they do, HyperOptic, G.Networks and Cerberus use CGNAT by default most of the smaller ISPs in the U.K. too do that now ever the largest take on new customers on some packages mostly the bundles via CGNAT.

That said the cost of a real IP address is £5 a month with HyperOptic and I think 40 or £50 a year with G.Network so it’s still cheaper than a VDSL connection despite being 15 times faster unless you are in the 200mbit areas of BT.
Buy a router that supports flashing https://openwrt.org/ . It saves a lot of time. After about 2 years of trial and error i figured why the network becomes bad and stops working when i run torrent, i never suspected the router would be the culprit and thought ISP had an issue, turns out ISP is very reliable most of the time and its the router that is having problems. The problem with router is the debug logs are a joke and does not tell anything. OpenWrt made significant change to my life. Thanks OpenWrt deveoplers.
null coalescing is good, but I personally found that Typescript doesn't offer many advantages on a large team. I know it's not cool these days! But it just slows me down and if you're reasoning about functions I never run into that many production level issues with types, but maybe that's just my brain I dunno!
Seems like Magicard offers linux drivers [0], found a cheapish used printer on ebay too.

[0]: https://support.magicard.com/solution/linux-driver/

[1]: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Magicard-Enduro-Color-ID-Badge-Card...
https://laptopsinspace.de

3d spatial video chats based on jitsi
I have those headphones too, and they work very well with Linux. Actually, they work even better than Windows since Linux can be convinced to send LDAC instead of aptX. I do that using pulseaudio-modules-bt [0].

If you're into listening to music, you may be interested in AutoEQ [1]. Those guys have done some measurements and provide info on how to equalize the sound. For this particular headset, it's somewhat less boomy. You can use PulseEffects [2] to control equalization.

[0] pa-modules-bt: https://github.com/EHfive/pulseaudio-modules-bt/wiki/Package...

[1] AutoEQ: https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq

[2] PulseEffects: https://github.com/wwmm/pulseeffects
>An emotion we are all used to living with every day, these days. “It’s fear. Fear of the unknown.”

The article sucked. As mentioned.

But, the trope set forth above -- about 'fear' -- is trite and, in my experience, rarely true.

It's the pat answer as to the motivation behind virtually any kind of bigotry, prejudice, or snobbery.

When a member of group A claims that members of group B dislike him because B's are 'afraid' of A's, it is usually the case that A simply won't (or can't) acknowledge the legitimate reasons why B's might find A's repugnant, annoying, or obnoxious.
> zero obligation

Except to those pesky shareholders. Which includes employees. Peoples' wealth is tied up in those stocks.

But regardless... maybe try email or something. The internet existed before Google and Facebook. Plenty of competitors would rise to the top in the extremely unlikely event Google and Facebook shut down.
Agreed. "Change is good, actually" is vacuous.
Disagree. You need very good, structured, abstract thinking. Most people don't have that. Even many developers don't have that or aren't very good at it.
Do same thing with your favourite paint app, turn mouse into red pencil and click if pointer is invisible. Eventually you've mapped your blind spot.
My desktop is connected through DLink AV1200 PLCs.

Every once in a while they lose connection (maybe once a month).

The speed is not great (~300Mbps) but I don't care because my inet connection is only 100Mbps. The latency is better than wifi, and really consistent (unlike wifi):

--- 192.168.1.1 ping statistics ---

18 packets transmitted, 18 received, 0% packet loss, time 48ms

rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 1.975/2.669/4.884/0.617 ms
that's not the solution, that's how you enforce something that is broken (similar technocratic positions led to DNA testing being no longer questioned in a court). The actual solution is to ban it completely.
I feel like the hardest part of modern software engineering is systems architecture. I've pretty easily picked up everything on this list that I've touched, but I still don't know how to organize systems. Is this just me? (if not, then I feel that this site misses the most important part of the discipline)
+100 I'm on your team, 100% agree with your points, TS is a waste of time and I'm encouraging my team to drop it.
Florence Nightingale used mathematics to improve health care
I disagree on the current sentiment but agree that browser monopoly pushed js on people. If js didn't evolve over the last few years (since es5), I would have believed removing it from the browser would kill it.

Right now, you have options to avoid writing js at all. There might be some glue code in js but you can write vast majority of your code in other languages and target js. People still choose to write in js.

Purescript, elm, clojurescript, kotlin, bucklescript, and the list goes on. There is a to-js transpiler for every popular language. Why aren't they seeing more usage?
"Always bet on JavaScript" holds true, I guess.
Because you get much more engagement on Twitter than you would with a blog post.
This isn't an "incredible thing" but it's a fun project I accomplished this week: single-file python package that lets you disable assertions in files or modules.

https://github.com/boothby/dissert
Nice! My first page load I got a single line that stopped at the first point. Is that just able to happen?
Show HN: Annotation based parser for programming contest inputs in Java
Ask HN: Alternative Platforms for Developer Work?
Excluding app stores or freelance/contracting marketplaces, are there any other platforms for developers/technical people to build "one-off" applications or prototypes for pay?

