skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel you. I'm currently at a startup that, somewhat by accident, ended up writing their backend in PHP.

Modern PHP is actually fine; it's largely avoided the issues perl has; adoption of the latest versions is quite high, and it's...fine. Not the best, not the worst, broadly comparable to other languages, and a far, far, far cry from what most people may think of when they hear "PHP". My last job used Node, the one before that used Python; I have personal preferences, but at the end of the day they're just tools, it's all fine. The "PHP: a fractal of bad design" blog post actually made a big impact on the community, and shocking number of the issues listed there have been solved, with rapid active progress ongoing. (Yes, I know, it still has issues, and people still hate it. No need to comment to let me know.)

And yet...

...there's a big chunk of the PHP community that just really isn't on board with any of this. Every time the core devs release a new language feature, vocal critics complain about how the language is becoming more "enterprisey" or "like Java". Even on the core dev team, when they vote about fixing some crazy broken feature of the language from the bad old days, a vocal minority is always against it. The language (thankfully) has not stayed still since 2002, but people are trying.

And of course, when we advertise to hire devs, if we say we're looking for "PHP devs", we end up flooded with applications from people who basically know how to install and configure plugins for PHP based CMSes, or from "senior devs" who have been hacking together procedural PHP scripts for 20+ years and have zero knowledge of software engineering principles, unit testing, etc. We've ended up hiring python devs to work on a php code base, not because no php devs are out there, but just because the community is so....weird. There are good engineers who happen to sometimes use PHP, but they rarely (if ever) identify as "PHP devs".

I dislike the JS ecosystem and it's constant churn and cult of the new, but sometimes you run across the reverse problem too.
> I've often read complains in the HN bubble that the Chinese system would be too rote.

I've seen both sides. 99% of complaints you read on the internet are written by people who've never been to the country they're complaining about, and whose sum total knowledge consists of a cheap stereotype.
Apple also allows you to share relative location.

A 10 square mile box.
Feasibility of Using a Corncob as a Football
Farmers were told to collect all this data back in the early nineties at the beginning of what was called the precision farming movement. They bought the sensors, collected the data and they're still waiting.

They're looking for the data to point at problems that could be solved to make them more money.
what do ya call HN, @manawyddan?
Google infra is far from duct tape.
People tend to have better things to do, already, in their own domain.

Also doing something you don't like rarely yields impressive results, no matter the endeavor.
For what it's worth, as an advertisement for his services, conciseness is better. It's easier to disagree with parts of a detailed opinion than with a vague general statement.

You can then project your own opinions into the general framework, and you find you fully agree :)

As a consultant, "I 100% agree with you, you understand me" is exactly the feeling you want.

He writes the long articles that show off his smarts in fairly specialized areas, where you need to be an expert to disagree.

It's really clever, and I'm curious if it's intentional on his part, or just his style.
NPR articles also generally aren't comparable to this one with direct sources. Are you really going to accuse me of a fallacy while committing your own Argumentum ad populum?
Yeah, not just "what you've copied into your clipboard", but "Careful! Sometimes you have important confidential data in your clipboard, such as passwords!"
I agree, and I think the overwhelmingly negative response here perfectly illustrates the post's point. The author is thoughtful and has great, but not perfect English. Because he's foreign, everybody concludes that it's a sinister work of propaganda, and attributes all manner of horrible personality traits to the author on the basis of the tiniest of mistakes.

It's absolutely predictable. I sincerely hope I won't ever have to endure the displeasure of meeting any of these HN commenters in person.
Show HN: Hipsterfy – see Spotify artists you and your friends both follow
The clipboard belongs to the user. It is quite obvious how clipboard-snooping could disclose sensitive information, and as far as writing to it, I should be able to expect the thing I copied last to be there when I hit paste next.

