skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You may be right. I don't really pay attention to BrandName(TM) of a simple feature. All I know is I never browse the /Applications folder to find an app. I also know that these features are NOT available on Windows. That with the missing spacebar press in Explorer for Quicklook access to a file in Windows makes not using macOS frustrating
Ask HN: Any developer deep dives into first party sports game?
As a kid I always wanted to work on sports games. Back then I loved Star League Baseball and then later TV Sports Basketball/Football.

Now as a professional I know I'll never work on those things (I do OS work now), but I'm still really interested in how these games like Madden and NBA 2k are built technically. But I can find very little in depth about them. Does anyone know of a pointer that can provide insight into how these top-tier sports games are developed?
Startups Managed to Successfully Drive Business Growth During Covid-19
I remember writing a paper in college about what the environmental impact of a web page was. One of the biggest energy savings Identified by far was changing the color of your website to use dark backgrounds.
Congrats on the launch.

How does it compare to enterprise ETL tools like Informatica, Talend - is it not possible to do these within them ?
Out of curiosity, which of the engineering problems posed by the Starship/Superheavy system are the biggest potential showstoppers? My instinct is the belly flop/heat shield required to make Starship reusable, but I know nothing about rocketry.
> spending time normalizing all of those in to columns and tables wouldn't make a lot of sense

I agree with you (depending on the use-case, of course).

I was talking about dumping the data into one of those databases (SQLite, Postgres, or MongoDB) and using their JSON querying functionality.
I find the marketing message a bit hard to swallow. The perfect answer for “what kind of music do you listen to” in person shouldn’t be something where we stop the flow of conversation and pull out our phones. It’s unclear to me why I’d want to use this. It would be helpful to see some example screenshots on the home page for be to better understand the value.
there was a time when a gene was named to facilitate search
through a bookshelf full of laboratory notes.
you could look at a genes lable and know exactly where to find reference to the gene, the lable would indicate the stack number the shelf, the section the volume the page[s] and paragraph....lables such as Sonichedgehog dont do that anymore.
I've noticed the uptick in fireflies too, but I attributed it to the mild winter we had compared to the deep freeze of 2018-2019. Spring was also warm and wet very early.

We also had the sub-Brood XIII cicadas launch out in the western suburbs which was insane. They came early and they came out in huge numbers.
Topology has some uses in physics, topological quantum computation is one of its potential uses. More concrete applications are found in condensed matter physics, such as topologically ordered materials and topological insulators.
> From a coder perspective I've only seen excel workbooks that are bad or terrifying.

I think this might be a type of bias:

The Excel sheets I usually look at as a programmer are from customers who want me to write an application for them. Typically because the conventional means (Excel sheets, directory structures, emails etc.) become unmaintainable.

So we end up seeing the stuff that is bad for w/e reason. Often a combination of complexity, inconsistency, usability and sheer mass.
Salesforce open sources an AI research environment for tax policies
Microsoft's MakeCode uses a subset of TypeScript with support for AOT compilation via transpilation to C++ as intermediate step.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/makecode

https://github.com/microsoft/pxt
If you know how to access tor you can get lsd delivered via USPS in the us. It's not anywhere as hard to get as it used to be. I'm in Berlin right now and could get lsd (and all kind of other drugs) delivered to my door in less than 2 hours, it's the same in any major EU cities.

edit: and you don't even need tor really, everything is happening through signal these days.
Not my area at all but isn't this genetic algorithm type stuff?
Wouldn't you rather share a garden with insects? I would.
So all that noise for people that don't know to change the data type of a column?
That Face ID like thing is actually one of my favorite features. It's on par with Apple's implementation. Unfortunately, battery life, accessory integration (e.g., WearOS), and app support all suck relative to the offerings on iOS. I REALLY want to use an Android phone if only for the Microsoft integration, but having spent the last three weeks trying to make a Pixel 4 XL work, I'm back on iPhone. I may be an outlier, but god damn I love my Apple Watch.
The difference is that the people that don't hate it now have an empowered skillset that they didn't have before.

Not knowing how to use the primary tool in your field because you only know how to use a web-based spreadsheet with 1/100th the functionality is not an "empowered skillset." It's a cruel trick to play on employees, who will have difficulty finding further jobs in that field because they don't have a basic understanding of the tool everyone else uses.
AOSP is completely different than pure Android. What you call AOSP is basically android without (other) vendor crap, but real AOSP is also without all of googles proprietery stuff (like google play, push notifications and so on).

