skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ironically a large part of my current job is writing code that runs on/interacts with a no/low code platform.

I would advise developers worried about these kind of tools to focus on the skill that really differentiates a developer who is basically effective from one who isn't, which is data modeling.

These things shine a spotlight on your high level data skills because you can't just code around bad database design decisions early in the project.

When the data is exported, your low level attention to detail and consistency come into focus. Did you encode Yes/No questions consistently? Were there free text fields where there should have been predefined options?

These low code/no code options are just revealing that coding was never the hard part of making software.
I don't fully understand what happened, but it sounds like essentially someone was supposed to update a payment from "repay full amount" to "pay interest only", and didn't do it. The system correctly executed the instructions it was given. The only way this would show up as a "loss" to the bank is if some part of the system expected to pay only the interest, and it sounds like that wasn't the case.

It also sounds like there was another human who was supposed to catch the error and didn't. My guess is that the volume of transactions is high enough and errors of this type are rare enough that most people wouldn't be able to catch it manually.
On mobile, this site has a “Get in Touch” element floating on the middle of the right edge that blocks a little (but annoying) part of the article’s text.

A plea: Please avoid adding obstacles to the users. Things are getting harder on mobile, instead of better, in the last couple of years. Like we reached peak usability and then forgot it was one of the most important goals.

Shiny UI elements are only good if they don’t mess up the core goal of your project.

// end of rant (sorry)
Completely agree. This is the "formal training required" part that we miss while recounting these anecdotes. I still love the book, as in, It's giving you a sea to dip a little, look at pretty cool turtles, but one's gotta take a deep dive once in a while.

Thankfully I was never very good with numbers, so I only memorized it till the 6th digit so I could use it as my password!

(thankfully I can let my computer fix those for me :)

Better memory: "I used to think, hey I got sorta close to 10th digit, soon I'll know a lot more, yay!"

Ah, Edit: The deep dive should be with someone to pick you back out, in my experience.
I've been using this new feature on reclaim and it's been awesome helping me reserve time to keep my commitments and not letting meetings take control over the day. I was already using the google tasks feature and now with some shorthand text I can reserve time to work on that task and it will adjust around as other meetings come in until I'm out of time.
North Korea is stepping up attacks on the banking industry, says CISA
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking

Banks do create money, by loaining other people's. I think you're saying the same thing?
Most of these key products "feel" expensive to me, which is purely subjective. Can someone more knowledgeable explain where the cost comes from? Small runs, extended research, custom hardware issues, etc? All of the above?
Why doctors strike (a med student's perspective)
Wow, it's truly awful, even on an Apple trackpad or scroll mouse! Like a video except instead of pressing play once, you have to keep scrolling down to play. Why not just embed a video? I know I've seen this terrible pattern on other sites, too.

When I scroll down, I expect one thing to happen: content on the page moves from the bottom to the top, revealing previously un-seen content on the bottom. That's it. Please stop trying to make scrolling do something else!
The problem is that the UI testing monoculture is on Safari. Safari has 20% market share according to StatCounter (9% desktop market share).

Most users use Chrome on desktop and mobile.
>I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that we are at the beginning of a war

We are not at the beginning of a war. I recommend you go outside for a breath of fresh air.
True, I was addressing the question at face value.
Not quite ELI5 -- buttttt nice analogy - and I see. Particles not energy > 100%
Thanks!
I think WSL2 is wonderful, I use it on my primary development machine. Docker doesn't have as many pain points as it used to, and I generally find that I can get around the OS without too much issue, and the new Windows Terminal App helps a ton (its no iTerm2, but its better than anything else I can find)

I still miss macOS, so much, because

- Mac Software I was accustomed to using (and it was lot) is no longer available to me (don't discount this problem when suggesting switching)

- I had to customize Windows 10 a lot, (many hours of work) to emulate native features of macOS I personally can't live without (including remapping keys, which turns out not to be trivial on Windows)

- I miss the general UI polish of macOS. Windows is...ugly in a lot of places.

- I miss Finder, and I've tried so many file explorer alternatives and nothing comes close

- Windows 10 can't seem to ever remember my screen layout for my applications. I had to resort to an application to do this for me. Drives me nuts

- macOS has way better HiDPI support (I have 3 4K monitors)

It ain't trivial, is what I'm saying.

Don't get me started on Linux, I loved Pop OS conceptually, but the support for basic things, like natural scrolling, was completely lacking, and I had to resort to all kinds of hacks to get a desktop semi functional. Not to mention, a lot of Linux 'add on' packages are abandonware and would break constantly when updating to new versions, and for basic things, like dealing with scroll direction, I had to edit files in a terminal, which I just found annoying. It just wasn't a polished out of the box experience. Don't get me started with it not recognizing adapters properly and issues with GPUs. macOS is alot of things, but they take 'just works' more seriously than any other operating system I've ever used.

