skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> articles like this give me FOMO for emacs and lisp and the like, but the learning curve intimidates me

Lisp is great and you should learn it. (If you want.)

You don't need emacs for that - just find a scheme interpreter in a web browser [0] and start reading SICP [1] until you get bored. That's all the effort you need to get the mind-expanding effect. This approach is also way more fun.

If you really like it, move on to a "real" Lisp.

> Anyway, I don't think keyboard-based tools for me

Honestly, me neither.

At least, not the way they were when I used emacs as my "daily driver." Why? Because the MacBook trackpads are so precise and fast that "using the mouse" is no longer an impediment.

If you ever try to use a pre-2000 mouse and operating system with their horrible (compared to now) tracking and accuracy, the claim that mice slowed a developer down makes total sense. Nowadays? Not so much.

[0] https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs61a/fa14/assets/interprete...

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...
But at least there's a power cord already included in the box. And a mouse.
Good points. Thanks for pointing out.
Going through Apple's buy site, the previous owner maxed out every single configuration except for storage (2TB not 8TB) and then skimped on purchasing a Magic Trackpad, opting solely for a Magic Mouse 2. If they were going to spend all this, they should have gone all in!

Pretax cost as configured: $51,999
Cost fully maxed out: $53,948

BTW, this refurbished Mac Pro represents a savings of 15% off of $51,999.
For this configuration, $51,599.
The backend service I'm using doesn't have cached CI yet, so the entire build takes ~20 seconds. The CircleCI free tier is good enough for now, and more time is spent pulling dependencies than building, anyway. The build pulls in heaps of dependencies, and the main codebase itself being around 20kloc. Subsequent local builds take around .2 seconds locally, so I'm very happy with it. Even working on a tiny Java/ Kotlin codebase recently made me miss the good compile times!

How hard is the caching to set up, especially in a CI setting?
Seems pretty pricey given the specs. How much would it cost to put together a new Linux box with the same/functionally equivalent components?
New, this configuration would be $51,599.00 before tax.

EDIT: Ninja’d like 5 times over. I see I wasn’t the only one that rushed to figure out what kind of discount the buyer is getting on this.
I read somewhere (may have been coding horror), that it's not that most people can't do fizzbuzz or other simple problems, 99% of programmers can do it.

Most good developers are already employed, so there's this constant pool of unemployed programmers (the 1% who can't do fizzbuzz) applying for all the jobs they can.
He is definitely an inspiring story, but I wouldn't call him a role model. It is not the burden of each person who is a minority to befriend those who hate them, and his approach is undeniably a dangerous one.
Ackshually, it was $999.
It always fascinated me that the process went to a semi regulated user pays cost recovery competition model, not to a regulated utility model.

At this point, the innovation stream has just about dried up. We're left with a need for micropayments that don't cost more to process than the value of the transaction, and almost all innovation has taken place to one side of card services.

If we fixed international funds transfer we'd probably get some incremental benefit. KYC is only part of the problem here, I recently did some IBAN transactions to the UK government from Australia and the expectations of fixed-field width (send this 15+ char reference string, but the input side has 12 chars for the reference field) were bizarre.

Huge amount of excess profit in TT.

Cheques? dead except for the USA.

Coins are dying of covid.

Remittence processes and the Islamic banking tradition is waiting to be somewhat unlocked. (trust is not transitive, unless you are a migrant worker from S.E.Asia and you have to get money back to mom and dad efficiently, without having any formal ID in the host country because your boss took your passport)
Personally I do not need this, and I imagine most people don't. But I wonder what Apple's return policy on this machine was, and what happened?

Did someone buy this and then not find it good enough?

Did someone want to test it and then get their money back?

Was something broken?

This is an expensive machine, comparable in price to a nice, new car. I'd want a history report if I were buying this.
There are a number of credit cards in Australia that do not charge annual fees. Many require being linked to an active transaction account, but not all.

