skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Projects with no PM, product owner, spec, etc.
Currently at the start of a new project doing the backend work and the only input has been a 25+ page PDF of frontend screens - there's no PM, no product owner, no spec, etc. Which means I'm supposed to be guessing what the backend needs to implement to support these frontend screens - all without any existing backend documentation as to what already exists.

Am I unreasonable for wanting more support than just "here's a PDF, figure out what to implement" as a pure backend developer?
Kerlissions: Trivial Collisions in Iota's Hash Function (Kerl)
Significant Locations, iOS 14 and iCloud
It should be lower latency for transaltantic and other long haul traffic, as the speed of light in glass is roughly half that of the vacuum of space. So the extra distance to space is offset by the faster speed of light.
It will be impossible to find on Google.
Also, I'm wondering if it a good choice for such a project to use the hipster '.io' domain regarding the risk in a near future with this domain name.
The issue is that large numbers of people, organizations, and governments have assumed a forever swelling population in their retirement plans. So, yes, like any time in history there will be individuals who haven't saved enough to retire. The issue is that a demographic contraction throws the large majority of retirees into crippling poverty, absent government intervention that allocates capital investment and workers' consumption toward retirees' consumption.

Obviously a forever swelling population is not model we can or should try to sustain, but reaching some kind of replacement-level equilibrium is sustainable and is much healthier for workers' and retirees' economic health.
Ask HN: How to nab and block a creepy user?
We have recently created a marketplace app. Which allows users to message other users. We have found one user making lewd comments to other users.
After first report we blocked that user.
That user created another account & started doing same thing. How do we block such users? This is a mobile app built with Flutter. We have our own DB + Firebase for messaging.
Probably .im might not be available
We are a small team and we built ourselves a not so complicated CLI tool to ease inspecting and management of our infrastructure. It certainly boosted our productivity and made our lives much easier.
I'm not sure whether the time spent developing this tool was worth it though. Since it's not just one time job but a continuous maintenance. On the other, we wouldn't go back to the old ways now.
Really great article. I've walked the same path and thought the same thoughts, and always felt somehow that it was just me. Here's hoping that Copilot lowers the barrier for all developers - especially ones who just have a small site or hobby project.
I disagree. We've had all necessary technology all along. It's exactly the lack of moral responsibility that's holding us back. Fighting climate change is more akin to the civil rights movement than to the Manhattan project.
If it's a high margin market, you should absolutely focus on capturing more revenue, it gives you more available capital to work with. Once that slows down or you get competition, you can focus on improving your efficiency.
preliminary calculations suggest this has the potential to capture about 5% of current CO2 emissions if applied to 50% of worldwide farmland.
(citation needed)
No way. The 285 around Atlanta is 66 miles long.

The 5 and 405 around downtown Portland can be driven in under 10 minutes under ideal circumstances.

Also, your google map link for Portland is bizarre. I honestly have no idea what that route is supposed to represent. It definitely isn’t any route someone would take who was trying to circle downtown Portland.
https://www.overshootday.org/newsroom/past-earth-overshoot-d...
There’s not much as (or more) engaging, provocative, and gratifying as my children asking those questions. Knowing they’re experiencing wonder. Knowing they look at the world and have questions like I did and still do. Why these things matter, what any of it means, that doesn’t need to matter really. I just love knowing that they have the same curiosity and wonder that has given me so much happiness for decades.

It’s incredible how relevant and hard to answer some of the early questions are. What are waves? How do objects maintain flight? It’s not just that, but the nature of the questions. They know what waves and wings are, but they want to know things about them. That’s kind of the pinnacle of human intelligence right there. The ability to care to, and then to ask, such interesting and important questions. There would be no progress without wondering about things that matter, or things with significant answers anyway.

I’d have a lot less grey hair if it weren’t for my kids but things like this are what made my life matter. I love this about kids, and I enjoyed your comment.
Yes, I was more or less inspired by TeX's algorithm.
Worth pointing out that some of the largest proponents of Matrix today are governments and civic institutions. The federated nature and ability to self host are really important to them.

The French government's installation has been in the public domain for sometime (https://matrix.org/blog/2018/04/26/matrix-and-riot-confirmed...)

