skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Same reason that thieves don't care about the damage to their victims, or oil companies don't/didn't care about global warming
I could see myself falling for something like this up to the point I was asked to buy gift cards. I feel like that would set off all the BS detectors in my head.

I rarely answer my phone if it's a number I don't know (if it's important it will come in the mail or they will leave a message) and always call back a number I lookup online to handle things like CC Fraud calls.

I'm not trying to pretend the manipulation isn't effective or say this person should have seen through the scam but I just cant see myself buying gift cards and reading them out over the phone to a "government agent" no matter how much info they had on me.

I would love to listen to a successful scam phone call (not one where the person being scammed is trolling them but a real case of getting scammed) to better understand this.
Got it. No issues!
Unfortunately, non-profit does not necessarily mean that someone in the organisation isn't amply lining their pockets.
While I mostly agree, I think it’s a stretch to say that an entire workforce could be replaced with no dip in productivity. Unless most of these workers were idle.
This is bad analysis.

It was impossible to get tested unless you were high-risk in April because there were so few tests. High-risk for Covid-19 means old.

Now we have more tests than we know what to do with -- so the average age is of course going to trend lower.

Also, test positivity is not up -- it's down:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eb7_BMOU4AEdrLm?format=jpg&name=...
In the summer before my senior year at college, I did a 3 month internship at a software development company. The interview for the internship was very soft, partly because it was only an internship, and also because I knew someone at the company who helped me get the position.

After I graduated, I applied for a full-time position there and have been there for 10 years. The interview process for the full-time position was also fairly soft and non-technical because I was hiring into a team that I worked with during my internship. I like to describe it as a 3-month long interview process. Not only did the company get to know me and what I was capable of, but I got to know the company and its people (in order to make a decision about if it was some place that I would like to work).

Surely this isn't scalable (internship are fairly rare, and generally are not available to anyone except students or recent grads), but the whole internship process worked out very well for me. It allowed me to bypass the traditional tech interview, which is something I feel very fortunate about.
I recently talked to someone who worked in higher ed administration, and they said that Covid may sink hundreds of smaller private colleges across the country that have quietly been on the financial brink this whole time. So they are all focused on keeping as much revenue coming in as possible.

On the other side of all of this, I am imagining a world where higher education is not nearly as important as we pretend it is now.
I doubt "Harvard-only" companies and "Yale-only" law firms of any considerable size exist. Sure, 3 Harvard friends might start a company, or 4 Yale lawyers may start a firm, but eventually they will have to venture outside their bubble. If you have evidence of an organization with, say, 35+ employees maintaining that kind of exclusivity, please post a link.
On today's episode of "Stop Liking Things That I Don't Like"
My favorite longshot in that direction is lifting carefully-shaped slobs of stone [0] up and down.

[0] https://omegataupodcast.net/299-gravity-storage/
That is extremely contrary to my experience. I could code a little bit before college but I learned more math, abstraction, theory of computation. I have never encountered anyone from my school professionally, but it was a modest state school. I did a ton of programming and that always mattered the most when I interviewed for jobs - what could I do and demonstrate right then. I have to ask, were you in engineering, where your connections mattered?
TBH, I think its better now that they're trying to level the playing field. Before (circa 2006 when I used to watch every single race) it was basically whoever had more money to spend.

>The winners were almost always, already decided at qualifying (unless some reliability issues happened during the race).

I don't think that's fair. FWIW, in the 2019 F1 season only 8/21 races were won by the driver in pole position.
> The next best interview would be a portfolio.

I tried using my (limited) open source hobby project portfolio as a substitute for coding interviews. Companies either didn't take me up on it, or still also required me to do their regular take-home. Twice now, I have had two companies ask for the same take-home, although in the first case they asked me to re-do the work in their preferred language.
FALD has been a thing long since before mled was spun up. As far as I can tell, mled is just a marketing term for slightly higher number of dimming zones.
When you are 93 years old? very, very easily from all kinds of complications
Toxic air pollution nanoparticles found in mitochondria of city dwellers
After an aunt of mine got scammed just like this, but to a lower tune of money, I got so sick of this happening to vulnerable people. I went ahead and made an app and put it on her phone.

The other apps and services out there operate on a blacklist model. They block calls they know to be bad. My app turns that around and operates on a whitelist model.

That being said, I had to help my aunt out some in getting it working, but now I am confident that she won't be scammed again.

Despite all the normal warnings we give our elders, in the heat of the moment, the scammers know how to take advantage of them. The best thing is to not allow them to ring their phone.