They generally don't have any kind of linked reward points structure, but that's not a huge loss as most of those got nerfed after the ACCC changes a while back (see elsewhere in these comments).
I learned about ReDoS through a PostgreSQL bug. On an old pg version(9.4.5), the following regex expression made pg hang in an infinite loop.

select 'anystring' ~ '($^)+';

Of course that was patched a long time ago, but since then I've avoided exposing regex functionality to end users.
$5k max
Storage and handling is approved when the drug is approved.

Basically you tell the FDA how to store and handle and the FDA says “ok, give me the data that proves the drug is stable under those conditions”.

Beyond that the FDA doesn’t really care who administers it.
> there's no maintenance work required on your part.

The post of mine you are replying to outlines maintenance work we had to do on an actual RDS instance. My point is that you shouldn't weigh managed solutions as maintenance-free: they're not (and examples of why and how they are not are in the first post). They might win out, and they do have a place, but if you're evaluating them as "hassle-free", you will be disappointed.

> If you think encryption is a problem, don't use it until later.

We had compliance requirements that required encryption, so waiting until later was not an option.

> Since RDS is a managed service, I just tell compliance auditors, "It's a managed service."

I'm not a big fan of giving compliance auditors half-truths that mislead them into thinking we're doing something we're not.

> So don't use new databases in the first 5 years for production, as recommended.

You mean we should run our own? (/s… slightly.) We were exploring Aurora as the performance of normal RDS was not sufficient. Now, there was plenty we could have done better in other area, particularly in the database schema department, but Aurora was thought to be the most pragmatic option.
The Republic of China will not allow a foreign business to acquire TSMC.

Furthermore, the United States government is pumping billions of dollars into domestic semiconductor manufacturing. If Apple wants a fab, they'll build one stateside, and they'll get Uncle Sam to pay for it.

But as has been seen by market realities of the last 15 years, affordable silicon manufacturing has been driven by massive scale across all market segments, not vertical integration. To the contrary, the most vertically integrated silicon manufacturers are the ones with the slower, hotter, and more expensive products. Acquiring a fab just for Apple products would probably not make better chips cheaper.
mate, I got some really good hey names, interested?
The discrepancy could be because Hacker News cares more about technology platforms than Alabama public TV. For an example of HN getting upset about government censorship on a technology platform, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219
Sure you can. But they explain why it's not applicable for their use case.

And I would literally blow up at Apple, if they forced this on TripIt... Sharing trip information is done using registered email. And iCloud email is crap.
The Perfect Art Heist: Hack the Money, Leave the Painting
Thanks! I'll look into doing dynamic update. There is an API for this, I'll add some docs to the site on how to call it.
Well. PayPal is a payment gateway/system where merchants and consumers can both use; it's serving the same role as Visa/MasterCard. Venmo is a bit off but once Venmo allows merchants as cash recipients, it will serve the same role.
I am not the market for this. I live less than a mile from work (when I am going into work...). However, some of the reviews I have seen have argued that some of the shows didn't even use the format well and seemed to have been reedited from traditional shows. That makes it less appealing for me.

Then there are also rumors that because the "episodes" are so short that they can be filmed using largely non-union crew which, if true, is pretty shitty. I have looked but I haven't found anything more than tweets claiming this though.
I’m pretty sure you could escape for under 10k if you built this yourself in a PC.
Is that including an FPGA?
The terrible unfortunate reality is that genocide works - and the Chinese government knows that. We have seen it time and again where conquering ethincities looking to create an ethno-state commit genocide and end up with exactly what they wanted. Turkey is one example, China is another, Burma (Myanmar) as well as most of the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand - but there are many many historical examples.

They are going to ethnically cleanse that part of China and re-settle Han Chinese there. No one is going to stop them since they're a nuclear power, and it will probably be complete prior to the end of the century.

...and this same strategy is going to be employed wherever they want to exert political and social power.
> You also can't say "$1.99 + 20 cents processing charge" - no, the price must be listed including charges. (Notice that nobody every does this?)