More recently the German Education authority has announced that it will roll out a 500K user installation - this is the world’s largest-ever single contract for a collaborative software service (https://sifted.eu/articles/element-germany-deal/)
That's excellent advice. I can see how demoralizing it could be to work on something you've already demoed.
Regardless of what Facebook or ESRI says, in order to import data into OSM, you must follow the Import Guidelines ( https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Guidelines ). Which includes wider OSM community consultation. If you ignore these rules, your data is likely to be deleted.
Mushroom Leather Is More Than a Sustainable Alternative to Animal Skin
Oxford's Covid Vaccine Front-Runner Is Months Ahead of Her Competition
Easily fixed by using ᑅ ᑀ, ᕙ ᕗ, or ᗕ ᗒ.
I've used Sort method several types both in Java and JavaScript but they way it's used it as a library function, I don't need to write my own sorting algorithm. Same for Data Structure commons ones I've used are found in Java Collections - ArrayList, LinkedList, HashMap, Set etc. For Deep Learning have used several algorithms that are best practices and common data structures like Tensors and Vectors. I realize the value of knowing the theoretical underpinning but practically speaking these are only ever written one by library creators, no idea why companies insist everyone to know these and implement by heart, they can ask much more interesting practical problems.
Feel like I'm missing something important here. What's happening with .io?
A choice of two dystopias, yeay
Blogging can be fun for the reasons the author mentioned. I enjoy the research and the conveying of information to others.

Sadly nowadays I often think of a topic and go reflect on "is this an attractive topic?". So I don't write just for fun anymore on any topic that I like - part of it is because of analytics. I can see which blogs get thousands of views per month and which get barely anything.

These analytics for me kind of ruined just writing for fun. I know I probably should not care about those numbers, but I do. When you spent hours working on a blog and it gets 100 views in a month, it feels bad. Especially when a quickly crafted blog gets 10x that. :)

I am consciously trying to just do it for the fun of it again. I'm also convinced that when I learn a new topic and proceed to write about it, my understanding deepens. That should be the real reward - the understanding.

Sadly I also think that nowadays blogging is a way of 'branding' oneself, limiting what you can write about. You might not write a silly blog criticizing the latest star wars, when you know your professional network reads the blog. Blogging anonymously as was mentioned here on HN some weeks ago might be a solution to this.

I'm rambling, good job on the first month!
>I feel increasingly dumb the more I see these configs.

Especially since there is no IDE support.

I've come back to enjoy XML with nice schemas and IDE validation and autocompletion instead of YAML and liquibase changes not going through properly due to an indention problem.
Start with Clojure then move to f# then Haskell.
I agree Chinese companies are basically branches of government if that's what you are saying however I also think the relationship between corporate USA and the federal government is a lot closer than most people realise.
I feel like trying to use a "dumb" declarative config language for everything is part of the problem.

The domain is not simple enough for that, so you end up with all kinds of weird scripts around it all, or other templating/codegen solutions, plus all kinds of ad-hoc conventions that are extremely easy to break and very annoying to navigate.

Having a full blown statically typed language like TypeScript - where things can reference each other strongly (not just by names and other strings), naming conventions can be encoded in functions (or even enforced by types), and structures on every level (even your project-specific ones) have a well-defined and checked schema - would help a lot in my opinion.

Maybe deno could find a use in this niche.
Agreed. Catchy names also have 1 to 2 syllables, usually, so Element seems a bit unwieldy. But maybe they want to step back a bit and give the Matrix brand a boost.
Had a similar thing happen to me. I once travelled to Cuba and checked GitHub one. My account was suspended but with some complaining it was quickly restored after they needed real proof of me.
I'll pile on: I'm working through Marko Luksa's "Kubernetes in Action", where he introduces this quaint line of code:

etcdctl ls /registry

He notes in an aside that you may have to do

etcdctl get /registry --prefix=true

for later versions of the protocol. But here I am with k8s 1.16, and etcd has been locked in a pod (seriously, why?) so before you contact it you need to "kubectl exec ..."

