skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have (semi-)frequently gone “off-grid” far away from established trails, without carrying a PLB. Sometimes I’ve gone days without seeing another human. I have extensive training in wilderness navigation, and have always reviewed my itinerary with the rangers ahead of time.

In hindsight, I can see how this was a selfish decision.

This feeling has been nagging at me for a while, since I’ve had close calls in remote areas that would have jeopardized the inevitable SAR crews.

So, I’ll acquire a PLB and carry it on future trips. Thank you for the reminder.

That said, I think some of my hesitation in the past was rooted in this belief that PLBs were unreliable and mostly a nuisance due to the abuse by inexperienced hikers. Also, if you are in cell range (like on the majority of the AT), I believe that a phone is the superior device since you can communicate the severity of your emergency to emergency services and they can respond accordingly. I’d like to read more about this if you have some links:

> ”now rescue organizations all over the planet are asking you to please...carry a goddamn PLB”
Yes, the gap from trying to hire CS grads for SW Engineer positions is one of the oldest facets of the problem.
I think that the infrastructure market naturally breeds a lot of products for pretty specific/narrow use cases, whereas our strategy is more about marrying financial capabilities with very broad/flexible APIs. Given that, we've always valued very cohesive and composable functionality between the different facets of Stripe, having a straightforward and tightly integrated Dashboard, and so on. (That's no criticism of AWS -- we haven't launched 100+ different products and we aren't going to have a product suite as extensive as theirs any time soon.)

I do think that software complexity lifecycle management (and how that pertains to organizational considerations) is one of the tough problems in our industry. AWS has done an amazing job in terms of their pace of development and innovation, but, yes, it's also become a pretty complicated suite. I think we all currently face some kind of "fast development", "cohesive integration", "broad functionality" trilemma and how best to surmount it seems a big open question to me.
You could say that evolved out of the "buying" era as the above commenter said, as Oculus was an acquisition.
"average age group of the 20 patients" == 60 years old

Is 20 a high enough sample size for any meaningful conclusion from a study like this?
In the 75 years since Hiroshima, nuclear testing has killed untold thousands
Is the name inspired by the imperative Esperanto verb by any chance? Se jes, saluton, bona elekto :)
People in my doctor friend's hospital taking HCQ got arrhythmias at a higher rate and often didn't get better. It is not a miracle cure and is quite dangerous in the alleged "treatment ranges".

I am a bit stunned that people are still going on about HCQ after all this time and the many trials. I feel this comment by a virologist is the key to understanding why it got so hyped and is not working:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016635422... (May 2020)

"Highlights

• In vitro data suggest that chloroquine inhibits SARS Cov-2 replication.
• In past research, chloroquine has shown in vitro activity against many different viruses, but no benefit in animal models.
• Chloroquine has been proposed several times for the treatment of acute viral diseases in humans without success.
• The outcomes of some current clinical trials of chloroquine in China have been announced, without access to the data.
• Peer review of the results and an independent assessment of the potential benefit for patients are essential."
The suggestion in the thread to "support defining this in package.json" (https://github.com/nodejs/tooling/issues/79#issuecomment-664...) reminded me of autoconf. It also has the issue of lots of auxiliary files in the project root (but worse since they're not hidden files), and the solution there is that you can add "AC_CONFIG_AUX_DIR(aux)" to the configure.ac to make it look for these auxiliary files in the "aux" subdirectory instead of the project root (for instance, "aux/config.guess" instead of "config.guess").
Slack on Slack: Delivering impactful internal products
Towards a better keyboard – A Modern Space Cadet
> [...] and multiple return values make for a truly dynamic language

If you are using a word "dynamic" as "once-good-but-now-increasingly-considered-worse-and-worse", I agree. Lua is definitely too dynamic to be safely used.

Weeks ago I had to debug a Lua code looked like this:

commands = commands_template:gsub("<arguments>", arguments:gsub(" ", "\\ "))

If you can catch a problem, great! But most wouldn't be able to do so. And I used Lua for a prolonged time, to the extent that I have made a type checker which absolutely flags this case [1] and developed a very good list of intrinsic problems of Lua which obviously includes this one and still failed to notice the problem. Lua is a small language, but packed with lots of similar problems.

[1] https://github.com/devcat-studio/kailua/blob/323caab59c06230...
soon there will no longer be the one internet. There will internet one for the USA and the "west", internet two for China and the "east" internet.

and maybe a third type of internet for some countries which connects two both Internets (but maybe only one at a time?)

so we'll have first internet countries (USA), second internet countries (China), and third internet countries (both)
Oof, I hate it when an IDE/editor tries to "helpfully" present the file tree differently than it actually is.
$250k books sold, to save lives
I actually run vim with a single term window within a screen session. All my window splits and tabs are handled by vim. I actually run nested vim instances within those term windows amongst other things.