I'd be in favor of banning application-initiated access entirely. I realize this would interfere with 1PW and similar. That was always a hack, and the fact that so many apps snoop on the clipboard is a great reason for it to stop! Sensitive dataflows for things like passwords need far better protection.
Here's an example, highlighting a band name on a festival website. Stock Chrome (and Spotify) on a stock Android on Pixel 3A https://imgur.com/a/1GqrRVs
Right but Jamf is what enables you to deploy those bash scripts reliably.
I may be mistaken, but I assumed that they meant that no parsing needed to be done between components, and that they just stream together, which is not really the case. You often have to use sed and awk (eleborate parsers) between different components to get the necessary portions of data from one component into the other...they don't just fit together like legos.
These currency controls are in place for decades and our current financial crisis has nothing to do with that.
I'm not sure that looking at what a user is typing into the comment box for the application really qualifies as a significant privacy violation. That presumes a privacy model that isn't terribly intuitive or practical.

Now, if they had evidence that the data from the keyboard was being sent up to a server, that'd be a different story.
I actually found ActiveState and ppm to be fairly useful when I was doing cross system Perl around the same time. You could get the same ActiveState versions for Linux and Windows and have a more consistent environment. In the few cases ppm didn't have what I needed, I would just use a CPAN client. Pretty sure I even got the CPAN client compiling some libs for windows (which took a bit of work, but wasn't impossible).

I even used that setup to package a couple Perl scripts with all their modules into PAR archive executables, circa 2011 I think.

> Regarding Perl's one liners, I feel they are what makes Perl very useful, but my preference is AWK over Perl for that.

I love the ability to pull in a CPAN module or two to really kick up a one-liner a notch without making it too long. Also, I like creating an alias to perl that loads up a few useful libs and the main project lib and putting it in the project path so I can use a one liner like a REPL and run small queries, reports, or even do complex DB queries/updates with it using DBIx::Class and all the helper methods I've created for this project's schema.
> Did you know JavaScript classes are blessed hashes?

> They even take about the same amount of syntax. ("__proto__" vs "blessed", "prototype" vs "bless").

omg, I totally forgot that (I left day-to-day JS use a good decade ago, sorry!).
I tend to disagree here. The thing that makes writing business software take a long time (using code, to be pedantic), isn't the fact that it's in code -- it's the fact that the requirements are often so fast and complex that there's no way to capture them in the application without taking a good chunk of time. If you want an application that doesn't actually meet your requirements, but at the very least, exists, get a group of competent-enough engineers together and they'll be able to whip you something up pretty quickly, I reckon. About as quickly as non-techincal people would be able to make something of equal usefulness in a non-code tool.

If you have access to only engineers, why would they learn this new non-code tool? If you want an application that meets a very sparse, loose set of requirements, just get them to create it using their normal tools -- it won't take relatively long.

If you have access to both engineers and business folk, there's no reason to have the businesspeople write such a requirement-lax application using a non-code tool, since if all you really want is an MVP that doesn't really meet your requirements, get the engineers to do it -- I'm sure they'd be happy with the freedom to throw requirements out the window. And then when you want to expand on it and flesh out those requirements, the engineers don't have to port the whole thing over from whatever proprietary non-code tool the businesspeople could have used.

If you only have access to nontechnical people, you're kind of screwed. Sure, you can have business-savvy folks whip up an MVP using one of these tools, but then when you want to expand on it, what do you do? You need technical people somewhere in the pipeline to make this work. If you didn't have access to engineers in the first place, this is the juncture at which you could hire some to port the application, but is the technical debt you've introduced worth it?

I don't know -- tools like these seem to target aspirational nontechnical people who don't have the foresight to think two steps ahead.
I write full stack web in various functional programming languages, and I am constantly copy-pasting 'lego blocks' between projects. If the compiler is happy, I'm happy.
Actually no not really. Plants only absorb two wavelengths of light. It's currently more efficient to convert sun into solar power via panels and then to light LEDs supplying only the wavelengths that plants use. Despite the seeming inefficiency here, the fact is that plants are even more inefficient at absorbing light not at the right wavelengths than solar panels.
Introducing an idea, in case you haven't encountered it elsewhere already. There are some estate-farms in England that are arriving on the same conclusion of permaculture/syntropic ag, albeit from a different angle.