Honestly, I find it incredibly odd that companies that have more manpower than Apple (you'd be shocked how little manpower they devote to some things) can't manage to pull off the polish of macOS UI
there was also the sneaker net, it was faster to grab a cart of mag tape and/or punchcards and take a walk down the hall

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

>> Similarly, as of 2019 the highest capacity backup tape format available is LTO-8, with a capacity of 12 TB. If a tape of this capacity were sent by overnight mail and were to arrive around 20 hours after it was sent, the effective data rate would be 1328 Mbit/s. With networking technology, this magnitude of speed over this distance would be very difficult to attain without a costly dedicated connection as one would likely need to use several hops and have a connection that is not oversubscribed. <<
Best Practises for Quality Testing
I agree, the JS ecosystem is reflective of constant new programmers redoing the UI every couple years, although I need to grit my teeth and admit that React did at least standardize/structure the ecosystem for the last few years.
FEMA is misguided in that is should be dispensing aid to states and cities in need and not instead doing the relief itself. Too often it actually steps in and blocks cities and states from properly administering aid to those in need. In effect, it should be handing out block grants and insuring that states don't conflict with each other, not be the source of conflict.

One major problem FEMA faces is not how it allocates its fund between disasters and terrorism it is instead the more of those funds land in states which have representation in Congress committees which exercise oversight on FEMA. Terrorism funding goes to police mostly and some to fire and related but the police and sheriffs of this country have outsized power in politics; related - the reason why defund the police was quickly dropped from political platforms
We are talking orthogonal problems here.

Closed Source software prevents users from having an "out" if the product they used to rely on stops serving their best interests.

Automatic Updates do push potentially detrimental changes into critical infrastructure of your customers with no notice. No amount of open source can fix that, because the "no notice" part of it precludes you from forking the project in any time frame that would allow you to respond to the crisis...

No cancel that, and aggressive upgrade policy from any critical piece of open source software should incentivize rational agents to preemptively fork the project in order to address the upgrade risk. The fact that you do not see this happening every day talks of the percentage of rational agents in the environment.
> All this is eroding faith in the exercise of democracy this November — and, potentially, in the election results themselves.

Anecdotally, in my circles not a single person has expressed lost faith or that their faith has eroded. If anything, the current climate has emboldened my peers' belief that it's important and effective. From my perspective, the media is doing more to try to convince people that democracy in this country is in decline than any other force, and I suspect it's financially motivated more than anything else.
Can't get a sausage in bread afterwards by mail!
> And new Starlink have visits limiting their reflectivity even during dusk and dawn.

I hope this really does work; as far as I could tell no such satellite has yet reached its final orbit.

It boggles the mind that this seems to be an afterthought to something this potentially consequential.
Some countries have vote by mail. Many US states do as well.

In the US our voting is on a work day, which is not given off by law. State politicians also control where polling locations are placed and how they are staffed, which leads to significant waiting times for people at polling places (hours and hours in many situations).

The introduction of electronic voting machines has created additional bottlenecks, as you can’t scale out those machines horizontally the same way with paper ballots. You’ll often end up with just a couple of e machines in place of a location that would typically have 20 or 30 booths for paper voting.

Did a bunch of research on this before our midterms in 2018:

https://medium.com/@eagerlabs/if-voter-turnout-spikes-our-vo...
Show me someone who's not interested in status symbols and I'll show you someone with very little self-awareness.

Do not disagree that the book is shallow, however.
If you're interested in detecting these types of attacks, I wrote a printer honeypot during my Masters program.

https://github.com/sa7mon/miniprint
You have it backwards. Almost none of the telecom infrastructure in Europe is state owned. As the comment you are replying to explained it's in the US where huge government incentives were paid out to telecom companies for broadband deployment who then proceeded to pocket that money and sit on their hands.
How many people actually go on luxury safari's?

How many people will actually pay $250k for a spaceship ride? I know everyone says they would, but who actually has the means to do so?

How many people will actually pay $20k for this fictitious rocket travel ride? That's the eqivilent of a decent brand new car.

The reality is there's a finite amount of people who have the means to do actual space tourism. You run out of these people after a short while... and then you go bankrupt.

And no, you cannot compare rockets with helicopter safety. It's well known helicopters aren't the most safe mode of transportation - but they do not spontaneously explode either. They are far safer than a rocket - arguing otherwise is disingenuous.
Any country with voting, heh. Now I wonder what percentage of HN posters live in non-democratic or "democratic" nations. Surely there's been a by-country breakdown at some point?
Bringing Apple’s old iSight webcam back to life with Raspberry Pi
Katrina definitely did.
My favorite database, Route 53, got resolver query logging
I suspect a lot of folks who are into note-taking methods have this mindset that if only we knew how to take better notes, we'd be able to reason better, produce better output and become more accomplished. I also suspect we are cerebral types and have rich inner worlds, so it's only natural that we think that more and better analyses will help us understand the world better. Yet, despite the many tools that we have, many of us only hover just a little above mediocrity in our accomplishments.

