skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
About every other month I have to help a biologist who has pulled down an older program from Github debug why it broke in their data only to find that they were trying to run in Python 3 instead of Python 2. These are people that can write shell scripts, but don't program. It makes me aware of all the old code out there that is not used super frequently, but still solves people's problems, and would continue to if there hadn't been breaking changes.

As I write Python 3 now, I am less than impressed with the reasons for breaking compatibility. I'm told that it was necessary for proper bug-free Unicode code, but there's enough difficulty when using, say, gzip, and little enough documentation about the "proper" way to handle Unicode that I doubt that it will actually reduce Unicode-related bugs.

Python is still a great tool, but Python 3 really took the shine off for me.
Nope. In parts it depends on the weather, if for instance there were loads of people/families in a park, or on the beach/riverfront, or some larger sports/show/music event. But even without that, it seems to me there is more littering in general, compared to a timeframe of say 2004 to 2012.

Speaking from Hamburg, Germany here.
You can leave a socket open in the background (although you do need a periodic keep alive but the period can be pretty long.) to receive push messages without draining the battery (as long as the server doesn’t spam it.).

The real problem is pushing everyone towards unconfigurable closed software that would otherwise abuse full access to the device. Because people can’t trust what they run on their phones the apps can’t be given any more privileges than a random web page.
Ever tried to send a push notification to your phone? How hard can it be? - At least locally, KDE Connect(https://kdeconnect.kde.org/) got you covered.
Counterpoint: Elon, in retrospect, called the Lotus Elise strategy "super dumb." [1]

1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2018/09/18/elon-mu...
In which way it does not apply to the post I replied to? In which way would using a plain iPod -which now filters out all notifications, including the ones you actually want to receive- help if you have wanted notifications? That's the idiotic part. There is no "wanted" notification in this context. The poster just generically finds all notifications useless.

If you are an addict to Facebook, I could understand buying a phone-network-capable device without the ability to install Facebook (the iPod isn't), or a child phone, or using parental controls on yourself (seen it); to enhance your self-control while still allowing access to work/family/whatever notifications. However, if you just don't want to receive notifications whatsoever, what's the point? There's no addiction here. You are talking about a different topic entirely.
I find that I can usually predict which topics on HN are likeliest to spark low-effort comments :)
EIS a Verdade DOS Fatos
`apt remove python2.7` doesn't show any trouble on Debian Testing. It should be released as stable around mid-2021, and then it'll be over.
Brings this to mind: https://xkcd.com/1053/
Open source a push server, boom, problem solved.
It doesn’t have to be this way. You can buy pine phones now and they actually work.
There is such a setting: https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/6068458?hl=en
Although perhaps it is not respected correctly by the OS?
Between c89 and c18 is close to 30 years.

What about between c99 and c18? Is there anything you can think of? I think the _s() functions, advertised as security features, are a weak effort. Anything else come to mind?
That IS kinda cool. Denmark is shutting down 2G and 3G, because the frequencies are to be reused for 5G and 5G is what IoT will use.

I’m honestly more interested in IoT on 2G. For most things it should be fast enough.
I didn’t swear off my smartphone. I have and use that, too. It’s not an either/or, it’s an and.
Digital photography still uses my father's filter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayer_filter). How did it survive? He made an inevitable choice, this is bit like asking why the number two is so prevalent. Frame the question right (as he did, preparing twenty years for what looks like ten minutes of work), and this grid is the unique answer:

"Checkerboard half the squares green, turn your head, and checkerboard what's left red and blue."

What's most striking here is the prevalence of green squares. With a honeycomb pattern, one could equally distribute RGB cells. However, this would be less efficient in hardware and software. John von Neumann considered base 3 computing, but settled on binary, for a similar efficiency advantage.

From what my Dad understood of the human eye, he decided that green was the best proxy for black and white detail, so he favored green. Digital photography evolved in harmony with the human eye, just as eyes evolved in harmony with the objects of our vision. None of us take in FM radio with our eyes, and few animals see red. Some speculate that our corner of the mammal world sees red to spot ripe fruit, nature's pigment playground.
It was a joint-venture between Philips and ASMI.
It was the only other game type I could think of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And it shouldn't die until the anomalous effect is adequately explained. That's how good experimental science works, regardless of current theories - if you see an effect you can't explain, you test it until you can explain it. There's a very high chance the tiny force is attributable to something mundane, but it's still worth finding out what that thing is.
How to blur your house on Google Street View
Bell Labs invented the transistor!
Python 3.0 is surprisingly short (~7 months) and Python 2.7 is impressively long (~9.5 years).
Markdown Guide – free, open-source reference that explains how to use Markdown
The orders are not paid up and many from companies with bad balance sheets.

