skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not working at Google, but I guess many Google employees share my perspective:

1. I find most criticism of Google on HN either wrong or overblown. To clarify this point, I suggest you name the 5 worst things that come to mind about Google; I'll be happy to explain how I feel about them.

There is one significant moral issue I see with Google: they like to collect and hoard massive amounts of user data, and they have a lot of users so the resulting centralization of data creates a big risk. Note that the issue I see is "only" a risk. I'm not even sure what the concrete bad scenarios are that would make Google specially bad when the risk is realized, but I'm sure they exist.

2. I think they do a lot of good, which far outweighs the issue mentioned in point 1. Here are the 5 best things that come to mind right now:

- They do amazing good for open source. I have seen Google criticized for "paying lip service to open source" or worst, which I find laughable. They have published 3 open source operating systems (Chromium OS, AOSP, Fuchsia). They have created a huge number of very useful open source libraries I have been using for personal and professional project, from big ones like Flutter and gRPC to small ones like libyuv.

- Related: they do a lot of good for open standards. Case in point: their work on open, royalty-free video codecs, which has been a boon for open source. I have seen Google called evil on HN for this, which again harms the credibility of their detractors in my eyes. Even for Google Chat / Hangout / whatever, for which they got criticized a lot, I think it's fair to say they tried harder than all the other big players to make it work with an open standard before giving up.

- They have been a driving force for a more secure Internet: early use of https for webmail, 2-factor authentication, lately ubiquitous https...

- They have been leaders in giving users access to all their data, with the Data Liberation Front / Takeout.

- They are the most transparent when it comes to the privacy policies and collected data (for example I get prompts to check the policy whenever I do something in Incognito mode). And relaed to the previous point: the My Activity page is awesome! It helps realize what they collect on me, and it makes the collected data actually useful to the user. For example I used it to find a place I knew I had visited on a given day, though I had forgotten the name and location.
I've used it for some projects alongside Splunk and ELK/Kibana for others. They're all effective at the scales we've thrown at them, but I find Splunk more intuitive to use, and IMO the query language is better documented.
Keep going, and make it smart enough to realize life without helping people is without meaning.
If Facebook sues the Chinese government, how would that happen?

Would it take place in: A) American justice system, or in B) Chinese justice system?

The answer is: B) Facebook would have to sue the Chinese in China, in the Chinese jurisdiction subject to Chinese law. And under Chinese law, it is legal for China to block Facebook, therefore there is nothing for Facebook to do there.

Now... TikTok vs the US is a different case. That would take place in American jurisdiction where TikTok may actually have legal path to make this go away.
Ask HN: Backup iPhone directly to USB drive?
So my wife's Iphone is filled up with videos and photos of the kids. I need to back this up, and I would ideally like to put the photos and video on a usb drive.

My MBP would not have enough space to take on all the extra files, so I am curious if anyone has solved this problem?
Blender tried this on me a few months ago. I used mv to rename the directory before deleting it though, the fear caught me as soon as I realized I had a directory named ~ sitting in my home directory.
The Black Side of Milwaukee
The model is unsound. Private vehicles on roads in cities cause a ton of pollution (and I don't mean CO2) that is very undesirable. Public/mass transport with good mechanisms for short journeys to and from hubs is a better model. The rise of ebikes and scooters is an encouraging alternative here too.

Yes of course there are times when people need a car, but they are not the majority of the time for the majority of people. And their severe externalities need to be priced in to discourage use.
You might want to give eCos a try. This should be runnable on a Raspberry. I managed to port Luvit (Luas NodeJS) in a few days. Then you should have a system booting within 500ms.

https://ecos.sourceware.org/
https://github.com/luvit/luvit

Sadly there is not a really big community around both of these.
I can't find the quote now, but I recall Bill Bailey saying once that he's not a good enough musician to just play music and not funny enough to just be a comedian. But he's the funniest musician and the most musical comedian out there.
Python While Loop Tutorial – Do While True Example Statement
Uber/Lyft offer a better service. Most importantly is reviews/ratings of drivers and riders. But also things like real time tracking of incoming ride, frictionless payments, even just inputting you destination in a map instead of explaining to someone (which is a huge plus when traveling to foreign countries.)

Sure taxi companies _could_ implement these features but so far they have not. Probably because the type people who are attracted to running taxi companies are not the same kind of people attracted to disruptors like Uber/Lyft.

From my personal experience I have a pleasant taxi ride 5-6 times out of 10 and a pleasant Uber ride closer to 9 out or 10. Even if the prices were the same I'd likely still choose Uber/Lyft.
This is a spin-off of a research competition happening at the MPI for Intelligent Systems, where teams get hundreds of hours of training time on a real robot to learn dexterity.