If anyone cares, my app is in the app stores, and available 100% free for basic usage.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/robostopper-block-spam-calls/i...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codeheadla...
They must, I've been playing TLOU2 on my ~1 year old PS4Pro and it's very quiet, almost silent. I've never heard it make much noise on any game, even when ambient temps creep into the mid 80's.
Critical Elasticsearch Metrics to Monitor
Shame on them for expecting purpose to be handed to them by some employer.

They should want to contribute to society and they should find a way to go do it. But that's not the job of literally every employer. It's their job as a person.
Can't wait for this to be deprecated in a few years. As a mobile dev, this doesn't solve any problems for my team. Perhaps another victim of Google's constant flow of ad money so projects don't need to actually prove their value.

Any cross platform tool like this is almost immediately out of date as iOS, Android, and the web continue to move forward quickly. It just doesn't make sense.
You could block internet access for your browser. There are a lot of apps that let you do that (and in some cases I think you can also manage internet access in your settings).
Blazor GameDev – part 2: canvas initialization
how do you downvote people? I only have the option of upvote.
Autodesk (as an entity) and every other thing on this planet that relies on the ecosystem to remain more or less as it is has a responsibility to do their part to oppose climate change. It's that simple.

There should be a site like this for every corporation and government that is significantly contributing to environmental degradation.
> With the purchase, Berkshire Hathaway Energy will carry 18% of all interstate natural gas transmission in the United States, up from 8%.

Always interesting to learn what XX% of a random industry a random conglomerate owns.
Absolutely correct. Coal is such a tiny, tiny portion of the "we need to figure out how much stuff is in this pile" market. Companies need that information both to keep their books in order (what's the dollar value of our inventory of gravel?) or to know whether they have adequate or excess supply of materials for their operations (do we need to slow down our procurement of sand?).

There are several companies in the market that use either drone footage or in some cases just a phone camera to estimate volumes of piles of stuff.
Also see: r/machinelearning has a toxicity problem

https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/hkc697/d_r...
It's basically that.

I block out chunks of time and disable all distractions during those blocks, I don't have a phone on my desk.

When I started they said to open a ticket with IT to get a phone installed and I simply didn't.

If it's urgent, like production is out - come find me otherwise wait until I reach a natural stopping point and I'll reply, you'll get a better more thoughtful reply then me throwing a reply your way desperately trying to get back to actual work.

It's weird to me how many companies seem to go out of their way to create an environment where developers can't get their best work done.

I mean there has to be a degree of balance between working together and working alone but the ratio in my opinion is 20/80 for what we do, meet up, make a plan, bugger off and work on the plan, reach out of something is a problem.

Versus the type of environment I'm currently in where it's death by a thousand distractions if you allow it, which I simply don't.
You do have to have a skewed moral compass – to the point that they will continue the scam even if the learn the victim has disabilities.

But not as skewed as the ones running the whole operation.
Could you gain the same experience by finding people like that in an online community and debating case studies among them?

Doesn't that happen in an informal way on a lot of subreddits and even here?
Request - any books/articles anyone can recommend on the human mind's instinctive need to become obsessed with something? Periodically, like many others, my mind becomes obsessed with something and I need to learn/build until it ceases to be interesting which can range from days to years. Like hoarding, I think there's probably an evolutionary drive in this, but curious if there are good resources to better understand the different attributes of wanting to learn/do something to 'irrational' levels of details whether it's something seemingly inconsequential or consequential, which seems irrelevant to this human drive. So much joy has come out of these periods of obsessions, I'm curious to better understand it's source.
I bought an old Lenovo tiny pc for about the same price as a pi4 with all perephials. Performance can hardly be compared.
There are dedicated GPS devices (by TomTom, Garmin, etc) which are much cheaper than smart phones. In the past they provided a far better experience too, I'm not sure how they compare to Google Maps nowadays though.
> A flywheel-battery hybrid storage system has been installed in Ireland, a system that the companies involved claim is the first of its kind.

From 2016. Apparently part of the charm of flywheel storage systems is that they're always the first of their kind :)

(I suppose you could argue that the Irish one was the first with batteries and this is the first without, but really I suspect neither are either)
New Law Makes It Illegal for Companies to Force Microchip Implants
Ask HN: Cloud Consultant vs. FAANG Job?
I am thinking a lot about my career recently, since I am generalist engineer and getting older and older, thinking if I should make strict move to join FAANG company (I may qualify for Google L5, if I can pass their leetcode interview part) or pursue cloud consultant job (fairly qualified in AWS). Tired of being generalist backend engineer who does everything for any company, who are building some type of CRUD app with some business logic before/after retrieving/storing data.