The truck is vaporware and Nikola has no experience actually making or doing anything.

So bringing anything in on time and anywhere near cost is going to be a challenge.

"PS Email me if you are interested in building a hydrogen powered flying vehicle." - that's such an HN thing to write!
> We always used them as garbage can liners

I started doing this "before it was cool" back in the 1990s. I wasn't aware of other people doing it so I couldn't understand why they weren't. I learned since then and I still do it today. Why use something once when you can at least use it twice?
Maybe, but a measure of the phenomenon is not an explanation of how human societies came to have an ethical aspect.

It is also possible that the metric is considering only one aspect of a society's ethical position, especially given that things like trolley problems, and some of the things that are done in the name of nominally ethical religions, suggest that people are not consistently rational in their ethical thinking and behavior.

One might, for example, value another's life purely on the economic value it is to oneself - would that be an ethical position or the absense of one? I don't doubt that one could make some sort of argument for the former, but ethics are really only interesting when they are at odds with perceived self-interest.
As in, you can pop up a notification from local events? It did several years ago the last time I programmed on it. I'd be surprised if it didn't today. But a poll->local notification isn't technically a push notification.
It does. You have to keep one running (with it being impossible to dismiss) if you want to prevent your application from being shut down. That's what GP is talking about.
Lots of ferns maybe?
Actually, you have to turn those _on_, usually. Its not that by default it will start spamming you about programs you did not install on in the first place.
One of the more insidious things Google has done here is that they force you to use the Firebase SDK to implement Cloud Messaging / Push Notifications.

This SDK has "Google Analytics for Firebase" enabled by default, and they use dark patterns to make it seem like having Analytics enabled is required: https://imgur.com/a/Nk2KhFo

Of course, if you do enable analytics, then Google sucks up your customer data (including in-app purchase behavior!) for their own data collection and advertising purposes. Also, you're required to tell your users this is happening, but of course developers don't know this. (More dark patterns in how Google reveals that they steal your analytics data for themselves: https://imgur.com/a/R0K71Zn)
I wonder if there's any merit to python3 kicking off a "is this script python2?" on some subset of common errors that crop up.

Then it could tack on a "looks like you're trying to run a python 2 script on python 3" final error to stderr.
Calculators on Phones Meme
I think you didn't read the second half of the sentence he quoted.
No they didn’t. Location services are a necessary part of being a phone.

It’s called cell tower triangulation and your phone needs to do it constantly, or you can’t receive or send calls.
Physics is precise. The uncertainty is due to error-bars in measurements. Any measurement has error bars for systematic, random and absolute errors, then there is the combinative error as multiple types of measurement are combined together.

It’s more of a worry, tbh, if you don’t see an error estimate in a result...
Username says it all

Ultimately, not acquiescing to social narratives alone is all I’m advocating for.

Narratives like society should avoid limits on the amount social capital we award people (money isn’t a thing outside human societies, having a lot of it isn’t scientific evidence of exceptionalism) on giant promises like forever life, nuclear cars, living on Mars, and whatever Google believes it’ll find sorting all the noise instead of measuring purposesfully.

If you want a free market of ideas and information, enabling a capital monopoly in exchange for a throwaway phone seems a bit nuts rather than putting that into local services to support a majority discussing and researching these ideas away from outdated notions some minority, due to story mode thinking, should profit. Why aren’t the technological inventions good enough for everyone?

Why the historical vault of gold to go with if the phone alone should be good enough for us? A phone that took millions of minds not just the minds of the extra rich. To design build and even make a market for.

There’s exactly no accepted evidence in physics that economic success has anything to do with biological superiority and a whole lot of math suggesting it’s to do with time, place, shape of information available.

In fact decades and millions spent on trying to math out who brings value to an org has resulted in math so Byzantine its impenetrable.
"The tree is already dead. I'll take that one."
I've often seen this attitude doesn't apply to just "users". Indeed there are many people that come from college backgrounds that generally treat "the public" as stupid. To get into the good graces of such people you have to agree with them.

When wading through the actual issues "the public" has, individually, you'll find that the issues are actually real. Usually some un-turned nugget of wisdom that was not applied in a very specific way. Many people learn things in a variety of ways. Different learning methods don't make people stupid either.
To be fair I believe you can now "mute" these permanent notifications and you still get the same user experience, although with an extra step.
Yarn Tips, Part 1
great idea! yeah that would seem to be a better design.
Regarding the playback time, currently I'm adding the "t=[TIME]s" parameter to the captured url, so it works for YouTube. But there are definitely more elegant solutions as this scales to support more websites.
It's obviously not biochar though. It might be similarly useful, but the bio in bio char is about the material coming from plants.
https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0394/

so “helpful”!
Optimize Your RDS MySQL to GCP CloudSQL Migration
If you log the contents of an object with firebug and then modify the object later in your script the firebug output does not change. But do the same thing with Firefox and the contents of the object will change.