We're not finished. Apparently the pod was insufficiently secure, because now we need to decorate the etcdctl with a couple certificates, a key, and do SSL encryption to make contact, so in the end I have this wrapper (names changed to protect the guilty):

$ cat ~/bin/etcdctl
#!/bin/bash
declare -A EtcdHost=(
[clust_prodA]=clust1-leader
[clust_prodB]=clust2-leader
[clust_qualA]=clust3-leader
[clust_testA]=clust4-leader
)
if [ ! -z ${EtcdHost[$cluster]:-} ]; then
export KUBECONFIG=$HOME/.kube/$cluster
exec kubectl exec etcd-${EtcdHost[$cluster]} -n kube-system -- sh -c "ETCDCTL_API=3 etcdctl --endpoints https://${EtcdHost[$cluster]}:2379 --cacert /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/ca.crt --key /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/server.key --cert /etc/kubernetes/pki/etcd/server.crt $*"
exit 0
else
echo "No known etcd host for cluster $cluster";
exit 1;
fi

The entry points for beginners have been nearly barricaded, and the ladders charred and dangling high.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23746969

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23813500

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23817497

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23828435

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23835507
I knew the citation, but thank you anyways. When you actually try with the local court you'll find out it's not as clear cut as it is on the EU website and the local court will adhere only to local codified law. My country's government is in opposition to some of regulations and the courts can't do anything about it.
People often get confused, they think the word is strong (Nike,Google,...) while the word nearly never is. As you've said it's the other way around, what the company evokes in us with their product over time is brought back to the name.
>> please provide an example of two of where they claim China is more oppressive than it actually is

> I'll give you one. Pretty much every single mainstream media basically says religion is banned in China. However to my detriment, every time I go back to China to visit my paternal grandma (who is a catholic), I get asked to go to Sunday mass with her. So, where is religion banned in China? Let me know your thoughts about this, do you think religion is banned in China?

First of all, I can't remember ever seeing Western MSM saying religion is banned in China. Would you be so kind as to provide an example?

Second, while religion is clearly not banned in China, there isn't freedom of religion. I care very little about the rigmarole of religious people, but I do care about their freedom to keep those. China whitelists a set of religions, religious practices and religious institutions. As with so many other things in China, if you happen to find what you want within such an approved space, you enjoy freedoms. Outside of those preapproved boxes, there isn't freedom of religion in China.

You yourself bring up catholicism. I am not here to defend the catholic church (yuck!), but the approved catholic church in China is not allowed to have the same relationship with the Vatican as ordinary catholic churces elsewhere. This is not freedom of religion. And let's not even get started with islam, or let alone falun gong! You've got to be kidding me.

So, no, religion isn't banned in China. I've never claimed it is, nor do MSM tend to claim it is. The claim is rather that there is very little freedom of religion in China.

>> adversarial justice systems

> You do realise that "adversarial justice systems" only pretty much exist in Common Law countries right? Whereas Civil Law countries don't use an adversarial system, which is pretty much the legal system of the whole of the EU and pretty much all of Asia including China.

I'm sorry. As somone from a civil law country who usually gets quite annoyed by common law people assuming that common law is the system everywhere, I should have been a lot more careful with my wording. I should have said "justice systems where there is a true burden of proof on the prosecuting authority" instead.

> I've even read arguments from British barristers that the adversarial system can be an inferior system. I mean, the adversarial justice system certainly didn't do too well for the incarceration rate of black people in America now did it?

Here we go again. There's a lot that's wrong with the American justice system. The Chinese justice system is fundamentally flawed, to the point of being a worthless sham that merely rubberstamps the arbitrary "justice" of the CCP. If you cannot see that enormous chasm between these two, then I don't know how to get through to you.
Ah, if you are using Java it is probably easier to use/develop for. One of the issue I've found is that the REST API is not well documented at all, and using it from an app perspective is not intuitive at all when you are trying to use it from applications that are not Java based.
This is an important matter. Thank you for bringing this up!

For my wordsandbuttons.online , I have one rule - all the pages, no matter how interactive-rich, should take less than 64KB each. To get there, I write all my HTML, JS and CSS by hand. Should confess, I wasn't thinking much of the environment, it was mostly about user experience. But I'm happy that it pays of in this way too.

My average page produces 0.02 g of CO2, which sums up to a 1% of sumo wrestler over the year (or a full-sized sumo wrestler over a century), and it can be absorbed by only one tree (what a coincidence, I have my tree planted just last month).

So, who wants to turn it into a competition?
You can have a billion dollars worth of shares in amazon, hell you can have a billion dollars in cash. It isn't going to wipe your ass in a nursing home. Someone young will. If the people who do the work are downtrodden enough why would they bother participating in your scheme?
Your proposed (not illegal, not unethical) explanation does not work out mathematically.

Even in the extreme scenario where all families stopped would stop having kids after the birth of a daughter, the expected number of male children would equal the expected number of female children. And even if say 52 percent of babies born are boys, you won't ever get a male excess of the discussed magnitude (1100 men for every 1000 women) this way.