They were spending a lot of money to extract marginal agricultural products from soil that wasn't well suited to monoculture, and some eccentric estate managers decided to stop spending the money, and allow the estates to "re-wild": no more shrub pruning, earth-moving, etc.

One of the "big ideas" they had, which might be useful to you, is to reintroduce "mega-fauna" to their ecosystems (in their case, ponies, "wild-ish" bovines, pigs, goats, and deer. They found that these fauna did an excellent job of pruning the wilds, but they had a new, second-order problem in pruning the fauna; they'd like to reintroduce wolves, to do the culling for them, but can't for somewhat obvious NIMBY reasons. :)

They're at the point where the estates more or less run themselves; they mostly make income from selling flowers, culled remains, and ecotourism.
Anyways, all this to say that you might consider leveraging some organic automatons to do some of the "extensive pruning" for you. Herds of goats in particular are very efficient pruners, and they can pay for themselves.

Sources (great reading/listening): https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/02/17/can-farming-ma... and https://www.econtalk.org/isabella-tree-on-wilding/
I got off Facebook 1.5 years ago as well. Removed my special Facebook browser I used (removed the app long ago) and at first it was weird as I was used to hitting it, whenever I had a few minutes of nothing. But after a week or so it felt great. Less screen time, less mental burden from seeing "stupid" posts, less useless discussions, ...

Couldn't get of WhatsApp, yet, as it's too often the default for friends and family.
I go to Twitter for my daily Two Minutes Hate
I lived in Spain for 5 years and then I returned to my country 13 years ago.

Some 8 years ago, Facebook was something that I really enjoyed using. I left way too many friends, close friends, and well, lovers behind. Facebook allowed me to have a healthy relationship with them, even if at a distance.

I went back to Spain on 2010 for the wedding of a close friend, and it was like I've been out of the country for 2 months instead of 2 years, and that was mostly thanks to Facebook.

I can't point exactly at the moment when all that went to shit (May be 5, 6 years ago?) but nowadays FB is a constant string of shitty videos from companies trying to stay afloat, shitty videos made by shitty people, fake news by the thousand - and people adhering to the fake news narrative! - and stupid motivational shit of the kind that really demotivates you, people viciously attacking other people for the stupidest reasons...

I disabled my account some 3 months ago, and I feel much better without it.

Instagram, on the other side, is a different beast. Even with the strong push by FB in order to monetize the network, I think that fact that people can't easily share other people's post, and are kind of forced to post their own material still makes it an interesting place.

As long as instagram does not allow reposting, I think it'll maintain a certain degree of quality.

I also have disabled my insta account, but I do miss the information from the people I was following there (Mostly, artists and crafstmen of all kinds).
It's broken for me, thanks to the "responsive" design. When the browser window occupies half my screen (1920x1080px), the top-right menus (bell, plus, profile) get replaced with only a bell icon. How am I supposed to reach the settings page now?
a hundred years ago they thought fresh air was an important part of staying healthy, so building heating systems (those big cast iron radiators) were designed to heat effectively in winter with the windows open.
I feel so much faster using the old reddit site. Yes it doesn't look as pretty but it's faster in multiple ways. The site loads much quicker due to less bloat, but UI wise it's also a lot more efficient.

Moderating some subreddits I feel like I often have to stick with the new reddit design just to use everything properly and it gets annoying having to flip flop back and forth.
Thank you for sharing that. It's an interesting claim but sadly it doesn't say what the name of the report was. It sounds a bit odd to me, though. Surely you cool down by expending less energy, unless you spend that energy to actively respire to expel heat like dogs do.