(I'm describing myself in the above paragraph.)

Outside of certain fields like academia and writing, I've observed that accomplished people tend to focus more on "doing" (including doing the "wrong" things) rather than constructing a super coherent model of the world. They rely on rough heuristics and feedback loops to learn, rather than careful analysis.

I read an article this week "Action Produces Information" [1] that made me think that maybe the more cerebral among us ought to step outside our mental models occasionally and actually try to interact with the gritty world and let reality be our teacher (instead of our models). By interacting with reality, we actually generate new information.

Quote:

Watch any group of entrepreneurs for a long enough period of time, for instance, and you would notice that the best entrepreneurs aren’t necessarily the best calibrated Bayesian updaters or expected utility calculators. Instead, the best entrepreneurs tend to have a mix of bias-to-action and fast adaptation in response to new information.

It seems to me that better note-taking methods are great for sharpening the brain (which is a valuable thing in itself), but a bias toward action/empiricism might be better for sharpening the skills needed to do meaningful things in the world. They're not mutually exclusive, but given a finite amount of time, my intuition tells me that putting more weight on the latter will tend to have a higher payoff.

[1] https://commoncog.com/blog/action-produces-information/
So they wasted 140 000 A4 pages. Why not just let the poor printers be alone. I see no need to show off just becouse the printer owners forgot to look them.
How to Make Online Classes More Interesting
Doctors striking to prevent the training of more new doctors is blatant greedy self-interest.
That was my exact initial reaction (which is why I posted it). Actually my initial reaction was 'WTF???' and so I made sure to read right to the end just in case I misunderstood and yep - they did in fact print off pdf files to random printers.

Thought the HN crowd would love diving in to the rights and wrongs of it. It reminded me of the 'old days' of fax spamming via uhmmm '2600' approved means and methods.

With that said - Would I rather read some pages printed off for 'some weird reason' (and got p*offed at the waste of paper etc) vs. inadvertantly becoming part of a possible future bot-net?

I mean - How do you alert the owner of a 'Write Only' (pun intended) device? And also hopefully at the same time kick up enough of 'Facebook/Twitter/XYZ' storm that Joe/Sue Q. Public notices?

That's a tough one.
Argo Tunnel AAAA Record
Has anybody else noticed that Argo Tunnels are suddenly creating only AAAA records? Given that I don't have IPv6 support at home, I suddenly cannot access sites that used to be accessible. Any suggestions/fixes?
I've been working with tens of thousands of them for 15 years. To name one area: last click attribution being the primary way people measure web performance is a prime sign that they are at least confused with how performance works. Advertising measured with last click tends to focus towards people that have visited your site less than 4 hours earlier, hardly something that is incremental to the sales of a business, and basically all research and experiments that you can run point to this, but it doesn't change the fact ad buyers all believe last click is the one true way. And to show that it's not just me saying this: https://research.netflix.com/business-area/marketing-and-gro... .
IIRC, CS1 was a mandatory class for other majors (like MechE) and a course in Scheme was basically hazing from their perspective.

I forget if Scheme was moved to a later course or made optional.
To get the scholarship the applicant has to explain what they will stop doing and how it might improve their life or the environment around them. So it's not really money for nothing...
I used to be pretty much in favour of opt-out for stuff like this, but I think at this point the industry itself has managed to prove that it can’t be trusted with anything but legislation guaranteeing opt-in.
Wind and solar are cheaper than thought, admits UK government
Wait, you're telling me that FedEx support explained that their drivers are defrauding their customers?
Walmart joins Microsoft bid for TikTok US
> For anyone (cough, elderly parents) who aren't adept at discovering hidden features.

I'm in my mid-30's and I find Apple awful at discoverability.

Take using Apple Pay. I don't use it often, but covid has had me wanting to. I can't ever seem to remember what sort of hand waving I need to do to get it open. I seem to occasionally bring it up when I don't want to. (It's triple press the home button when the display is off, long press is Siri.)
Walmart says it’s partnering with Microsoft on a TikTok deal
I’m learning rust right now and there is a lot to like. Steady updates like this are also very motivating. The ecosystem feels very sane - especially compared to npm. Top notch Wasm support, cross compiling is a breeze.

That said, coming from a FP background (mostly Haskell/JS, now TS) Rust is... hard. I do understand the basic rules of the borrow checker, I do conceptually understand lifetimes, but actually using them is tricky.

Especially in a combinator world with lots of higher order functions/closures it’s often completely unclear who should own what. It often feels my library/dsl code needs to make ownerships decisions that actually depend on the usage.