Any recommendations?
If the job is indeed necessary to bulk produce a household necessity like soap, then that’s not what is defined as a “bullshit job” by Graeber. Producing soap, no matter how boring, is not a bullshit job. He’s talking about jobs that literally do nothing useful for anyone, could be removed with no consequences, not even to the company paying them. These jobs exist, and I’ve seen it.
Can't argue with that. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
This is great, and I'll add:

3) Never, ever, ever tell anyone anything if they contacted you. If it's the bank calling, or the government, or insurance, or the power company, or anyone else, say "Thanks, I'll call you back". Hang up the phone, wait an hour then find the phone number yourself (look on your bank card or whatever) and initiate contact with the company.

Same goes for emails. DON'T click links in emails. Delete the email. Wait an hour or two then research the phone number to call and initiate contact.

I will never even have a phone conversation with someone that called me (other than friends, of course)
Go is also fully compiled to native code, big difference.
A programming course on coursera might have a higher return than a degree in History from Harvard. (assuming return=money)
To point 2, there are scam calls in Asia that would show up as your child's phone number, with someone saying they're from the hospital, the child has been in an accident, they're going to operate but they need payment first. I guess even in the "bad parts" of the world doctors would never delay treatment due to money, but maybe some parents don't consider this in their panic.

I wonder if having a duress as well as normal password (like in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fx77j1vl4d8) is useful, but obviously if the caller is pretending the person is incapacitated, that goes out the window.
I think many of the 'nice to haves' would eventually become basically free under UBI. As people are freed to engage in low-capital creative work, we'll see a lot more of everything, driving down the prices. Similar to Bandcamp, or indie games on Steam: a massive pool of highly-skilled amateurs which eventually drives down prices.
I'll be honest, I would prefer to read pretty much any major news organizations reporting on this conversation other than Vice.
This logic does not hold up. Let's say you sell hammers, and a person walks into your store and says 'I'd like one hammer please — I'm going to go bash my friend's skull in'. Would you sell it to them?
> Do we want hammers to be restricted to only those whose political ideologies align with ours?

Do you want a hardware store to have a "free fertilizer for white supremacists" sign?

Sorry for the extreme example. Point I'm trying to make is, at a certain point, yes, we want to restrict things based on political ideology, and always have.

The question is where and how to draw that line, and, the process we currently use to do that is public discussion, civil society, and democratic government.

So I think it's perfectly appropriate to talk and think about this.
It hasn't been shown yet that achieving natural herd immunity is even an option. Even in countries where they have been very lax on measures there hasn't been enough build-up for HI and it also seems that the antibodies go away quite quickly.
> Journalists do in-depth investigative reporting, they submit FOIA requests, they cultivate connections with other institutions in order to get stories of public interest to the public.

Some do. Others maliciously crop social media comments and provoke twitter flamewars to create content.

I think the biggest problem with the tech industry is that it's insufficiently self-critical. But I think journalism has the same problem; I rarely see journalists writing articles about other journalists behaving badly. They have a tendency to protect their own, which mirrors my observations of how people in the tech industry generally respond to criticism of the tech industry.
Nope, Ubuntu Mate is very functional and respects the user. I won't use a disrespecting OS unless forced. Which I do, have a W10 vm for work.

Now Win 2k I might consider, however it is likely very insecure and newer apps don't support it.
Anand did a great thing with tech journalism, but the notion that he, or any journalist, is in any position to gatekeep on who qualifies as a "thinker" is laughably vain.

I do not deny that VCs have a bias (an agenda, even) that leads them to predict a future which furthers their own wealth. But corporate media holds considerable cultural power, and to assume members of the corporate media only tell the truth and never act to protect or extend that cultural power is naive (or mendacious).

Whatever we may say about capitalists insulating themselves from failure, at some point they still have to put some skin in the game. Your average corporate journalist is arguably more insulated from the consequences of their failure than a typical VC.

Edit: I seem to have mistaken this person for Anand formerly of Anandtech. An unforced error on my part. My point about vanity still
I was just chatting with some girl about this..Back in my AOL days you would get hit with the 'YOU=' or 'U=' as soon as you entered a chat. Mostly because we had thousands of aol logins and was always on a different account.
You should check your sources [1]. Every single time someone has claimed that a federal or state government has "forced" someone to inflate COVID numbers, it's been blatant nonsense.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-07-02/error-le...
Even if Autodesk products just get replaced by a competitor's? And the environmental campaign were to conveniently ignore that? Just a hypothetical. It's certainly been done before.

Hence moral outrage is an effective tool for mass manipulation.
Collection of foreign letters used in mathematics
And then what? You throw away the example specification so that the why only continues on in the code?