To preserve the object as it was when debugged you have to either copy it or log all the specific properties you're interested in rather than the object as a whole.
One of my all-time favorites.
If the DG Nova, which is the overlooked mini in the title, is overlooked, it's only because the people doing the looking weren't around when they were popular. By the standards of the day Data General made a lot of them. See here for a few more tidbits: http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/dg-nova.html
Can't read most of the text because the calculator is on top of it.

Also, it's not a pocket calculator.
How? And can't you do that without mandating voting?
I guess Krug pissed this person off.

I'll withdraw the comment. lexicality was correct, and I probably didn't write my thoughts well. I do believe in promptly admitting when I was wrong.
How do Chinese users get around this problem? I don't have Play Services on my phone and Telegram notifications work just fine (because it keeps its own background connection anyway). Maybe they're reinventing the wheel in every application like Telegram does?
It's odd that there is so much interest in automated driving of trucks, which is a really hard problem, but very little interest in automatic shunting operations, which is technically easy in comparison. It would enable trains to compete better on trips which are shorter and/or have less volume.
FTA: “They target the orca, because they think there must be tuna under the pods,” says Jörn Selling, a marine biologist for Firmm whale watching and research foundation with 17 years’ experience in the Straits. “They go right through the pods, their hooks cutting the dorsal fins”.

[…]

But many conservationists suspect some fishermen retaliate violently”

I think it’s at least equally likely they learned that boats of a certain size in the neighborhood of tuna can attack their family, and do this to protect it.
Many physicists had dismissed the revolutionary space drive as simply fake science.

The use of "fake" here really bugs me. Fake implies lies and I don't think that's at all present here.
To build on your second point, it also adds a step of complexity in the logistics process. You have to get your truckload of goods to and from the rail depot on both sides, so you're already using trucks.
It’s one of the reasons a billion iOS devices have good battery life.
In your first paragraph, you might be humanising the beasts quite too much.
Just trying to imagine some rhetoric recast in the language of exponential growth, statistics and game theory....

"In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were making a costly signal of commitment. But it's obvious today that America has failed to support the separating equilibrium... We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of hyperbolic discounting.... I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where their skin colour will not be a sufficient statistic of the content of their character!"
Aren't they stilled routed over FCM?
mpv, really? That has nothing to do with python as far as I know. There are Python bindings to libmpv, which I maintain, but I doubt they're included in Debian's mpv package (and they're Python 3 compatible).

Maybe it's a VapourSynth thing?
$30 Billion valuation with no product, no customers.

Insiders taking millions out of the company.

Lied about major IP developments and ownership (Hydrogen, Fuel Cells, parts)

This is insane, and I can't believe that GM would go near this toxic pile of garbage, it's utterly shameful and makes GM execs look completely stupid and incompetent.

GM is getting an 'inspired truck idea' - how hard would it be to create a little independant division and hire some freaking designers and inspire people a little bit? Which would be good for their whole company?

Nikola looks like fraud, but they're just a scammers, in a way it makes GM look worse.
unpaywalled FT article: https://archive.is/jMLkh
My immediate question was “what’s their annual budget anyway?”.

It seems like the lab is funded primarily from its initial endowment, and that for 2017 they only needed an extra $225k [1]. What’s unclear is whether the additional support from NMT has stopped, NSF / grant funding for the equipment and studies has dried up, or something else.

I couldn’t find any other details on the Langmuir Trust/Endowment.

[1] https://www.nmt.edu/leadership/minutes/regents_minutes_septe...
first thought after seeing this: holy shit how did that pass code review?

on second thought, that's probably intentional to force their customers to upgrade at least once every 3 years.
The quality and depth of answers here is pretty inconsistent. But this in particular is a pet peeve of mine:

> Plot a histogram out of the sampled data. If you can fit the bell-shaped "normal" curve to the histogram, then the hypothesis that the underlying random variable follows the normal distribution can not be rejected.

This is commonly taught in undergrad stats, but you shouldn't do this. I'm of the opinion that normality testing in general is usually a red herring, but this is specifically not a productive way of doing it. Use the other methods. A visual test that relies on how much the histogram approximates a bell curve is very prone to error, because a sample from a variety of other distributions can look visually normal even though it isn't.

More broadly speaking, the reason I don't like this is because it's an example of the kind of formulaic, cargo-culted recipes that are often used in statistics without critical thinking. You should strive to obtain a deep understanding of your data and its distribution, and you should be deeply skeptical if the sample you happen to have looks normal. Nature abhors normality, and the central limit theorem can only promise a tendency towards normality as n approaches infinity. It says nothing about what size sample you'll practically need for your specific data to be able to treat it as normal.
±9%
Author here. I actually agree.