Anyways, I guess this gets easier over time, right? Should I avoid using closures all over the place? Should my code look more like C and less like Haskell?

[edit] great answers all, providing useful context, thanks
DJ Screw, Vaporwave, Digital Lost Futures
I started trying out the plaintext email workflow recently. One thing is very clear - all that pain is only because of bad tools and nothing to do with workflow itself. Regular email clients (incl webclients) garble the workflow horribly - HTML by default, top posting with no easy way to correct it, and attachment handling that assumes the user to be an idiot. I use neomutt. It's hard to learn and it's not the best an email client can be. But it makes git-email workflow and mailing list handling much more pleasant.

There is more that can be done. Better GUI and web clients for plain text email can help. Clients can display issue threads better. Patch mails can be combined. There can be an interface to import the patches easily. There can be optional markdown/ReST/asciidoc rendering. Similar improvements can be made with mailing lists too. With good tools, email workflow can be more pleasant and more intuitive than Fork-PR.
macOS has a 12+ year old bash. Also, even with Homebrew patching up Apple's neglect, coreutils behaves differently under a Darwin kernel than Linux. A repeat source of aggravation for myself is the behavior of 'ps'.
Clever "abuse" of signal lines!
I recently started a new project using only pixi + vanilla js. No frameworks. No npm. Just pixi.min.js + vanilla js included into an html file. It's super refreshing - the js files are tiny, the load times are insane (instant), other people can read my code without having to learn a new framework.

I am thinking about using npm to get access to linting, uglify, etc. but that would be strictly for distribution, not development.
Yeah that’s an ad stunt for their blog. Nothing interesting really. Probably shodan and a little python script. Yes, IoT has a security problem but you shouldn’t be going around using people’s ink to make an already made point.
Agreed. In my experience, I've learned more from reading MDN than specs.
If you design your site/app in the Applethink-bubble, then maybe you're missing out on quite a lot of market share if the majority of people with devices find your Applethink site/app difficult to use.

Make stupid design choices, win less customers.
Also, the wites leading to the switch seem like 0.05” IDC cable, which is horribly inadequate for mains application. The “jumper” is not some kind of low power config input, it simply shorts the midpoint of DC smoothing capacitor bank to neutral mains wire and thus is both live and conducts significant current.
oh, very nice!
Note, though, that he went up to almost 46% which is the highest he has had since right after he took office, when COVID started becoming serious in the US and it briefly looked as if he might handle it somewhat competently.
I'd consider $100, but not a $100 per year subscription? Come on!
And there is direct hardware support for it in Apple Silicon. It's going to be very interesting to see where things end up with Apple Silicon and what they choose to put in their silicon that would never see the light of day on Intel or other CPUs aimed for broader markets.
The Covid database contains cumulative figures, so if you ask "How many deaths in ...?" you get the naive query with the sum of the Deaths column for that country, which is wrong. Actually I wonder how to explain it. I cheated and asked "how many deaths in ... on July 14?" but got the wrong query, with July 14 as Province_or_State no matter how I rephrased the date.
Right, some people certainly do manage to build a business around lying, and how they get past the societal defenses against that is a question -- "WeWork" is a unicorn precisely because it is an exception to the rule.
That's what I meant by outdated documentation.

I personally use bookmarks. They're simple to use. However, people have issues using them in a team setting (by default it doesn't sync the bookmarks when there's a push, I think). I have not explored topics - looking at Heptapod it seems they prefer topics, so it may be the way to go.

If you're the only developer, then bookmarks should do everything you want.
There's a windows feature like this which I hate with a passion. If you grab a window and shake it side to side, it minimizes all open windows...

So sometimes I'll grab a window to move to my left monitor, decide instead I want it on the right one, and suddenly everything is gone and I now need to go open every single window one at a time. It even took me months to understand that the shaking was what caused it. I would just sometimes be working and suddenly everything is gone and I had no idea why.
Stock market valuations seem to no longer be correlated to fundamentals. Why is this?
The first thing I thought of while reading your comment were graphical adventure games, where you pretty much had to click on everything to see what did something.

The fundamental difference with modern user interfaces is that you now have to tap, drag your finger across the screen in different directions, drag both fingers across the screen in different directions, pinch, unpinch, and whatever other gestures seem to be relevant to the situation. For good measure, try gestures that don't seem to be relevant either because the software may surprise you!

Now I know that a lot of these user interface decisions do offer value, but they are only valuable if you know that they exist.
I meant a borrow checker, which I assumed was clear from what I was replying to. Yes, Zig does do runtime checks in dev builds and I did not mean to imply otherwise, I don't think the runtime checks provide the same set of benefits.

Just so we're clear, I like Zig :-)
Merch38 is public – a No-code t-shirt widget. Embed everywhere in 3sec for free