Billing would ideally not be hourly but a flat rate for the entire project by a certain deadline.
Standing outside in the sun all day everyday is absolutely deadly.
I'm sad to hear that you feel so anxious :( Exercise helps a ton. So does therapy (cognitive behavior therapy especially). Mindfulness meditation can help a lot, too.
My product is writing. I wrote

preetamnath.com/blog
Generally you don't want your autograph and signature to be the same.
I have a little less experience, only 30 years, but I have to fully agree with you. Not sure why you got down voted (maybe the religious popularity crowd rearing its head).

I have seen my share of "innovations" come and go, but I too fail to see the empirical evidence that most bugs/errors are caused by type mismatch. In fact, I would even go as far as to argue that in my experience the benefits of typed languages (and the class of bugs they prevent) do not outweigh the usually larger code size (and often even additional complexity).

Maybe I've just tried the wrong languages, but I was never convinced of the great improvements usually promised. At the same time, I have seen other people twist and jump through hoops, while vigorously holding on to their conviction how all that is an improvement.

Sure, some errors will move from run time to compile time with typed languages. But if those are a systemic problem in your code, you probably have even bigger things to worry about (the ones you already keenly pointed out).

From a cynical point of view, I can understand why corporate entities would love typed languages (for the increased code size and complexity), but that's another story.
It was used in multiple production systems I have worked on.

Look at the number of DLs on this JSON schema validator https://www.npmjs.com/package/ajv
Yes, latency and quality degradation suck.

But in most cases, for most people, wires suck even more.

Seriously. I can't walk around my apartment to tidy it up while on an audio call on my computer if I'm wired. When I walked around the city with wired headphones to my phone, the wires would constantly snag or something or other. Wires are constantly getting tangled, or I have to spend time carefully rolling and clipping them and unclipping them and unrolling.

Wires suuuck. They suck baaad.

If I'm doing something professional with audio or AV where quality/latency are paramount, then sure I'll use wires and dongles as necessary. They're a "pro" thing.

But for everyday use? Wireless is still generally good enough, and the pros waaay outweight the cons. Which is why the world has been switching en masse.
Wrote and published a book on how to implement Sign in with Apple (https://siwa.fluffy.es) as I am an iOS dev and also backend dev, plus the deadline Apple set for it is end of this month.

Didn't do much marketing but still managed to sell 15+ copies, pretty happy about this attempt, spent 3 weeks writing it after work hours.
Most Americans will get COVID, and the risk of death is exceedingly low (0.3%). “Death wish” is exaggerating the situation. If you’re young and healthy (or even middle aged and healthy), it’s reasonable to take what others interpret as risky actions.
Sorry, based on your comment history I don't think I'd like to discuss anything with you. Cheers.
This author has written about this in the past. He says that if he’s faced with an open blog post window he can never write/complete/publish anything but the Twitter format makes it easy for him to do so.
> Forgive me, but when I program I know what the variables I am working with are doing, and what kind of data they are storing.

That sounds fine, as long as no-one else will ever have to read or work on your code.
Elon Musk’s Lesson in How Not to Celebrate Diversity
Do you work on small or large code bases? On truly large projects you often find yourself making changes without that level of deep understanding.

On these projects you often find yourself needing to work on higher levels of abstraction. Types help here by instantly telling you what the data is and providing hints.

Types take extra time to write and maintain, but they significantly reduce the difficulty of working on large projects.
Newsletters seemed to have a moment last year but it feels like the hype has gone away. Mine are filtered into a folder and I can't remember the last time I opened that folder.

I have to wonder why publish a newsletter? What's wrong with a blog? Do you dual publish to the newsletter & an RSS blog?
A friend and I made an app for photo memos. The idea is to use it instead of the camera when you just want to remind yourself of a thing. Originally we wanted to challenge ourselves to write the app in 24 hours, but it predictably stretched out (quite) a bit.

https://kluz.dux.works
A bunch of different things, few of which I got actual traction on, in true ADHD form (though some of that was being unable to go to the local hackerspace, for hardware work)

One thing which has been rather fun and successful, is speeding up uutils' implementation of integer factorisation: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3...
(uutils is a Rust reimplementation of the GNU coreutils and findutils)

I'm not yet satisfied with the performance, and I still have quite a few ideas how to improve it, but it's still more than 44 times faster than it was when I started (measured on factoring everything between 2 and 10⁷; it's a lot more on larger / more-interesting sizes)
There is a steep learning curve to go from scripting out some solutions, to understanding good design patterns for production quality code, and to run and deploy an application. I have a non-technical BA degree and it has taken me years to feel competent at building software, and every day I have to push myself to learn new things. And the learning is often "two steps forward, one step backwards." It's not for everyone.

> Rant done, it's just frustrating that people limit themselves like that.

"If I can do it, so can you" isn't a fair judgement. Everyone is different, and CS/programming has many complexities that not everyone is interested in putting in the time commitment to learn it.