Cheesy (but true) anecdote: As I was writing my article this morning, there were two distractions. First, I tabbed to Facebook where I saw one of my "friends" had posted something political that was both factually incorrect and also very offensive. It reminded me of All the Bad Things, and made me doubt my argument, to the point of almost just scrapping the article. Not just because that FB post was an example of someone being stupid and lazy, but because I had mindlessly interrupted myself and tabbed to Facebook and was about to engage with that post.

My second distraction was my 2-year toddler, who had just woken up and was tugging at my sleeve. And I thought about the world I want him to grow up in and the view I want him to have of it.

I know I can come across as idealistic (hell, I've even gotten that as formal feedback in a performance review—but I've also gotten feedback that I'm cynical, so shrug). But honestly, one of the wonders of us as humans is that we can carry all these different capacities. We can be smart and motivated and social. We can be stupid and lazy and anti-social. All those capacities are worthy of admiration, not contempt. Technology is a great tool, we can decide where we focus it.
I believe it's for node-gyp and the build system for native modules.
Does the driver own and maintain the car they are using for this moonlighting?
This is for locally generated notifications only. Push messages are different, last time I checked Mozilla operates a free service to relay push notifications.
The contents of Debian Stable, to my understanding, generally reflect the state of those applications in early 2019[1].

1: https://release.debian.org/buster/freeze_policy.html
People can't trust it anyway because most people are not developers, programmers or able to read code, debug binaries or even have a concept of hardware and software.
I was in fact agreeing that it won’t work from the launchpad, but stating that that’s no big deal.
Didn't Musk threaten short-sellers? Wasn't there also that weird promise to go private?
But still 41% didn’t think it would replicate. Proving a result to 41% of the population still seems useful.
> little enough documentation about the "proper" way to handle Unicode that I doubt that it will actually reduce Unicode-related bugs.

There are hundreds if not thousands of pages of unicode documentation. If anything the problem is that there is way too much for any normal person to actually understand it.

For most people though, knowing when to normalize strings to NFC versus NFKC is all they need to not unknowingly accumulate tons of technical debt.
Yes, users are fucking dumb. I use to work help desk for a number of years, and the stories I could tell...

Though, I sorta object to treating them all like their stupid. There are stupid users, and then there are users that are stupid because you treat them like they are. Let me explain.

When I worked in healthcare I was pretty stupid. It wasn't that I didn't understand the mechanics behind it, but it just didn't click with me because the training I had was deplorable. I was regularly yelled at for making mistakes, and didn't have a really supportive environment. So in my haste to ensure I did everything quickly, and didn't make any mistakes it actually caused me to either overthink or underthink certain steps due to anxiety and nervousness. So in other words, when someone started treating me like I was stupid I was more prone to acting like I was stupid...

So when I worked at help desk no matter how stupid a users was I always did my best to treat them as kindly as possible. In the end what wound up happening is that I wound up getting much better results than my coworkers who wouldn't treat them respectfully. That wasn't even my super weapon though. It was anticipation of future problems...

I always really liked Roman Mars perspective on design. Good design is effortless. When you go through a door if there is a handle on it and you pull that handle you feel stupid when you see that it says pull only. So in my own way I am always trying to view things I do in IT, whether programming or helpdesk from a user centric perspective. If I think ahead of time about what sort of potential issue someone would have, and I can change something to prevent that then I have much better results.

This is something I see being a problem all up and down the entire stack in IT. It is time to stop treating our users like idiots. But it’s also time to start returning to idiot proof design.
Does the driver own and maintain the car they are using for this moonlighting?

Does the blogger have an exclusive agreement with the agency?

Is the blogger using agency resources to complete your work?
The executives at Exxon knew about global warming fifty years ago and buried it. They funded research that muddied the waters. They funded propaganda. They funded lobbyists. They even started wars.

The older generation is the bad guy, and it wasn't for their mistakes. This was intentional. Not all of them are complicit, of course, but now that the chickens are coming home to roost we're getting lecturing points from people like the person you're replying to about bismuth in our phones or other such flim flam.

The reality is that our generation has something equivalent: Surveillance capitalism. And you know what? Plenty of people from Google and Facebook have stepped forward and demanded regulations. Where were the same people from Exxon Mobile in the 70s?

Ethics and morals matter. The truth matters. And people with enough means are still pushing for more at the expense of others.
But does it work at scale and with the UX of the other platforms? If so: why hasn't it taken off yet?

The technical part is not the hardest part; it's the "everything else".
Order of Evaluation in Operators
A programming language to heal the planet together: Julia – Alan Edelman TEDxMIT