I can't imagine there are many people panting in their warm houses though.
At this point any "expert" should be able to show somewhat accurate predictions that they made in February, March, or April. Otherwise their opinion is just a best guess.
1. App clip needs to be registered with Apple
2. The web domain needs to link the App clip (Apple App Site Association file I'd presume).

So this wouldn't work straight off as you describe. The NFC payload is just a url this url is sent back to Apple servers to load the App clip.

What could work is someone uses a legit App clip and hijacks the corresponding web site and places a malicious payload and tricks the App clip to load the malicious payload and tricks the user to tap on NFC / QR code and exploits App clip. Even then the last line of defense - sandbox needs to be circumvented.

Nevertheless, this is definitely a new attack vector and there will be exploits from NSAs.
Really wish Amazon would stop trying to eat all software startups.
Why do you have to eventually trust someone?
I've always considered it a forum more than social media.
I wonder if it so they can restore the keyboard when you copy a password? I know they could copy it at time of copy as well but just a thought.
If I'm remembering correctly (this was from 3 years ago), the string was moved to a different section if it had a null byte in the middle of the string. That's why coming up with the assembly I used was kinda tricky.

Here's the output as-is:
https://gist.github.com/vivekseth/20f319d2a9978af57d926b649a...

Here's the output with a null byte in the middle:
https://gist.github.com/vivekseth/fc50319aaac24588bcf568209b...

From what I can tell, it seems like both strings are in the TEXT section now. Maybe something changed, or I'm remembering incorrectly.
I was shocked to find out that firefox enabled websites to access the clipboard sometime in the last five years or so. .. and I'm left stressed out that I could have had important passwords or key stolen this way.

This can be disabled by setting a preference: https://www.ghacks.net/2014/01/08/block-websites-reading-mod...
I think the name is probably hurting adoption.

The creature it refers to pretty universally considered repulsive. I'm no psychologist or anything, but I would expect that to have an undue influence on even the most rational person.
Norman Borlaug was my hero. A man most Americans never heard of did more to help people in the twentieth century than any other person. He was more impactful than Elon Musk without all the publicity.
I encountered this in Ireland.
I find it interesting that in the PP100 (Problem Per 100 Cars sold) no one is doing better than 136, so on average every new car has a problem.

Curious how J.D. Power is defining "a problem" the article provides this insight

"It now asks 223 questions, split into nine categories: including infotainment, features, controls and displays, exterior, interior, powertrain, seats, driving experience, climate, and (new for 2020) driving assistance. Ars readers may not be surprised to discover that the most troublesome of these categories was infotainment, which accounted for almost a quarter of all problems. Top complaints here were voice recognition, Android Auto and Apple CarPlay connectivity, touchscreens, onboard navigation, and Bluetooth issues."

I guess I would want to get the car with the least number of problems, but without additional clarification into their methodology, I don't know how to best interpret these numbers.

I mean if someone is having trouble pairing their off-brand Wish Bluetooth headset to their car and considers that a problem, I would hope they weight it less severely than say, the brakes failing.

I tried to find out more about their methodology but found this rather scant page https://www.jdpower.com/ratings-methodology
Pack ABS for Beginners You Can Do Anywhere
You have a very narrow world-view. You can not even imagine...
I dont remember it resetting default browser back to edge. I remember the update, edge popup, it putting edge shortcut to taskbar but firefox was still my default browser.
Yeah, parent comment probably doesn't realize who Simo is. It's like calling out John Carmack for being naive about OpenGL.
Not to mention they lucked out that DuckDuckGo is called DuckDuckGo.

I just can't believe such smart people could believe that is good branding.

What exactly were the brand names they rejected to go with DuckDuckGo?
> - You can only grow non-calorically dense foods in vertical farms

How about seeds and sprouts?
Android is open source, iOS is not.
More importantly, the person wasn't an eyewitness, and the 6-pack photo array was window dressing to make the outside technician appear to be an eyewitness.
> Or you can let access to your photos, but only let it see a walled garden of a few select photos.

iOS 14 has this now.

