skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very similar to my story. But I'm curious, why would you need to use blank keycaps to learn Dvorak? I have always just typed on a regular QWERTY keyboard with software remapping to make it Dvorak. In that case, looking down at the keys while trying to learn is useless (except for the M and the A key!), so you learn not to do it just as you would with blank keycaps.

Overall I'm pretty happy that that I learned Dvorak and feel that my typing is much better than it ever was with Qwerty. However I'm always hesistant to recommend that other people follow the same path. There are numerous downsides to Dvorak (or any non-standard layout)

* I have kind of un-learned Qwerty. When I have to go to someone else's machine at work (game dev studio) to diagnose a crash, Qwerty feels very foreign and I look like an idiot when I go to type (looking up and down, making lots of mistakes, and generally typing like an old uncle who has never used a computer). This is a bit less of a problem now that Covid has hit and we are all working remote and screen-sharing instead of visiting each other's physical machines.

* Family members get annoyed when they come to a computer and it is on "Dvorak Mode", and they don't know how to get it "back to normal". Having separate accounts helps with this, though I have had some Dvorak software that sometimes annoyingly "leaked through" to other user accounts, switching the settings for my wife

* Shortcuts are a pain. Some software (particularly things like 3D modeling packages) have tons of shortcuts and they are all well thought out around the idea that you have a QWERTY keyboard (the important shortcuts will be in the left hand, like mode-changing keys on QWER so that you can use a mouse with your right hand). It sort of sucks when you go to use those softwares and the hotkeys are all over the place. This even applies to the normal Cut/Paste/Copy hotkeys. I have software-remapped those so they are in the same location as QWERTY (on Windows, using Autohotkey) but that causes secondary issues where Ctrl-K shortcuts are unavailable because the V key is K in the Dvorak layout and I'm using that for pasting. vi/vim is also weird on Dvorak, but I stay away from those anyhow.

* It is hard to know where keys are when not in the "touch typing position". This kind of goes along with the last point about shortcuts. Since my physical keyboard is QWERTY, I cannot look at it and know where are particular key is. And all of my training in Dvorak is muscle-memory so I only know where the letters are by feel and not by knowing which QWERTY key they are mapped to. Consequently, trying to press a specific letter hotkey when my hand is not in the standard "home row" position is a bit of a guessing game. This is a problem in situations like using a 3D software where you are mostly mousing and only poking at hotkeys here and there. Obviously getting a labelled keyboard would solve this issue, but there are other downsides to that as well. (confusing other family members with my strange keyboard, paying extra for a niche product and having more limited choices)

If you can get past all of those issues... Dvorak is fantastic!
The MBAs probably. That's working so well for Intel right now (not).
> I wish I could mod down this article. This looks like the beginning of an FSF smear campaign.

This is what the "Paradox of Tolerance" idea looks like, when taken to its logical conclusion. By simply tolerating this person's post, its ability to be tolerant is ultimately destroyed by the intolerant.
Is Sputnik just a common cold virus, without any modifications?
How are they going to expose you to a risk? Are they entering your home?
Three of ten Americans laid off in crisis worried about food, shelter
Show HN: In-app messaging tool for Web, iOS and Android
But what about all this cool pseudo-science? Shouldn't we gamble on it?
I bet she already is.
MDN is a Wiki. Everybody can contribute.
Same here, W3 pales in comparison, which is not to denigrate their work. It's been helpful many times.

MDN just has more accessible writing and notes on best practice.
Thanks. Rust has been recommended a bit in this thread so I'll check it out.

Out of curiosity, what's the appeal of learning Rust ? What kind of projects do you use it for ?

I find that I can solve mostly everything with a blend of PHP/JS, but I also never escaped web CRUDy stuff, and PHP is very well suited for these.
Power implies the ability to cause change. When you say "real" power I think you might have some specific kind of change in mind. What kind of organizational influence are you considering "real" power?
> But then again one of the first ballistic missile defense radars accidentally mistook the rising Moon for an attack...

They are in good company; like 90% of UFO sightings are just people seeing the Moon and mistaking it for something else (or rather, not immediately identifying it, leaving them with impressions like "there was a bright light following me down the road" or "there was a glowing orb behind the trees").
Hope someone scrapes them and hosts them as a torrent now, I'm not sure where else to go for js documentation besides node.
This somewhat explains why the black community is under represented in science.
Show HN: Kinopio.club – visual thinking, brainstorming tool
What? So is the project over? What about webrender and wasm-related stuff?
I’ll check this out later. Sounds promising.
I agree, these are the best JS docs around. I hope they continue maintaining them. The main alternative is W3 Schools, which is substantially worse (I blame their for-profit ad-supported business model, which doesn't necessarily incentivize thoroughness and depth)
Baker has burned all of Mozilla's goodwill in a weird effort to compete with NordVPN.
I've tried using Amethyst a few times but never finished anything. Upon each attempt I ended up moving to another language/framework due to the frustration of horrible compile times. Also, while there are lots of comprehensive docs, but the docs were written for a variety of versions so there was a lot of friction to get something simple started. It has been several months since my last attempt, so perhaps Amethyst has improved since then. I do love the promises Amethyst makes and for the same reason I'm very interested in Bevy.
from lux, Latin for light. Similarly, lucent, pellucid, lucifer (light bearer).
Hey HN,

Kinopio is a visual thinking tool that can be used for things like brainstorming, organizing thoughts, mood-boards, planning, basically for figuring stuff out (by yourself or collaboratively).