In other words, screen handles persistance and the ability to reattach to an existing session. The outer vim serves as a terminal manager. The nested vim instances are used to edit code, etc.
Fuzzbuzz (YC W19) Is Hiring a Sr Back End Engineer (Remote/US Only)
Years ago, there was a kickstarter for a Rescue Me Balloon.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/651668573/rescue-me-bal...
To me this is part of a larger problem: tools that expect a given directory layout, or even worse, that they are the sole tenant of a given repository. Just because my project contains some node.js code doesn't mean that I want to have a top-level, global node_modules directory.

Let me organize my repository files however I want and however best fits my project organization.
Nadia's website, the portal to her wonderful mind and work: https://nadiaeghbal.com/
“We aren’t expecting any support because there is no state”
Yeah read/saw that somewhere...
User surveys are never going to be good science. Surveys are confounded by massive variation in response rates. For instance, I haven't filled out a user survey in many years because I have better things to do. They can only ever give a vague indication that something might or might not be a common issue.

The scientific approach to find out if app slowness is a problem is to make a much faster version, give that to some fraction of users in an RCT and see if their usage goes up. But that makes no sense for a business. If you make the effort to develop a fast version, just give that to everyone and move on to the next thing that might get you more users.
>tldr; Facebook is finally coming to an end. Their executives know this better than anyone, so they're scrambling to pick up as many scraps as they can in order to delay the inevitable.

Facebook is the Microsoft Office of social networking.. at least in "coolness" factor. Folks under 25, 30ish years old, pretty much only use it because they have to, not because they want to. WhatsApp is in a similar boat amongst young folk within the United States and Canada. Instagram really is Facebook's only social network that has any kind of cachet with this demographic.
Why aren’t there lines of effort for hardware manufacturing processes, firmware and logistical supply chains?
The owner is a Russian Cypriot who abdicated responsibility. They weren't able to locate him.

Four crew members of the vessel got stranded onboard for a whole year while the issue was being resolved. They were not allowed to disembark nor return home.

Afterwards this stuff was improperly stored in a warehouse for six years. There's lots of corruption and incompetence at every stage of this.

The twist not in the news is the alternative uses this substance has and what else was incompetently stored in the vicinity. It really isn't a big mystery why so many tons of it were left for such a long time in that port.
It's nothing to do with importance and everything to do with how often you need to see and access the file.

My .vimrc and .bashrc are super important, but I rarely need to edit them and I never need to be reminded of their existence, so having them show up every time I ran ls in home would be annoying.
> On which systems are they hidden?

On most systems. There is a long-standing convention in the Unix-derived world that files and directories with names which start with a dot (this also includes "." and "..") are hidden in directory listings. The main exception is Windows, which inherited its conventions from MS-DOS; the convention there is that files and directories with the "hidden" and/or "system" attributes set are hidden from directory listings by default.
As someone in the industry I always find the claim that Java is ubiquitous in low latency trading fairly strange.

The only firm that widely uses Java over C or C++ on the hft fast path is Virtu, and the sense I get from some of my friends there is that they regret the decision (and now it’s mostly used to guide fpgas).

There is a TON of Java usage in software that would have been considered HFT maybe 10 years ago, especially at big banks, but the fastest I’ve ever seen somebody make a Java trading program that actually handled the whole tick-to-trade path is 7us, which would be at best ok by C or C++ trading platform standards.

I’m sure you could write some dumb trigger program operating on off-heap bytes that had similar performance characteristics to a C hft program, but unless you accomplish this via code generation then you’re just writing C in Java with a runtime actively battling your goals.

Edit:
Jane street uses ocaml + fpgas but they aren’t really in the HFT business in the same way that say Virtu or Tower is.
Costco's brilliant, contrarian and successful business model highlights
> doing the right thing pays, which is why we created a category to recognize such actions and even helped start a now-moribund award, called the DIRT, to honor good behavior.

If the incentives are wrong, do your bit to change the incentives!

Retraction Watch is a worthy contribution to the repositories of shared knowledge that are of so much benefit to all of us.
I dont know if Id characterize it exactly like that. But “market access” does seem to be is gained by a Jio tie up. The economist has been covering it regularly. Heres a July write up https://www.economist.com/business/2020/07/04/india-incs-inw...
Some of comments show up on the thread but not necessarily on her comment history.
Yeah, Facebook is more akin to Google/Microsoft than it is to Myspace.
They are hidden by default to protect newbies.
GitHub users can unhide them.
Hate those pesky config files in your project root directory? Try this
It's about 'when' more than anything. We live in a world today with mostly free information sharing on most scientific subjects. But picture a time when cutting edge science like the nuclear programs were veiled heavily in secrecy. Every single development took time, effort, work, science. And the result is... an answer that can probably be written down in a single piece of paper. Easily shared.