So AOSP is basically pure android without googles crap.
Reports of Microsoft exploring into buying out TikTok's global operations
I use a first generation iPhone SE every day in conjunction with my regular iPhone 11 Pro Max and I definitely wouldn’t call it unusable. The main pain point I have with it is loading a heavy webpage if I don’t have ad blocking on
Then we are doomed to the lowest denominator. The bad actor here is the one that expects some software to magically change your data, and he should expect an error or at least a warning or asking for confirmation.

To good actor is people who carefully care and curate their data, just to be corrupted silently by the program.

Lets say then, keep the default but add at least some sort of "respect my data as it is, because this is a CSV with CSV extension" mode.
Which creates this lovely reality where you effectively have numbers that can be accurately represented in IEEE float but can't be represented accurately in decimal notation, and numbers that can be represented accurately in decimal notation but not in IEEE float. All of those cases are dicey with JSON.
Babel is not limited to JavaScript frontends. You can take any language and write a Babel front-end for it. This is, for example, how Fable compiles F# code to JavaScript. Those two languages are very different from each other -- far more differences than Python 2 and Python 3 -- and it works brilliantly.
Because it's not a hypothesis, it's a nonsense conspiracy theory and of course medical journals will refuse to publish it.

If people want that "information" its free for the taking on reddit, 4chan and facebook memes.
It still doesn’t make sense to send beginners into those depths.
It should be noted for younger generations that ESP32 is more powerful than typical 16 bit computers we used for MS-DOS.
I'm still running an 6s plus. My luck might run out with iOS 14, but so far so good. It was expensive when new, but I've gotten 5 years out of it. Might get 6 if the update doesn't hurt it. Still runs quickly. Screen is still scratch free. Despite it's high initial price, it's been a bargain overall.
One thing to bear in mind in this discussion is that the U.S. did not simply exit stage left after the revolution in Iran. We've continued to isolate Iran both economically and militarily, especially with lavish support to Israel and even to Iraq during the Iran/Iraq war. It's impossible to say what kind of government Iran would have without American interventionism because it's never been free of American interventionism.

It's sort of trivially true that responsibility for every facet of the Islamic Revolution in Iran can't be laid directly at the feet of the U.S. But, when you screw around with another country explicitly to steal their resources and exploit their people, it's silly to expect whatever violent resistance springs up to be rational and measured in every respect. They may even find it useful to heighten certain differences with the colonizing power to gain support from the people.
Some do but as with RSI from keyboard/mouse usage it affects everyone differently. One thing they usually have in common is excessive repetition for example by constantly using shortcuts with CTRL. While practicing typing (both keyboard and gamepad) I noticed that highly repetitive lessons with lots of text like "jf jf jf fj fj fj jfjfjfj" cause much more strain than lessons with more realistic text. In the end it all comes down to responsible usage, nothing is completely safe.
Yup, wouldn’t hurt if their reps were unionized and could push back against this stuff either.
Personally, I've never seen a case where the difference was clinically meaningful. So, meh...
>has led to the near-extinction of bees in residential areas

Why do you want bees in residential areas ? I think that it's illegal to keep bees in some proximity to residential areas around here (my grandparents used to keep bees).
> One party produces oil, a second party consumes oil, and the third party is just there to take his cut because he thinks he's smarter than everyone else.

One party produces oil and a second party consumes oil, but those events do not occur at the same time. A third party 'stores' the oil meanwhile and charges for it. You are welcome do it for free, I'm sure you'd be a hero to society.
Sorry for asking but are you familiar with how MS Excel aggressively converts data to dates? There's no way to "sanitize" it (without resorting to hacky solutions like including extra characters) and even if you fix the data, it will re-change them to dates the next time you open the file.
Very cool, nice work! SQL Server / Azure SQL support available or on the roadmap?
Ah thanks you're right, I updated my comment.
You're right, but I still doubt neither cigarettes nor alcohol would be legal if they were invented in 2020
Now save that file as CSV (maybe because you want to process it with some non-Excel tool) and re-open it. Mar-1.
I would define my Pixel 4 as bland but reliable which I am okay with.

My main positive is this thing, so far, has survived more than a few drops that would have killed other phones I have owned.

That said I agree about the battery but even before COVID I was reliably near a charger so it didn't matter that much. Hand gesture feature fell flat for me and I don't use the song recognizer.