And after 10 years of maintenance, the code has drifted with each iteration so that the why is no longer clear in the code.
Smooth ad my friend.
Let's see how https://ruqqus.com will do as a Reddit alternative. I give it a chance! The algorithms are open-source so there is no manipulation.
Patents are almost always approved fwiw and the FR cases here seem to be linked to worldwide patents. It is not the patent offices job to test the validity of patents. That occurs in a court when someone challenges the patent. This is true of every country, France included. So whilst you have a list of software patents filed worldwide (including France) that's not really relevant to the enforceability of the patent in France.

This is also why you see articles from time to time highlight a stupid patent as if it's an outrage that the patent office allowed it. It's not the patent offices job to enforce patents. You can literally go ahead and patent swinging on a swing (1) and the patent office would approve it if the paper work is in order. The media would then likely pick up on this with outrage as if that's an enforceable patent. The truth is that it's simply not the patent offices job. Patents are meant to be enforced by courts.

1: https://patents.google.com/patent/US6368227B1/en
Don't Put Logic in Tests (2014)
The one big downside I have noticed from WFH is that any efficiency I introduce in my own work becomes reclaimed time. If I can crank through a days work in 4 hours in the morning I can reasonably take it easy in the afternoon. This is great but it has created some stress around things like code reviews and impromptu mentoring etc.

If I am sitting in the office I may as well spend 20 minutes on a code review trying to figure out a cleaner solution, but at home its harder to do it. There is just a general feeling of racing towards that 'done' status which represents a good amount of completed work for the day. Before it was just 9-5 and a thorough code review was a welcome use of that time.
They are pointing out that facial recognition has a lot of the problems that these earlier schemes had in that they were another way to disenfranchise and cause problems for minorities. With FR the immediate issue is making many false matches, leading to yet another thing causing over-policing with darker skinned people.
> Except that none of the hospitals in the US have been overrun.

...so far
I agree that you shouldn't document "how", but when I'm reading unfamiliar code, I find I what I miss is "what", not "why".

To my mind, in well-written code each function should be documenting its contract: what it assumes, what it guarantees if that assumption holds.

(And if it turns out that what you'd write is just the function's name and its parameter and return types with a few grammatical particles added, maybe it's OK to omit the documentation.)

Then if you find that in order to do that you have to write a little essay, or you need terminology that doesn't correspond to a named thing in the codebase, or you're repeating yourself in multiple comments, that tells you something you need to put in higher-level documentation.
In order of most comments to least:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17874320

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16995389

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17260911

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561080

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6236478

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17816185

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13955261

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18800421

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15880092

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19095884

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17433908

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9204922

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17162935

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17074058

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12607328

Don't miss the lively contributions of https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=davidgraeber. Hopefully we'll get him again!
Never say no, but don't say yes unless you're sure about it.

You won't believe how often that will be good enough.

"Can you code in X?"

"I can program in many languages!"

Didn't answer the question, but was often enough for the interviewer.
Try using the LessPhone[0] launcher. I have used it off and on and had some success with it. It locks you down to a slim set of apps (configurable), in a plain black and white interface. It's not perfect, but it's helpful.

[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=me.aswinmohan....
Search google for optical keyboard switches, they are easy to 3D print. They have clicky designs and just sliders for quieter operation.
You don't seriously think that the government wouldn't have access to this data stream?
Legally they all already are. Any tool which is required for the production of nuclear weapons is regulated. Things like hammers are easily available and not tracked, but precise enough CNC machines have built-in always on GPS and cell/satellite links to report their locations. The manufacturer is responsible for ensuring the machine cannot be used outside its licensed geofenced area.
> Another way to look at it: stock market is up, which is basically owned by the top-X; while "labor" struggles to get by - and will struggle for the foreseeable future. Anyone who thinks about "changing the world" could use a situation like this crisis as a test case; if a situation like this does not punish the poor, that you may live in a "(super-)human" society.

Keep going! You've already made it about 90% of the way to Marxism. The interests of capital and labor are at odds, because capital has no way to extract value from the world without labor. This means capital has strong incentives to keep labor in its place, which leads to situations where billionaires can massively increase their wealth as a result of a global pandemic that shuts down much of the economy, but workers suffer as a result.
Harvard is fairly cheap to attend, less than a state school for most, and free if your parents make under $65K. They were forced to do that a few years ago so the government wouldn't start taxing their endowment.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/12301...
Buying and Selling stocks with maximum profit
Not true. Deaths only lag cases by 5-10 days. For example, in Italy daily new cases peaked on March 21st and daily deaths peaked on March 27th.