And any access to sensitive data always prompts you. And if you deny the request it sends empty data back to the app. Exactly like what you describe.
Apple due to it's market positioning has to put the most powerful cpu available. They weren't able to cool it though, so it was constantly throttled down, which is inefficient because you have to pay for the whole thing while you can only use 70% of it.

Now they put weaker chip but it can be utilized to its full capacity, so essentially at the cost of capital expenses, they significantly cut per laptop expenditure. Also internalizing more r&d helps with taxes.

I don't know whether potential instructions set optimization will yield that much, because Mac needs aren't really different; maybe they will focus on battery life more then other laptop manufacturers, which they historically did, who knows.
Because you would need to write and/or audit your entire technology toolchain — software, build tools, operating systems, hardware, etc — which isn't feasible for anyone.
Applications Engineer – Apply Now
Ah here we go, actual presentation video has been posted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9_xAixGlmk :)
Forgot to mention: occasionally I spend too much time writing trivial HN comments, which don't make me a better programmer.
I helped write a report [1] about the state of the Space Resources industry for 2019. This report should get you up to speed on the science, engineering, and law/policy going on in the field.

Our website specifically covers ISRU, including a monthly newsletter and sporadic articles (including one published this morning about minimizing lunar dust kick-up when landing vehicles on the Moon).

[1] https://www.thespaceresource.com/news/2020/the-space-resourc...
One last thing - to be a successful farmer has very little to do with growing crops. Take business classes - the rest is relatively easy to figure out.
I only have Facebook (Messenger) because my larger family use it for instant messaging but we are willing to move on.

What's a good alternative that has a web client at least when you are on desktop + you can video call too?
Not just illiterate. How many people here have the time or desire to inspect every app they use? It's a ridiculous proposition. We all have better things to do.
Independent audits could be conducted on those privacy enhanced ROMs, if there was enough interest.

I'm not saying this is the most practical solution to this problem but at least it's a possibility.
Hi HN! I made this as a side project to get better at Haskell and Kubernetes.

This came out of a funny dinner conversation with some friends talking about discussing favorite musicians. Someone proposed that the musicians most likely to be spark interesting conversation were those that were unpopular enough to be "cool", but popular enough that someone else could have feasibly heard about them, and suggested that musicians with ~1M monthly listener count were the sweet spot. (Empirically, I think that's about 5-10x too high.)

Anyway, this tool should help you figure out which musicians make for interesting conversation. If you'd like to compare against me, my friend code is "uIrtZpcNPUZpikRlAVPg".
Open banking is required, please wait.
> It can be an elegant design choice, but also a design choice that appears to be or is an abuse of privacy.

For decades, all programs running on your computer had access to the clipboard. A primary intended purpose of the clipboard is precisely to share information between different programs. Maybe it is in fact a security issue that should be rethought, but calling it an abuse of privacy seems extreme.
Thanks! Perused them and it looks a solid match.

I had always thought of them as being mostly startup centered, but it seems they've expanded.
@dpoochieni

> [She] clearly thinks it would have been better to use her 20s

is it okay if I ask what was her age when she said that?
I think a more appropriate title would be "The harm of studying abroad in the US for Chinese students"
Because Silicon Valley thinks nowhere else matters, and likes to pretend its parochial local monoculture is never a problem.
You've also got a huge number of DIY biohackers with no business background or vision for a commercial enterprise hacking away in diy hackerspace around the country. I think those hackers will evolve into the truly successful next generation of synthetic bio companies, like what happened to tech companies.
Day Traders Will Have Fun Until They Get Wiped Out
We haven't been farming as we do today for 10,000 years. The green revolution was exactly that, a fundamental revolution in the way to grow crops.

You can't be farming sustainably if you are depleting the soil. Preserving soil health is a fundamental aspect of sustainable agriculture..