What it has convinced me of though is I no longer care about customizing my phone or the extra geeky things I can do with Android like I did when I was a bit younger so my next phone purchase will be an iPhone. A reliable, incredibly responsive, secure, more private experience for the 4 apps I use and phone calls I make.
What cost? Looking back maybe 15 years all the experiments with CCFL and LEDs were more costly than the filaments i have now. They last longer, use less, AND make light which is pleasing and usable to me. Wheee! Almost candles!

edit: Last longer as in have already outlasted anything I had before them, the filaments I mean. Also not really more expensive to buy. And their energy usage is ridiculously low.
Quite a bit of this is owed to traffic patterns and windshield glass changes though
I've made a video about disabling the USB to prevent rubber ducky attacks a long time ago.

never thought about shutting down the computer.

https://youtu.be/RtRsBTGZUgc
Ask HN: How secure is Signal messaging?
I'm trying to convince a party to use Signal to communicate privately with me, and would like to verify certain things with HN community to make sure my understanding of the application is correct.

- Are receivers and senders the only entities able to access privately sent messages/pictures/videos? Do the Signal servers not store any of this data?

- If it is not stored on the server, are all the media and content sent and received then stored on the user's device? In other words, will my usage be capped by my device's available storage?

- If Signal servers are hacked, are the security guarantees thrown out? Or, do the hackers only see encrypted data at all times, with no way to decrypt it themselves?

- Is Signal the most reliable mobile app in the secure communication domain? Are there better alternatives?

Thanks in advance :)
I'm not a journalist, just a rando

I don't follow right-wing types on Twitter or anywhere but I make a point to check foxnews and read the comments and click around on increasingly aggressive right-wing Twitter profiles and read their comments, along with traversing right-wing websites like Breitbart and ZeroHedge pretty regularly.

If you looked at my profile it would also look like I only follow and listen to a small bubble. That's because I don't want their BS cluttering up my life and intruding when I don't want it. I choose when to let their ideologies into my life in a controlled manor, it works much better this way.
You're talking about three different classes of device: PCs, phones, and IoT (IoS)/deep embedded.

Embedded development is hard. Really hard. And much of that difficulty is intrinsic to the problem space, so it isn't going away anytime soon. But much of it is just embedded developers being masochists and embedded tool developers being sadists. For phones, the pain is probably 90% avoidable. 90 percent!

No, I don't know why we live with it either.

The reason your phone is different than your PC is that the PC's OS has all the drivers for everything built in, then loads whichever drivers your specific machine needs. Embedded Linux images are built specific to one model of hardware, with weird crappy OEM-provided drivers baked in and nowhere else available. It doesn't _have_ to be this way. But it is.

So to support your phone, the vendor basically maintains a custom-patched kernel with a bizarre build process. And that's done more or less independently for every model they're supporting. It's a huge headache!

Why deep embedded is this way is a little more understandable. (It's also where I prefer to work if I'm doing software; I don't like embedded Linux. It's just not my thing. So if I'm wrong when talking about it, that's why.) Deep embedded is often working with very limited hardware, custom circuits, and general strangeness. It also can serve the industrial, automotive, or medical markets, which naturally tend to longer product cycles. So the product is generally less standard, meaning it makes more sense (at least to me) why the support flow is so bespoke.
Personally, this is my preferred approach. I feel uncomfortable making final notes the minute I have just learned something new. It's like your bubble of knowledge has to expand and connect to other thoughts and ideas in your head, otherwise my notes feel so superficial and incomplete.
> If library authors make esm as a thin wrapper over cjs, won't it hinder tree shaking.

Correct. I wouldn't follow the article's advice wrapping ESM with CJS as it leads to larger bundles.

> Won't it cause degradation in behaviour?

For web apps - certainly. The forced sync behavior of CJS wouldn't be very noticeable for local applications however.
Overdosing on Choices
Some of it has to do with hardware vendors like Qualcomm refusing to support older chipsets with newer kernels, or you know, just open sourcing their drivers.

My pixel 1 is basically stuck on a 3.18 kernel forever, even if I go and compile AOSP myself, because of Qualcomm's nom-free drivers.

At a certain point, companies like Google have to decide how much they want to backport fixes to older systems. Apparently they've decided on 3 years.
Certainly not. I just moved closer to downtown, to a neighborhood where I can walk to everything I need. I don't want to go back to a car-dependent life.
InsanelyMac is fine, they don't deserve to be lumped them into the same category as tonymacx86!

(Tonymacx86 also has a lot of useful information, for better or worse, but you shouldn't start there.)
Most of the reactions seem fall into three categories:

1. "You (the individual) should stop using Excel". Good advice. As the article mentions, though, if you ever send a tabular data file to someone else to edit, there's a fair chance they will open it in Excel and corrupt the data. Excel's CSV import/export cycle has even more traps than using xlsx consistently, so in some sense individual avoidance of Excel makes the problem worse. You could send SQLite files or somesuch so your colleagues can't work with your data, I suppose.

2. "You (all scientists / whatever non-programmer group) should stop using Excel for data analysis". True, but getting everyone to change is hard. Both top-down (thou shalt not use Excel!) and market-driven (Airtable! LibreOffice!) haven't worked so far. Hopefully there will be more progress on this front.