There are still two weeks to submit simulated results for phase 1!

https://real-robot-challenge.com/
This is a gem of an article.

The PDF full text for Velkov et al. 2014 "The RNA-Dependent-RNA Polymerase, an Emerging Antiviral Drug Target for the Hendra Virus" is directly downloadable from: https://www.eurekaselect.com/118581/article
Nice to see it uses Go on the back-end
"At its peak in September 2013, there were 85 million BlackBerry subscribers worldwide."

I never said that they made more money but that the platform was generally better for executives

In 2012 I had a blackberry because clients that had strict security rules (one of them was in the diamonds business) allowed blackberrys but not other smartphones in their offices
I dunno, you sound kind of average for the folks in your office.
The company proxy would have to be modified to allow torrent traffic, I guess?
No mention of FPGA, I guess it already went out of style.
There is a delicate balance between what the author of Reboot Jerry Colonna describes as 'Foolish Grit' vs. 'Healthy Drive + Ambition'. In my own experience I find it helpful to enquire into the underlying motivations for the work.

i.e am I driving myself from a place of fear? How does my body feel when I begin working on this? What is the source of the resistance? Whilst fear can certainly be a powerful motivator in the short term, it is not a sustainable fuel source.
Not OP, but a big Nim fan. I think Nim has made a mistake by marketing itself as Python inspired. I know why it does so; Python is a very successful language and as a niche language, Nim wants to associate itself with an established one. But in my experience, Nim has a very small overlap with Python. It is whitespace significant, prefers short words to symbols for operators, and has a robust stdlib. But if you look at the actual language semantics, or even the keywords, Nim is not really related to Python. I'd go as far as saying Nim is more similar to a Lisp than it is Pythonic (which works fine for me, as I prefer Lisp to Python).

All of this to say, the OPs language seems much more Pythonic. The key words, the built in functions, the class system, all seems designed to match Python as closely as possible.
There are two reasons people think AGI would benefit them. One is that an AGI labor pool requires different, and probably cheaper resources to operate. The other is that AGI has the chance of scaling past human levels of intelligence and this can result in products not possible to conceive of or make with human-level intelligence.

AGI would provide a labor pool which requires vastly different resources than our current labor pool. An AGI labor pool would require largely the same material components and operating costs as current IT infrastructure ie: metal, silicon, electricity. Our current labor pool requires food, education, medicine, and nearly everything else civilization provides in order to supply our human labor pool.

Imagine two enterprises producing identical products, one employing human laborers, and the other employing AGI laborers. If the cost of AGI labor is lower[1] (or has better scaling dynamics) and human laborers, then the AGI-based enterprise has an advantage. Naturally enterprises which can be AI-ified will be. This has obvious short term benefits to the costs of production, but difficult to understand long term impacts.

The other interesting effect of AGI is the scaling of the magnitude of intelligence. If AGI is not bio-limited like our human intelligence, how does this affect the results of AI? Are there scientific advances discoverable by AGI, which would have never been discovered by human-level intelligence? In this aspect scientific progress has the opportunity to advance faster than if we advanced it ourselves.

With a game-changing tech like AGI there are certain to be aspects which either I missed or others consider more important. Interested to hear other people's (or AI's) takes on this.

[1] 'multiple pennies of electricity per 100 pages of output (0.4 kWH)' https://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2020/05
Scene files are the biggest thing. They're merge conflict magnets. You breath aggressively and they'll "change". Our workflow tends to be based around prefabs, and a main scene we _rarely_ change. Despite never touching it, everyone on the team has to revert Main.scene before committing, pretty much every time.

VFX Graphs are also pretty nuts. Cut one line and it changes 3000 lines of code. This isn't the biggest deal in the world, but it makes for weird diffs.

There was a memory leak bug with the videoplayer component, and the only fix I found was to update to a newer-than-LTS version. That version likes to strip public rendertexture fields from the inspector every time you pull a scene down from git. Hopefully they fix that before they call it an LTS :)
Артель (artisanal collective) is exactly about getting profit shared with members.
create-react-app is inappropriate for anything but demos and quick and dirty throwaway stuff. that doesnt mean dont use react. it means dont expect to press 1 button and have a literal wizard make your application good.
Show HN: We build a calendar for people that schedule to-dos
3 Things You Should Do When Asking Someone for Their Time
Nope, it is not their job. If a citizen is accused in a crime, there are other institutions tasked with the investigation. Sometimes this is the counterintelligence, sometimes this is the police. However, breaking the law and actively avoiding legal supervision is a crime which makes them criminals.
12v DC is not even useful for LEDs as it requires current limiting resistors - hence power wasted to heat. The proper (efficient) way to drive LEDs is via constant current source.