For me, with time and experience it has become easier to put a solution together, but it still not easy work and many times I am mentally exhausted by the end of the day.
I've been following this book to learn how to parse/interpret/compile languages: https://craftinginterpreters.com/

And started designing and implementing my own pure-functional, JavaScript-targeted language with features like built-in partial-application of arguments, and every function being able to be called in a prefix, infix, or pipeline style
"Little things", like kind words, are not insignificant. Thanks, sincerely.
10+ years back a handful of times I suffered from (what I think were, but you’ve got me thinking) migraines that resulted in localized loss of visual perception. In my case the spot was right in the center of my field of vision.

The loss manifested itself at first as trippy vibrating colors, which soon changed to non-black nothing.

After that I would look straight at things not only to not see them, but to not even realize I am not seeing something.
I think the key word is "elective" here.

I've been scheduled for an implant for ~4 months now, and waiting for things to calm down before getting it done - but it's not exactly "elective" - there are serious health consequences of not getting the work done - it will be more painful and more expensive the longer I wait. So I get to balance increased pain with increased risk of infectious disease. Compared to most things, it's absolutely a legitimate barometer of how safe I feel doing the riskiest activities _that I have to do_.
A DIY USB Mouse Jiggler
social bingo cards for predictions

https://bingotronic.io/~abewinter2

WIP, signup here https://bingotronic.io/auth/join

no ddos pls
How to create video ads easily when you are newbie
Filestash (https://www.filestash.app) which is inspired by the infamous FTP comment from when Dropbox first launch on HN
Didn't build as much as I dove into NixOS. Really enjoying it so far.
Are you predicting 500-900k deaths in the USA due to COVID-19?
Not perfect = broken? Well, I disagreed
So how else do you explain SoftBank's testing results? The testing pool is large enough to not be an outlier, everything else was exactly the same for all their employees - their genetic pool, healthcare system, their cultural habits. The only difference was their level of alertness to personal hygiene. People working in stores were extra cautious of everything while who WFH were laid back and might have ended up slipping up more often, hence the higher cases.
What’s strange to me about all these stories is their veiled, counterfactual suggestion that any of this is really safe given the trajectory the US is on.

If the US had reacted early and competently, like South Korea, New Zealand, Taiwan, or many other countries, people could be going to dentists without too much concern. But we didn’t, are on a bad and dangerous path, and now have to somehow pretend that we’re not, based solely on popular sentiment.

The reality of COVID-19, how it spreads, and what’s proven to quash it have absolutely nothing to do with how people feel about the pandemic.
All the time. In that moment the leaf that used to be a cat also instantly changes to having been a leaf all along.

Our experience is like a dream vaguely guided by reality.
Arpit's Newsletter

Once a week, in your inbox, an essay about programming languages internals, or a deep dive on some super-clever algorithm, or just a few tips on building highly scalable distributed systems.

https://arpitbhayani.me/blogs
Nodejs showed that a lot of developers are lazy and want 1 language to learn
I don’t work there any more. If you want to talk to someone who knows a lot more about it than me, try haberman (who also hangs out here).
I created a YouTube series teaching entry-level programming in JS, in Esperanto. Because why the hell not.
Huh, I don't share your experience at all. I maintain an F#-and-JS application and I'm constantly surprised by how well interpretation works. You literally just import F# code in JavaScript and use it, as well as the other way around.

Sure, if you want to make maximal use of the strong typing of F#, you'll have to annotate JS data as it comes in, but that is necessary complexity, not incidental. And if you're happy with having your F# code "dynamically typed", there's zero ceremony around importing JS stuff.
I started implementing a version of APL, but that have taken some significant steps away from traditional APL, and introducing features that normally would not be seen as fitting with the language. It's still an experiment, but some of the key features are: immutability, lazy evaluation, first class functions, a macro facility and automatic parallelisation (the last one doesn't really work as well as I would have hoped).

I started the project in January, so I guess this counts?

Here's a video showing what it looks like:

https://peertube.mastodon.host/videos/watch/4a19ca9e-7ca6-41...
Not a domain expert, so I make no predictions myself but do consume data from subject matter experts on the topic.

Healthy middle aged person who wears a mask in public but goes about his life with his family as if nothing happened. Haven’t gotten COVID, but if I do, I’ll take sick days and move on. What else would you expect people to do, hide inside forever? Curve was flattened, there’s no appetite to do so further if necessary, life goes on (or it doesn’t).
> Forgive me, but when I program I know what the variables I am working with are doing, and what kind of data they are storing.

How many times has six-months-hence you cursed you for this attitude?

Be honest.
I built an Alexa skill that sits in front of the local council's website (South Worcestershire, UK) and tells me which set of bins go out this week. Have already probably saved myself more time from looking up the website manually than it took to build the skill. Code at https://github.com/morgan-murray/bin-day
After my first prototype(s) of system I start reviewing design patterns with goal to identify how my prototype(s) are similar to various design patterns, then I start looking at opensource projects with similar design patterns, eventually I see the righteous path.
This is a new newsletter I started: It's called Understanding with Jenil.

Goal: Educated myself and hopefully others can learn about primitive concepts of finance, economics, cryptocurrencies and emerging startups.

Link: https://jenil.substack.com/about?utm_source=menu-dropdown
this movie meme is so tired, and doesn’t even apply. trucks are by no means unstoppable, and bridges obviously can be moved.