The place I went to yesterday for lunch did this. This is in Silicon Valley. I believe it was a 3.9% credit card fee.
It still comes down to: Would you rather be seen as someone who creates value (profit), which is a "developer", or who works on odds and ends for the company and ultimately costs money, a "programmer"? Given the two options I think the most advantageous option is obvious.

I will admit however that my view on this is rather arbitrary. I don't think we really have a good way to resolve what's best.
I don't think American Express card have ever been a practical way of paying for things in Europe.

I would guess 90% of Europeans have never even seen one of these cards, unless they work in international hotels or tourist places.
I'm guessing you can get (multiple) good nvidia cards to match apple's afterburner cards
> We're left with a need for micropayments that don't cost more to process than the value of the transaction.

I disagree completely.

There's no technical or business reason why we couldn't have micropayments tomorrow. It's been tried many times already. The thing about micropayments is nobody actually wants them. Each time you make a payment of any magnitude, your brain has to process a 'purchase' which carries a large mental burden, and eventually you get decision fatigue.

Micropayments are one of those ideas that people think we want, but in practice, nobody does.

As a thought exercise, why do you pay Netflix $13/month and deal with sporadic content disappearances, when you could pay Apple $1.99 for a perpetual license to whatever piece of content you could ever want? Nobody wants to make that purchasing decision each and every time they want something. They'd rather pay for an all you can eat buffet even if it's objectively worse and more expensive over time.

> If we fixed international funds transfer we'd probably get some incremental benefit.

Check out TransferWise! They've done a ton to solve this problem. They even have a currency agnostic bank account with local banking details in 6+ regions and supports 50+ currencies. [1] IMO they've largely solved remittences for the average joe.

If you've got a ton of money to move you can use InteractiveBrokers to exchange currencies at market rates for $20 per million (!!) in commission.

[1] https://transferwise.com/us/borderless/
I'm not totally sure what the UX is for a non programmer, but stripe is an option.
They just released a customer billing portal for users to self-manage their plan on recurring billing.
Sounds like it could hit many of the features.
Wait which one is the US ?
OpenID would have done it, but Facebook and Google neutered it in favour of OAuth so they could cement themselves as primary players.
Small banks can integrate zelle, it’s their choice they’re not being locked out
... but macOS?!?
I don't think it's a post-2000s thing. In a year where hundreds graduated with a CS degree, I think there might have been around 15 females in my year (1994).

My brother did CS as well (mid-1980s). There might have been only one female in his year. There might have been more, but he never spoke about them that I can remember.

I suspect the gender bias has been around for a long time.
What is the cheapest desktop you can build with 1.5 TB of ddr4 ram?
Can you even buy half the ram for that cost?

> 1.5 TB DDR4 ECC Ram
Businesses aren’t required to accept credit cards.
We don’t know if the previous owner got the trackpad or not. For example, if there were a problem with the computer and it was swapped for a new one, Apple probably wouldn’t ask for the Magic Trackpad. Or even if it was returned, I imagine those two products have different pools of stock.
Citation needed. Apple hardware is expensive, yes, but usually isn't that far out of line with prices for equivalent specs.
This used to be the case, but it isn't anymore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressions_Hair_Design_v._Sch...

Plus, plenty of gas stations show a cash/credit price on their signs.

The merchants are no longer allowed to block this behavior.
Some places require no additional info from you.

There are good use cases where third party logins are good enough.
Rotoscope?
Code Examples for the Book Hands-On Scala Programming
The two video cards alone cost $10k.
It looks like she was running it while Yahoo Auctions was competing; in that time frame, Yahoo was a force to be reckoned with, and they had some scaling issues to manage (which is mostly a tech thing, but management can screw up tech things). So, while ebay did have market fit, it wasn't a sure thing.
One good piece of news I saw was that a lot of these new bank-to-bank mobile payment services like Swish are finally looking into cross-compatibility between countries, something that has really been missing until now

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Mobile_Payment_Syst...
Doesn't even include the wheels!
Yeah, not sure the point of this post. >$20k alone for GPU and RAM.
> We want to find the force at each tire. So by rearranging, we get F = PA. The pressure is gotten by a tire pressure gauge.