3. "Scientists should learn to use their tools". Even if a user knows all the scenarios in which Excel corrupts data, it cannot in general be stopped from doing so. If you set column types up front, type every value manually (no copy-paste) & save and check on each edit, and then never re-save the file again or let anyone else re-save it, you're safe. Probably. I sort of expect a bunch of replies saying this isn't safe at all. But if the file is edited, you need to check the whole thing. Eventually an error will slip through.

The only way I've found to safely work with Excel files, or files that might be edited in Excel, is to put the data files under version control and always check the diffs. Often someone else's import/export cycle will change the quoting style on the whole file. In this case, the work needs to be repeated so the diffs are clean and the changes can be verified. This is a necessary but very obnoxious part of this process. Version control targeted at non-programmers and non-text files would help a lot.

There are also tools to to flag potential data corruption errors [1], but error detection in the absence of the original data won't be perfect. And if it is manually run, it won't be run consistently. Most people don't have continuous integration pipelines for their data.

Excel is very powerful and has a lot of potential to improve non-programmer productivity. It is unfortunate that avoiding data corruption is such a minefield. The situation could be significantly improved by anyone with a decent product and a great marketing strategy.

[1] http://maplab.imppc.org/truke/
Last I checked V8 don’t outsource to a library, their JSON parsing is built-in see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20724854
Canon hit by Maze Ransomware attack, 10TB data allegedly stolen
The “Local – Global” Strategy at Netflix
Netflix doesn’t just follows the textbook glocalization principle but improvises upon it. Since, it wants to maximize the engagement that it can get for a single show among all the users on its platform, a good number of shows or movies produced tries to cater to a globalized audience.

For instance In the case of Lilyhammer, Netflix felt it needed to make the Norwegian production less Norwegian. Or Indian Matchmaking which is a perfect example of how Netflix is doubling down on its ability to create shows which can be seen by people from all over the world.

Read more
https://cnc.substack.com/p/how-netflix-is-winning-the-world
Maybe they could have a word with Bayer?
My life is a tiny bit more active than your average gym/yoga rat and phones last me around 2 years. That's consistent across something like 10 years now.

- One got stolen

- Two broke while hiking/kayaking

- One was a lemon and the battery started working funny after a year and a half, it's one of the pixels that came with a high capacity battery and the replacement one is lower capacity so I didn't risk spending money on servicing it

I'm on my fifth phone now.
I would guess that it's easiest to manufacture a linear row of panels, and install N hundred copies of that row following the path of the canal. Otherwise each row of panels would need to be either made bespoke or adjusted on site.
You can put LineageOS on the Note 2 if it is the LTE version.
Free Tool: Calculate Website Words
The biggest problem with calculating words on websites, is that you need to deploy a crawling software to visit every public web page, remove the duplicates and return the accurate results. The word counters I saw were either scammy (aka ask for email address and return nothing), or calculated only one page. I couldn't get the entire website calculated!
So, we've decided to build our own free tool. It can handle even JavaScript based themes! Try it out.
https://websitewordcalculator.com/
How to Access 5 Buttons Through 1 Arduino Input
I have been teaching my daughter with Scratch 3. I taught a few classes at her school back in December. I posted my lessons online so the kids could go back and review them.

The kids really enjoy it, especially 4th and 5th grade.

I got a cutebot and interfaced it with a microbit. My daughter and I made an obstacle avoidance and track following program using the block based programming this past week. She had a blast. I think if you make it fun for the kids, they really get into it.
Cooking Meals with a Rice Cooker (2008)
Alternatively, depending on your hardware requirements, you might want to consider taking a look at the Mobian (mobile Debian) project. Only the Pinephone is currently supported, but you get things like `apt` instead of `apk` on pmOS, which is based on Alpine Linux. Both are great projects, of course, and I think pmOS is focused on more devices.

[1] https://mobian-project.org/
It would be a great way to diversify the offerings for people who want to start a small restaurant.

A lot of cities don't have certain types of cuisines. This could be an option for a new immigrant to introduce their food to a new market.

And for those who see a bigger picture, renting these ghost kitchens to new immigrants on a Kitchen-as-a-Service model.
This is indeed a sketch from Portlandia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G__PVLB8Nm4
Inbound and Outbound FFI – Possible Rust
Like I said, I did account for that
Because actual quality (usability of research, open access, reproducibility, data availability, sane exposition/introduction, proper methods, documentation and code) is not as important as producing a fancy manuscript.

Journals don't care, referees/reviewers might care, but they are unpaid and they usually don't want to rock the boat that much.