You can try a Scala simulation here: https://pastebin.com/4US9a6aE.
And have more fun by doing the encoding/decoding on GPU [1]

[1] https://github.com/CESNET/GPUJPEG
When (Not) to Squash Commits
Yes, in November.
Digital sovereignty is becoming differentiating. Open source, on servers you control, end-to-end encryption by default. This is how European SaaS can win.
80 - 180 US$ for the removal of a ton of CO2 is far more than the cost of adding a ton of CO2 to the atmosphere (in Germany, currently around 10€/ton, I believe).

In principle, removing a ton of CO2 needs to be cheaper than the cost of adding a ton of CO2.
Java is an interesting one; while you don't write the sorting algorithm, you do write the sorting conditions, a function that returns a number depending on the compared values. Likewise there's hash functions, although in practice those will be generated by your IDE or Lombok. (I haven't been into Java for a while so there may be better alternatives, iirc Scala and / or Kotlin solve it as well)
Time zones a big factor. Note that this is about online classes (live), not a MOOC.

I wouldn't want to expect a student in Sydney to stay awake at 3AM to follow a lecture at Harvard at 1PM.

The same is true for office hours with professors and TAs. You have a huge disadvantage in getting information if you are in a bad time zone.
Google’s former CEO hosts an exclusive retreat in Yellowstone each July
I wrote a tree traversal algorithm to allow some custom logic to be specified in an external JSON that we didn't control... Felt great!
If so, they're pushing "conformity" and "being a good cog in the machine" well past the point of cargo cult programming. That's what this algorithm-based interviewing is all about: a textbook cargo cult. And people wonder why they aren't seeing quality.
Whenever I interview engineers, my main priority, beyond grasping whether they understand the stack they’ll be working with, is gauging how well they can work in an organization of fellow engineers, designers, and product folks to deliver a product and support the larger engineering team.

If they can pass that hurdle, you can almost be certain they know how and when crack open an algorithms textbook or use Google-fu to apply the right algorithm to solve a given problem.

(Knowing which data structures to reach for is far more applicable than being able to apply algorithms from memory. The article is good evidence of that.)
Matrix.org is just one of plenty of public homeservers if you don't want to host your own.
Putting aside that modern plane autopilots can also navigate and land planes, the common definition of words is often more important than the technical definition. Especially when it comes to marketing to the general public. Terminology gets reused because it has a common usage and somebody wants to use that to frame their new & shiny product.

Ask a normal person what they think autopilot does and they'll say "the plane flys by itself". Using that for cars becomes "the car drives itself". Same for copilot, most people probably think they're there to help the pilot.
Profit is a measure of productivity, other things being equal.

A director of marketing creates a campaign which affects millions of transactions... so it's a function which can dramatically increase economic production.

It's pretty easy to compare productivity across industries. Leave what "should" be aside, when you're planning for the success of nations you cannot rely on Moral Bonuses.

The rate of economic activity (ie., people transacting with one another such that each has more than before) is measurable: it's called growth.

And you cannot grow by replacing highly productive industries with deeply unproductive ones. To pay for things we need the ratio of workers:transactions to increase.

Human history was severely impoverished because this was always a low number. We are wealthy today only because it is a higher one.
I apologize for an off-topic comment, but I just had to chuckle at the term "living aboard". In similar contexts it is usually a typo of "living abroad", but here it is quite fitting. :)
Why would it matter if it's an American or Chinese company? It's a sad world where we need to decide about company, product, person, idea, book or whatever based on their perceived country, colour, race, ideology, ...
Congratulations to Electric Imp.

I can recall a senior engineer giving a talk at an Erlang meetup years ago (5+), where he described the tech. An interesting combination of Erlang servers and embedded Squirrel VM clients, iirc. The talk stayed in my mind long afterwards. Really explained the tech choices well, and I admired both the pragmatism and the innovation.

I learnt a lot from that talk, and have been rooting for them ever since.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqXntCtVH68

As for the actual product, I don't yet have many (if any) IoT devices in my home. And if I did, I wouldn't be buying them based on Twilio or Electric Imp's name. But I can see there being a land grab for IoT tech supply and infrastructure, which Electric Imp clearly has a high value approach to.

So this is a 'random' acquisition that makes a lot of sense to me. Could develop into something quite big actually.