Can someone explain why the air pressure inside the tire is the same as the pressure that the tire applies to the ground? Ignoring sidewall stiffness as pointed out to others, why must this be true?
What RAM are you buying?
People are referring to social politics when they say reddit is left heavy, which is certainly true.

Yes, economic politics in America is more right leaning than most of Europe but even still I have a hard time believing reddit pushes towards the right more than the left in any regard besides smaller subs
Probably not for the same power envelope.
How common is this 55+ hours a week thing, really? I've only been a developer for 2.5 years now, and I spend some of my own time, say an hour a day (3 hours a night, once every three nights usually) working on side projects, and another hour reading technical articles or tech blog posts.

But I've never had a manager ask or pressure me to work more than 40 hours a week. In fact, they opposite is true, they've actually often discouraged me from working outside of core work hours because they don't want their developers to get burned out. Maybe I'm just fortunate that I'm smart enough, and productive enough, to get everything done in the 40 hour work week and I should feel blessed to be as smart as I am? (generally in the top 3-5% on all standardized tests throughout my life)

But to the best of my knowledge, my coworkers weren't being pressured to work more than 40 hours a week either. Or maybe they felt ashamed of having to work more than 40 hours to keep up and didn't mention it? Maybe the pressure wasn't direct pressure from management, but an indirect pressure just to keep up with everyone else?

Maybe it's the benefit of working in the Midwest?

I don't honestly know. But I can say that in my (short) time at both companies I've worked for, I've only met one developer that reported being asked or pressured to work more than 40 hours a week. So it just seems so strange to me to keep hearing it as a truism on here.
Maybe they just ran their compute then sent it back. Like leaving the tag tucked into the fancy shirt you only need to wear once.
Very likely from a studio with a business account that's made more than a few orders.
Hackintosh!
and the solution is not to say (or imply) that people have messed-up priorities, it is to figure out how to make the right thing as convenient as possible.
are you sure? 1.5 TB ram on amazon is around 11.5K (https://www.amazon.com/24x64GB-DDR4-2133-PC4-17000-Upgrade-P...) Cursory search. But still, surely you can't build one for 5K
At least we don't have hyperinflation. That's even worse for the poor. Though to be sure I agree with you. We really need to fix this, but it's not going to happen. Right now we're paying an enormous -unprecedented?- political attention tax that is starving lots of important issues of oxygen.
The RAM itself would run you up more than double that amount.

This isn’t gonna cost less than 20k.
This.

The blog post was long and winded. And it brought up some very desperate arguments, like the bug bounty offered to hackers when they report security vulnerabilities.

They want people's email addresses, period.

They say that no email breaks the sharing feature. True. But that's something that can be offered later when someone actually does share something with you. They say that the emails will go to the a seldom checked account. True. But users can change email addresses. They say it breaks support service for looking up accounts without email addresses. Again true. But what's another way of looking up accounts? Username. What is another? Apple ID.

They are email network harvesters. Plain and simple. And this is their business model.
Out of all the differences between the US and China you chose to talk about imperialism and racism, some of the few things both have in common. Interesting.
The newest OpenPOWER chip: A2
What does this do that a much cheaper computer doesn't?
TSMC is literally Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, and I doubt the other leading edge fab clients like Nvidia & AMD would appreciate Apple owning TSMC.

If anything, this business is too capital intensive for Apple to want to hold a foundry. Why lock yourself into one companies fabs like Intel did when you can pick between TSMC, Samsung, Intel and any other fabs that are competitive at the time?

AMD split off their foundry side. Intel is using Samsung's foundries more and more. Vertical integration does not make sense given the increasing cost of new fabrication nodes.
I seriously hope I'll see the day when OpenID takes off. It doesn't seem to be going the right way, but it would solve most of our login problems.