I've been building it for the last year after leaving my job as the co-creator of Glitch (http://pketh.org/hello-kinopio).

There's no sign up required to use it, let me know what you think,

thx!

– Pirijan
Herd Immunity from Covid-19 Won't Fully Protect Us
So you think Mozilla would be better if it wasn't run like a tech company? How should it be run instead? Why should they not be using metrics to measure the impact of what they do? It's not obvious to me that running it less like a tech company and more like a non-profit (whatever that means) would work better.
Storybook is a tool for organizing UI components. It displays the different components and their variants in a easy to glance UI. Highly recommended if you're working with React, Vue etc

Here's a post I wrote about how my team uses it - http://www.sheshbabu.com/posts/how-we-use-storybook-for-docu...
> In fact, I go out of way to look things up on MDN because if I just search "Google" I get spammy and sometimes wrong results that are crammed with ads, often poorly written, etc.

Tip: use DuckDuckGo's searchbangs[0]. I reach for !mdn everyday.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=mdn
I dunno man, I think Kx deals with out of memory data in the most sane way imaginable if you assume time oriented problems and understand how computers work (aka latencies in squirting the data across different layers of hardware into the CPU). I have no idea what they're giving people for manuals for setting up for different query patterns these days, but the old K3 manuals were great; classics of database engineering and practical computer science. Petabytes before it was routine.

The APL family takes some getting used to, as it's a significantly different paradigm from Julia and Python looking languages: arguably as different a paradigm as Lisp. It's also fairly natural if you've done any work with Matlab, NumPy or other array oriented packages, but you do have to put in the work.

It doesn't get as much attention here, but Jd is pretty good also. It's also much lower barrier to entry than Kx if you're building a personal project with it (aka its free for personal use). J is a more complex language than K, but I like it better; more oriented towards mathematics.

https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Jd/Overview
The JIT in JavaScript: Just in Time Compiler
The switches he references in his post are from two entirely different product verticals. One is from the unmanaged vertical, the other is from the managed PoE vertical. Not only is he ignoring that a 16 port switch exists in the unmanaged vertical, he's ignored an entire vertical of managed switches without PoE.

TP-Link makes a $40 unmanaged 16-port gigabit switch and a $80 managed 16-port gigabit switch.

He's created a False dilemma/dichotomy by pretending that other options don't exist. This is like saying "I'd like a Toyota automobile larger than the Yaris but I can't afford the Lexus LS".
How did it go over? I have not seen the royal family suffer serious material consequences for murder. Have i missed something?
I'll try this tomorrow. The old opera presto also built in under five minutes and was in general very lean, but crashes on most modern JavaScript heavy sites. I still sometimes wonder where it would be today if they hadn't abandoned it or properly made it open source at least.
Eager to see part 2!
This is all very fine, but what it misses are the power imbalances we have. This is not inherently a bad thing, but if I don't have the freedom to disagree with my landlord out of fear of being evicted then I'm not living a very "free" life. "Collective reason" sounds great, but in practice it doesn't really work. I feel it's very naïve.
Time to go back to Firebug? Well, except Firebug no longer exists.
Absolutely. When I was doing Hydroponics/Aeroponics, I keep seeing all of those pretty much everywhere. That didn't work out so I'm now on to Satellite Imagery for Agriculture and I see that everywhere. The world works its own stories but directed for you.
Doesn't mean everybody will. Wikipedia is a weird special-case. I've contributed once to MDN, ever, and I use it all the time.
Related reading from QuirksMode about MDN: "the cult of the free must die" https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2020/08/the_cult_of...

I think a version of MDN that solicits donations from the companies and individual developers that make use of it could be great. Mozilla being propped up by money Google gave them from the search bar always felt fragile.
Not only underfunded, but also damaged in Hurricane Maria in 2017. https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/arecibo-observato...
So is the number of people that realistically care about Firefox.
China’s Days as World’s Factory Are Over, Foxconn CEO Says
> What would be good chat software today that focuses on 1:1 messages (not groups/channels)?