The USSR would have developed the same bombs eventually, but not as quickly, I would guess.
Virginia Covid-19 Tracing App
I had this thing sent back to B&H.

My 1-star review is here:

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1503260-REG/msi_prest...

I ended up getting 2 x UHD BENQ. Which are 4k and work well.
> People value opinions they agree with, not opinions that are new, different or insightful.

> It shows that people in general don't just respectfully disagree with differing opinions. People attack all opinions that aren't inline with theirs.

It's not just that. The achilles heel of HN's readership/voting behavior is its bias towards positivity and validation, and against criticism and sarcasm. I've got tons of fake internet points here, so I often do some experiments to test this out. As a general rule, with some exceptions: No matter what the topic is, if your comment is positive, shows approval or otherwise supportive of the topic, you'll tend to get upvotes. If you raise concerns, point out flaws, or express cynicism, you're going to get downvoted.

So when something comes up that's actually false or suspect, the correct skeptics get downvoted, and the incorrect people praising the article are promoted to the top. I wish I had access to the raw data to do a sentiment analysis on the comments and compare it to voting trends. I guarantee they are correlated!

Ironically, the first vote on this comment was down.
Since Win7.

But Windows has a lot of problems with hidden files, so a lot of people just set it to not hide any.
As long as something like `(f FS) WithContext(ctx context.Context) FS` exists and has overwrite/replace semantics, then that could be used to do more narrow scoping of particular requests, no? Ie. `fs.WithContext(ctxT1).Read()` vs `fs.WithContext(ctxT2).Close()`.
Nope. I only use Windows if I'm getting paid to, and in that case system administration is Somebody Else's Problem. I've never been to CCleaner's website, let alone installed or run it. I'm going off second-hand reports from people who think CCleaner purges crapware from their PCs. Evidently it does not. I should stop making ill-informed comments on the internet, but it's just so much fun!
> As far as I know, Python doesn't have the notion of dev dependencies

Python doesn't have the notion of dependencies.

Pip doesn't have dev dependencies, poetry does.
Thanks for the reply (and the fun new word trilemma). Accessibility for new developers has been something that's been on my mind a lot recently. Glad that it's something you're mindful of!
I kinda of feel like nuclear reactors are huge and complex and tax our current technological and organizational abilities to design and manufacture. There are other things like that but the downside risks are orders of magnitude lower. Example, friend of mine helped install a (I think) GE 7F turbine. Fired up and it threw a blade. And was down for a couple of months. Oh well. With nuke plants the stakes are higher.
First comment from the forum thread:

> Good job! I can’t imagine being the guy who has to keep track of that

How cute <3
Your "funny story" is very fitting here... there's a lot of value hidden in just knowing how to interface with AWS.
Lot of companies are actually the middleman between you and AWS (e.g. Heroku which provides managed databases, Redis instances, etc. which are all hosted in AWS.) Meaning that you are not the client of AWS; Heroku is.
Ask HN: Can we get a black bar in memoriam of Turing Award winner Frances Allen?
Totally worth the downvotes ;)
Is insurance more expensive in Black neighborhoods?
Because you're shopping for a skateboard not a web app.
Just curious, how many icons are on your desktop?
Without having played it, that seems like a reasonable balance.
I think they just hit one megacommit, and the number they gave is how far away they are from one mebicommit.
Lebanon's economy is in the gutter, so they really needed that grain...what a sad situation.
I know I read about some trading firm(s) doing that, but I don't know which, if it was even stated.

Whomever they were, they were rotating pre-warmed jvm images with disabled GC, and were reaching quite respectable latency figures.

To not have to recycle them quickly, you'll want to not generate too much garbage objects, and that's actually easier than one might think in Java. Especially if you accept to restart the jvm from time to time, as you only need to be mostly statically allocated.

Rare error paths can freely use dynamic allocation as long as most of the service doesn't.

Nowadays you can also get away without using strings in most places, using only char sequence flyweights over "statically" allocated char sequences. Otherwise strings were a pain, especially API's that really doesn't need a string (ownership) but had string method arguments nevertheless.