I meant DC as in 230-330V DC for home/office use. I meant generally replace AC (high voltage) lines with DC ones.
> do you know where I can buy them

Good luck
I work on AAA games and this is exactly how I feel, especially about the online ecosystem around Unity, it's a big pile of garbage with maybe 1% of it being reasonable, best-practices documentation/advice.
Extraordinary is boring. If one wants to draw as good as Michelangelo Buonarroti, or play the alto sax technically as well as Charlie Parker, one has to put in the hours. Imagine only having one interest? Example: Michelangelo and Charlie practiced or executed their craft incessantly.

"In an interview with Paul Desmond, Parker said that he spent three to four years practicing up to 15 hours a day."

"If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all." ~ Michelangelo

I argue that one is more employable, more accomplished and has more opportunities if one is average, or above average, in five separate disciplines. Has more diverse friendships too.
> The AAA I’m working on has about 75 KB of code

Do you really mean 75KB of code or is that exaggeration for effect? That comes out to, I don't know, about 2,000 lines of code? I assume you're not including engine code in here, but still - 2k just seems orders of magnitude off from what I would expect a AAA game to have. Is most of the logic not implemented using code, but rather some other method?
I applaud the Danish Government and I wish other countries politicians would have the courage to respect the origins of their mandate to govern. And before this descends in to ‘what-about-isms’ I can name at least 5 countries whose over-sight bodies should pay attention.

"The fact that the head of the Danish Military Intelligence Service is a willing participant in circumventing the agency tasked with holding his own intelligence service legally accountable is mind-blowing and must be deeply concerning to the minister."
Quick example form today: "Hong Kong man 'first case' documented of getting coronavirus twice" [0]

This article has quotes by multiple experts saying that this is good news, that the immune system fought off the reinfection, the person was asymptomatic, and this is how you'd expect an immune system to fight off a coronavirus.

In fact, this is all normal for a coronavirus. Experts predicted this would lessen in severity and probably end up like the common cold, or appear intermittently like a bad flu year. [1]

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/24/health/covid-19-reinfection-h...

[1] https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/04/two-scenarios-if-new-cor...
Hmm, if I were to get a computer from my birth year, it looks like this would be the only option (or perhaps some big iron of slightly older vintage).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard_9100A
I hacked together a truecolor Matrix Rain emulator for VT100 terminals
I remember there being a PATH setting in either autoexec.bat or config.sys
Nice job.

I don't understand the question. Can you rephrase it? =)
Banning a certain foreign company from doing business in the US is not incompatible with constitution as long as it is done following the correct process. It has been done hundreds of times and stood correctly.

It could be "challenged" but it would be dismissed rapidly, because of ample precedent, and the Supreme Court would almost assuredly refuse to take the case.
> The executables are located in C:\DOS (or c:\dos, because DOS don’t care about casing)

Somewhat true. IIRC, DOS changes all path input to uppercase and tries to find a file/directory which is labelled in uppercase. If some program manages to create a file which has a lowercase character in its name (for example FOo.TXT), you can't touch it with for example DEL, because DEL FOo.TXT would be converted to DEL FOO.TXT, and DOS would complain there is no FOO.TXT...
This isn't a fair analogy since sunlight has many well documented positive effects. Vitamin D production being obvious, but also many understudied effects like nitric oxide release. It's difficult to fully root out confounding effects, but typically people with more sun exposure live for longer, despite having higher rates of skin cancer.
You can either monetize the thing that brings you business directly, adversarially impacting users.

Or you can monetize something else that's correlated to those costs to subsidize the main use case and keep new user acquisition frictionless. Like NPM charging large businesses with special needs with NPM Enterprise, or GitHub with teams and CI/CD features and GitHub Enterprise, and so on.

Docker sold off Docker Enterprise. Now they're trying to extract rents from people who are just trying to "docker build", a command whose ease of use is what drove people to use Docker in the first place.

Foot, meet gun.

Docker is breaking their main selling point. "docker build" and "docker run" should _just work_. By breaking that expectation in subtle ways they risk alienating users. By advertising that they're willing to break their main use case, they're going to alienate businesses and early adopter developers like myself.

Now I'm looking for alternative registries and making sure that devops code I manage doesn't depend on Docker. That's surely not what they wanted, right?
As a theoretical physicist your results should be reproducible based on the content of your papers, where you should detail/state the methods you use. I would make the argument that releasing code in your position has the potential to be scientifically damaging; if another researcher interested in reproducing your results reads your code, then it is possible their reproduction will not be independent. However they will likely still publish it as such.
I agree and I am sure the apartment owner makes a hell lot of money than a cafe owner. If they (govt. and apartment owners) really cared about disabled people they could have easily added ramps to the buildings in last 30 years. They are probably just taking advantage of loopholes.
AP Episode: The Black Side of Milwaukee
Thank you for the link to the Princeton group. That is encouraging. Aside from that, I share your lack of optimism about the prospects for this niche.