The premise of the question is that direct messages are somehow different and require a separate application. I don't think that's true. Slack and Teams do an absolutely fine job at 1:1 messages.
That's at least a tiny bit of good news then. Thanks for clarifying that!
Get 50% off on all our plans. Coupon code is "EARLYBIRDS".(Expires in 24hrs).
Why can't good documentation pay for itself? Oldschool Runescape's wikipedia is arguably the best and most accurate and most thorough documentation of functionality and nuance I've ever seen. Not sure what the server costs are but if it was distributed as a torrent then I'm sure 99% of the information would still be correct.
not to mention the ~70 employees laid off in January which brings that percentage of lay offs in 2020 to just under a third of the total workforce they started the year with.
How to get 1000 upvotes on Product Hunt
Thomas Sanladerer had a video on this, essentially using the 3d printer as a plotter for PCBs. It creates an mask but the usual etching process is still there.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sL0LZFcNaow
I replaced some extensions with nextdns(.io).
Oh, I already have lots of outside hobbies. I'm just trying to make work more fun (I do realize how privileged I am to even think this.)
I think this is less informative than the authors are thinking. Their methodology doesn't seem sufficient to distinguish concrete effects of lockdown from general hedonic adaptation. (The fact that suicidal ideation is significantly down is pretty surprising, though.)
Firefox Dev Tools were how I sold other devs on trying Firefox. I think the number of devs who liked the tools and stuck by them is the only reason why as much of the web renders well on Gecko as it does. Certainly, I've worked at small startups where no one used Firefox that turned out to have significant visual bugs on Firefox for months, because no one ever bothered to check it out.

I understand why Mozilla wants to make more money new ways. I think everyone does. I was going to get their VPN as soon as it became available on Mac. I also completely understand that they can't monetize Firefox, at least not in its current state. Users would obviously rebel against any kind of proprietary features that live behind a commercial license, and I don't think they can make any compelling hosted services that integrate with Firefox either. But I don't understand why Mozilla seems to be trying to speed along its death.
Agreed. Think of the countless companies, arguably most, that will never publicly acknowledge their layoffs.

"Corporate double-speak" is still far better than not saying anything and/or hoping that nothing leaks.

Public acknowledgement in difficult times is near impossible for most companies, especially those that are private, to accomplish.
Although configuration can be a bit problematic at first, the benefits of using Storybook are clear. In my previous job, the typical question of "Is there a component for something like <X>?" was pretty much resolved going to Storybook and check for it.
Regarding the 20TW from the Wikipedia page, that's referring to the EIRP - effective isotropic radiated power. This is the amount of power that you would need to radiate from a theoretical antenna with a perfectly spherically symmetric power distribution. The Arecibo antenna has a fairly narrow beam. The 20TW EIRP transmitter appears to operate at 2.38GHz. Plugging that frequency and the 270m diameter, a beamwidth calculator gives me a gain of about 75dBi. So, yes, it's like a 20TW transmitter, but only one tiny narrow little slice of it. At 75dBi gain, that's one (10^7.5)th of the total sphere, about 1 part in 30 million. Or, you could say, if the antenna were radiating the same power in every direction as it does in it's peak direction, that would be 30 million times as much power. So, dividing to find the power in that narrow beam, we get "only" about 600kW radiated in the direction it is pointing. Add in cable losses and other inefficiencies, and the power output at the amplifier is probably close to a megawatt.
Right now best examples are mostly NFT games like Axie Infinity and NBA Top Shot. DeFi arguably qualifies... Decentralized replacements for many siren server offerings will likely be developed over the next decade, no harm in getting started now.
Ohkay, I'll consider getting a coach.
The Curious History of Steam Heat, Radiators and Pandemics
> What would it take to replace PDF with a zipped html

EPUB. It's already zipped HTML and supports fixed layout.

Or, perhaps more simply, maybe just HTML + paged.js.

> all that is missing is a "page model" for html which would have to be invented.

CSS paged media is already a thing. What else do you need?
Yes and his book "The Vital Question", which covers some of the same ground. Highly recommend.
The problem is you need money to hire venerable engineers. And you need to hire a lot to maintain a modern browser. Yet every attempt by Mozilla to monetize and diversify has generally been met unfavorably here on Hackernews.
Also if the team that was supporting it is gone, will the deployment just bit rot and die?
The blog is from 2017!
On seeing the title my mind immediately jumped to prediction markets as a tool that should replace scientific papers' reviews. Which is a bad idea because of tiny amount of specialists in any scientific field and resulting minuscule size of potential prediction market.
That is good news. Do any of the other companies have people working on MDN?
Pour one out for a real one. Rest in peace Joan Feynman.
This is pretty bleak and sad news for future browser competition I guess
Non-US folks who are wondering what Real ID is, and why this site seems to hate it so much, the United States is best considered in the context of the European Union but with US internal politics regarding data sharing between the federation and its member states.