Used like that, as you would on an embedded platform, theres nothing I know of that actually beats the JVM in raw performance while still being somewhat practical in terms of tooling and hiring. Rust might take that crown, we'll see, but I hope so.
A voice of reason
yeah, exactly. a nice thought. it becomes an extension of stack overflow experience a bit too. plus contextual relevance is very high, as mentioned below. use ML to connect topics of code and then create powerful network of contextual coding literacy through engaging media clips. a wild ride, also of intrigue.
What's the advantage over plain old /etc ? I am always annoyed by /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/share/bin, and others. Why can't we consolidate?
Show HN: Remote Engineering Jobs aggregated from Twitter
I'd recommend reading her interview in Coders At Work. I never realized that compilers were already a flourishing field by the time C came around, and that C actually ended up having some negative effects in compiler dev.
D’oh! Thanks. :)
If it's a large enough company and/or you're asking for something very specific and not something they are willing to give you, they usually won't even bother replying.
It is certainly reminiscent of P&F, in loading a metal matrix with deuterium. And the effect this paper documents could ... conceivably ... possibly ... maybe explain the erratic and fugitive positive results that P&F-style experimenters sometimes produced. But I don't think your certainty is well-founded yet.
> we'll have first internet countries (USA), second internet countries (China), and third internet countries (both)

This does not seem to be limited to network connectivity. The same balkanization is occurring with trade, movement of people, and defence spending as well. I would also say that its not as discrete as “USA”, “China”, “other” and is probably better expressed as “US aligned” when you start looking at nations who are already members of groups like N Eyes, EEA, Belt & Road, etc.

Im particularly interested in India. Will they be successful enough to create their own sphere, fall into US influence, or defacto continue as a large unaligned “other.”
Hi pc, huge fan of Stripe and its relentless focus on the "impatient developer", which so many enterprise companies miss the mark on. As a future co-founder interested in this space, do you have any talks or essays on how you built a developer centric company that has also a successful "enterprise" side to it?
* when you have something of non trivial size to discuss, get on voice chat instead handicapping yourself.
It’s interesting to note how much the grain silos changed the shape of the blast. The damage behind the silos is almost immediately reduced, even in this set of images.
I’d agree. I read an optimization paper by her in college.
I was a self starter. My interest in game programming kept me wanting to go learn programming. And I did.

But it was incredibly hard to progress my skillset, and to some extent still hard today.

I got a hobby that kept me learning day to day though: 3D printing.
Of course the user can choose software that sends no cookies or she can remove cookies from headers with a proxy if the user-agent itself (e.g., "modern" browser) cannot be controlled adequately.

There is some relief for the location issue. It is not too difficult to discover alternate geolocated IP addresses for websites that choose to employ such strategies. Further, proxies, even just Tor with a proper config file, can give the user a specific geolocation of the user's choosing.

Do users choose different user-agents for different web usage? On smartphones we routinely see users choosing a variety different applications for different purposes, e.g., an online shopping app versus a news reading app. For example, if the user is engaged in online shopping, then she almost certainly will need to enable Javascript and cookies. However, if the user is reading^1 news on small news websites or nontechnical blogs (to use your examples) then IME neither Javascript nor cookies are required. Using the same application (the same "modern" browser) for both purposes, and with Javascript and cookies enabled, is, IME, from a technical standpoint, unnecessary. The text of the articles can be retrieved and read with much simpler software; none of this software needs Javascript nor cookies to perform its respective task.

1. The situation changes if the user is "viewing" news (photojournalism) or "watching" news (autoplaying videos). IME, neither Javascript nor cookies are required, however short of the user writing custom Javascript to process page contents, employing some software, e.g., standard UNIX utilities, other than a modern browser, to extract the image or video URLs, is sometimes necessary.
Agreed. Any Turing Award laureate, let alone the first female Turing Award laureate, deserves a black banner
Crypto exchanges make money off most customers, though, so they can afford to dedicate support staff to recovering people's 2FA.

Does GitLab make any money at all on free users, or are they just a loss leader?

Note that paid GitLab users aren't losing the recovery option, only free ones.
Walmart just launched a terrible AI self checkout monitor that everyone hates.
He has a patreon if you'd like to contribute: https://www.patreon.com/mattgodbolt
Frances Allen wrote "A Catalogue of Optimizing Transformations" in 1971. 50 years(!!!) later, they are still the backbone of optimizing compilers. I think the only major thing missing is autovectorization.

She was in her 30s when she wrote it.
As an aside, when there is a black bar, I would also love it to link to the reason it is there.
Mukesh Ambani, the founder and chairman of Jio, is not a Brahmin. So the idea that caste differences could play a part in dealings of this sort is a fair topic.
Unlike a lot of explosives, ammonium nitrate doesn't go off in anything goes wrong; it requires a few things to go wrong at the same time. Thus, storing huge amounts of it is safe enough for lots of people to do it, and consequently for those large storage amounts to litter the list of largest explosions.

Another common feature of ammonium nitrate explosions is how the procedures they were following didn't cause any problems the last several times they followed it. The Oppau explosion, for example, found that dynamiting their ammonium nitrate/ammonium sulfate mixture to loosen it caused a massive explosion that didn't occur the previous 30,000 times they did it.
From the stories I hear from my friends - it's a spectrum. Depends on the department and role you are working in. More technical roles are less Lala but non-technical roles can out-Lala other Lala companies.