Most research programmers, in my experience, work in a lab for a PI. Over time, these programmers have become more valued by their team. However, they often still face a hard cap on career advancement. They generally are paid considerably less than they'd earn in the private sector, with far less opportunity for career growth. I think they often make creative contributions to research that would be "co-author" level worthy if they came from someone in an academic track, but they are frequently left off publications. They don't get the benefits that come with academic careers, such as sabbaticals, and they often work to assignment, with relatively little autonomy. The right career path and degree to build the skills required for this kind of programming is often a mismatch for the research-oriented degrees that are essential to advancement in an academic environment (including leadership roles that aren't research roles).

In short, I think there is a deep need for the emerging "research software engineer" you mention, but at this point, I can't recommend these jobs to someone with the talent to do them. There are a few edge cases (lifestyle, trailing spouse in academic, visa restrictions), but overall, these jobs are not competitive with the pay, career growth, autonomy, and even job security elsewhere (university jobs have a reputation for job security, but many research programmers are paid purely through a grant, so often these are 1-2 year appointments that can be extended only if the grant is renewed).

The Princeton group you linked to is encouraging - working for a unit of software developers who engage with researchers could be an improvement. Academia is still a long, long way away from building the career path that would be necessary to attract and keep talent in this field, though.
> Information on how this actually works is scarce since relative to the US there is much weaker rule of law/discovery, and fewer independent journalists

So often I tell people something and they say “source” and I tell them why a source is not possible or spell out the exact limitations in data collection and then downvoted to oblivion with a pile-on of why this worldview is irrelevant

This is not a feature of these kind of websites, it is absolutely a flaw

I would say most of the world is not google-able, if you are doing anything of consequence that affects others politically or financially or legally.
> Just like in a restaurant

My expectation of apps is to get rid of these artifacts of the past. In most other parts of the world prices are given to you upfront, no tips necessary.

Not only that, but Uber asks you before you even check out if you want to give 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%, or a custom amount. Considering I haven't gotten my food or service yet, how the hell am I supposed to know? I don't want to deal with this decision. You tell me how much I'm supposed to pay and just present me one number. I'll hit "buy" if it fits my budget.

Uber got rid of cab driver run-arounds, they can get rid of tips in the same way and just ask for a fair price upfront. As a customer I would find up-front, no-tip pricing a MUCH better UX.
I really like the Cochrane reviews, and love that they periodically update areas when there is more recent research. And you are correct, their articles on Vitamin D have become less enthusiastic with time. This makes sense I think, since the initial publications on a topic will all be "positive" - they have to find something new to get published (creating a publication bias). And they do try to account for publication bias, but really the best way to fix it is to have more studies. With Vitamin D getting so much attention, you can get published whether you find a correlation or not, so you have a wider range of studies to look at. I wanted to give a summary of the Cochrane reviews and the largest human trials of Vitamin D in the next blog post.
I had some issues with iOS Reviews too, but I always talked with real person who gave me real information about the issue and how to fix it. Same with Amazon, I'm also an Alexa Developer. Instead chatting with the Google's agent I felt so stupid, I did several questions but I always get only copy/paste messages.
And physicists have been writing code for a while simply because the number of software engineers with a working knowledge of physics (as in ready for research), have been trained in numerical analysis (as in being able to read applied mathematics) and then are willing to help you with your paper for peanuts is about zero.

I don't understand why it is so hard to see that you need either a pretty big collaboration where somebody else has isolated the specifications so you don't need to know anything about the problem your code solves really, or becoming a physics graduate student yourself for this line of work.
A judge may also fear a Chinese assassin if the reverse happened, but enough with the fairy tales.
As a guy in his 20s, I am more interested in the precursor to marriage: how do you find interesting people and form relationships? Of course, the issue of marriage is a very important one, but to me (and, I suspect, to many HN readers), the more pressing question is how to form romantic relationships to begin with. Any HN readers wanna chime in with advice for us young'uns?
I'm going to guess you just got one from Docker Hub today, because I did too. I saved the code, alongside the password in my password manager, which itself already requires 2FA to open. Still, seems like it defeats some of the point of the security to store it in the same place as the password...
I specified where I’ve had experiences.
Show HN: Productivize – Issue #8
Happy Monday y'all! Productivize Issue #8 is out and can't wait to share what I have for you today:

https://productivize.substack.com/p/productivize-issue-8
Funny - as someone in Europe that has spent time in the US I kinda see the opposite. I wonder if some psychological biases are at play here.

To me my home country feels all very regular and the US has strong styles to where I could pick out an American town from most other countries. But to you the opposite is probably true, USA towns seem all very normal and regular to you.