There are fifty member states with full privileges and around ten member states with reduced privileges.

The federation issues government IDs in two ways.

First, the federation government issues federation IDs in the form of passports. These are accepted as proof of identity only, and grant no additional privileges beyond proof of residency within the federation.

Second, each member state issues their own photo IDs following their own independent processes. These are neither proof of citizenship to the federation’s border control, nor to other countries, and data sharing agreements historically did not exist between the states and the federation.

The member states of the EU issue passports as the state ID card, and requires each member state to accept those passports as approximately equal to their own for most intents and purposes. The US federation also requires its member states to accept both any member state IDs and also federation passports.

“RealID” is an effort by the federation to be able to determine from your state ID card whether you are a federation member. It defines a minimum burden of proof of citizenship that states must require and verify, and presumably share with the federation, in order to issue an ID card with a federation membership indicator. For political reasons, many member states and many citizens do not believe it is appropriate for the federation to make this demand of the member states. I believe this is in contrast to the EU, where data sharing between authorities of member states regarding federation passports is required by the foundation, but I’m not 100% certain.

I hope this helps. Please treat this as a teaching example and do not make immigration, travel, taxation, or citizenship decisions based on it. I am not your lawyer.
I'm not even sure I want everyone contributing, at least not without some pruning.
yes, the Head Bubble puts your head in a bubble, making your background black and tracking your head. it's a great way to hide your background and it really takes away any distractions from video calls.
I’d prefer a chat app which made it harder to create a group/channel.

I’ve been apart of organizations that use Slack and the proliferation of channels is insane because they are so easy to create.
They don't need to make their money back because they never invested any, people have already bought the game. The employees are paid, CR has taken his salary. Mission accomplished. It's more nuanced than that, but it is definitely not a traditional invest > produce > reward cycle. It was more like reward > produce > reward/debt, remains to be seen.

The long term goal though is to sell in game currency, and it's that simple I think. I imagine we will see ship sales continue after launch, but you will instead have people paying for in game currency and buying the ships in game. While you could grind for them in game, many people will just buy the currency to save time.
I'm a bit confused. It seems like not having great dev tool keeps developers using Chrome which hurts the adoption of Firefox. Do they not get that?
Degrees of Freedom: Booting ARM Processors
This article is not correct. It’s not a ban if someone buys it, it’s only banned if China continues to operate it.
They are effectively one country already.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_State
I like it too, but with that price, I'm definitely not a target group. It's a nerdy device with a luxury price.
Don't let your children use TikTok, former MI6 intelligence chief urges
Because the people who put ads and paywalls on their sites are in an active war against adblockers and dynamically loading all the content is an effective countermeasure for not allowing JavaScript?
Unfortunately 25% at mozilla, 25% at booking, 25% at uber, 20% at linkedin, more at airbnb (obviously) shows how internal management teams are seeing revenues HUGELY shrinking.

This tells a lot about fact that stock prices are bad measurement of situation we're in. It's funny to observe that S&P and Nasdaq are at the February all time high, pre-covid levels. Let that thought sink in.
Thank you for the suggestions.
Oh, I guess I'll definitely try that out. I guess it will create some new insights.
Nice website, I like it :)
Analyzing social movements, taken on face value, with pure logic alone isn't good enough. You have to learn their history as well; otherwise you're only comparing empty slogans against each other.

Libertarianism and the free software movement are two social movements that have very little in common except the word "freedom."

Libertarian philosophers like Hayek, and even those who would describe themselves as anarchists like Rothbard, do not advocate a lawless society. They accept the bottom-up process of building up common and constitutional law through court precedent and reject the top-down imposition of laws by fiat.

To your specific points, American society has already worked out which "freedoms" impinge on others' freedoms over the course of 200+ years of constitutional law, building on many more centuries of British common law. The idea that a single person can sit at a desk and calculate "trade-offs" between civil rights enshrined by law and enjoyed by large groups of people over many hundreds of years would be absurd to a libertarian, though commonplace today. Who is allowed to make such a decision, and why?

The free software movement emerged as a defense of pre-existing collaboration networks between academics from the threat an attempted corporate takeover in a very specialized area of computing at a specific point in time, i.e. OS development in the 1980s.

I find that few developers understand the forces the original software freedom movement was fighting against, although such forces are stronger than ever. This is only because the software freedom movement so thoroughly wiped out its opposition within its own limited domain that those looking from the outside can't understand the point of it anymore. Perhaps that's what true victory looks like in the historical record; when the opposition is not only defeated but silent, the victors look like a bunch of loud extremists going on and on about something irrelevant.
To me it seems not so much insincere, but incoherent.

This all sounds like a bunch of grasping at big picture straws, not announcing a new actual direction.

I'd be very wary of what we hear from Mozilla leadership in the next few months.