One way to sign in, used everywhere, decentralized, set up 2FA for everything in one place, switch providers with ease or be your own provider.

Apple could promote a decentralized solution instead of forcing the sign in with apple shit on people, but clearly they want all your data so they can lock you in.
Not as per their git commit history
https://github.com/phacility/phabricator
>> Afterburner is a hardware accelerator card built with an FPGA, or programmable ASIC. With over a million logic cells, it can process up to 6.3 billion pixels per second.

Interesting -- didn't realize FPGAs were commonly used in graphics development flows. Does anyone know what software is used to customize the FPGA to accelerate tasks in macOS?
Sharing trip information is done using registered email.

Could you provide any details? How is such "registered" email different than any other email?
The memory alone is $15,000.
No, that much RAM is over 10k alone.
It looks like this hasn't had any updates since May 2018.
Depends:
Did the “project” include lots of JavaScript? If so, there is probably nothing to worry about, the company will be bankrupt/liquidated soon anyway.

If we are talking about actual real software, like for example a missile guidence system written in ada, then there is also nothing to worry about: for normal humans it is utterly worthless and the chinese already have a similar system
Getting started with .NET core 3.1 multi-threaded applications in high school
It means if you're white - hate directed at you is fair game.

They don't care where you live.
I think that's an oversimplification, because credit transactions tend to be 20%+ higher ticket sizes than cash purchases. In a way, the credit card surcharge baked in is something of a volume purchasing incentive. Further, the networks do explicitly permit cash discounts on card transactions, and always have. Merchants tend not to offer them, though.
It seems like they’re maybe Apple-exclusive so it’s possibly they’re drastically marked up. The Titan RTX is $2500 apiece and seems somewhat comparable.
Small dollar transactions really need a better solution. Idk swipe rates, but something like 2.9% + $0.30 being a total transaction cost of 5.9% is just insane. Especially if you’re business is majority small transactions such as could be the case in a bodega or gas station.
Here's a $32,000 attempt at a PC build to compete with a loaded Mac Pro. The result was a mixed bag.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_IHSRPVqwQ
Well here’s the relevant specs for what it does:

> Compatible with Mac Pro (current generation)
PCI Express x16 card

> Accelerates ProRes and ProRes RAW codec in Final Cut Pro X, QuickTime Player X, and supported third-party applications

> Supports playback of up to 6 streams of 8K ProRes RAW or up to 23 streams of 4K ProRes RAW

So if there’s an NVIDIA card that does all that, great, happy to hear it. I heard Adobe Premiere was recently updated to support the Afterburner as well so hopefully it also works with NVIDIA’s equivalent.
How to auto rotate the image using Deep learning
Apple has a very generous return policy. There are so many refurb Mac pros due to return for incompatible peripherals or whatever reason it was returned.
Very pleased, but also confused, to read two quite good and quite different articles on the same topic in a row that both coherently referenced Marxism.

FWIW I work at a not-originally-software-native company that is pushing in a more software-first-oriented direction, as much of the world has since 2011, and that undermines the title "don't call yourself a programmer" more than anything, but also some of the other points in the 2011 article. I do think much of the cynical stuff in the 2011 article is very important for naive tech enthusiasts and naive young professionals to understand, and it seems full of good advice, but the linked 2013 article is also a good counterbalance.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and predict you'd still get those beach ball spinners even with this setup.
I wonder if the number of people who would are willing and able buy a refurbished Mac Pro is higher or lower than the number of people who are willing and able to buy a used Bugatti.

It seems that once you have the kind of money to be getting those items, you would want to get it new and customized exactly how you want it.
Similarly, if the issue was with the SSD, maybe Apple decided to replace it with a 2TB before reselling it?
My last Mac Pro cost $3499. I did professional video work on it for 8 years. And now I can't justify / afford one. What a world.
You were always allowed to offer cash discounts. What you weren't allowed to do was impose credit card surcharges. That was recently eliminated.