skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
previous entries in the series:

typing: https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview

hexing: https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-interview

reversing: https://aphyr.com/posts/340-reversing-the-technical-intervie...
Im currently in grand teton national park and need to get a test before seeing my parents. This area that has 5+ million visitors a summer has about 3 covid tedting sites in an 2-3 hour drive. The main hospital needs a referal to give you s test. Any referals from out of the area will have their tests sent to another site, results are expected in 5-7 buisness days. When asked how much it would cost, they said they have no idea, they will bill the insurance. We have decided not to take this test and wait till we are in a major city and get the 15 minute test. Naturally, they have plenty of open appointments to administer the test. Our healthcare is completely broken. These national parks are intersections of people from all over the US and one of the most important places to have rapid testing and its just completely unavailable.
connectFree, the company selling Zen, is a Japanese company: https://connectfree.co.jp/
Super excited about this. It's going to be a slow transition moving off but our bundle sizes are going to drop dramatically. Definitely love the idea of making our I18N work easier.
I completely disagree. I can put a Type C plug into the port of any of my devices on the first attempt, the quality of the plug is much higher, the plug is more stable in any of the ports of my devices, I can charge all my devices with one charger, I have a docking station that just delivers 4k/UHD@60hz with both of my laptops (MBP, Pixelbook) and all I need is one Type C plug in my laptop.

I have a GaN 68W charger with 2x C and 1x A and it's the best travel companion I've ever had. It's lightweight, small and it just works.

I roll my eyes everytime people complain about Type C. The second Apple delivered Thunderbolt 3 via Type C it was clear that the dream of having one universal port for everything doesn't work, then came various ways of quick charge, some even proprietary. But you can rest assured that anything that's just Type C will work with any Type C and charging isn't always quick but it works.

This is so much better than anything we had before.
Can I use my air fryer to make those chips? I can't decide between corn or potato though. Any suggestions on pros/cons?
Hello HN and sorry for this bizarre drama!

Although we have a page documenting some outlandish comments that the founder of Zig has made about Zen[0], we find it well inside of our rights to fork the MIT Licensed Zig and make a better product with commercial support.

We had initial plans to support Zig in Japan, but efforts to localize Zig were not accepted and we could not take the risk of not having some sort of formal role.

Regarding commercializing compilers: our main market is in embedded and as others have pointed out, charging for compilers and support is not uncommon.

One of our big main differences between Zig is that Zen natively supports vtables and traits that we call interfaces[1].

Although our core market is in Japan, we are preparing our English website and hope to have it out soon.

On a more personal note, I am happy that Zig is growing and that they got the foundation together. At the peak before the fork, I was the 5th largest contributor to Zig, so I am very happy to hear when people say that they are enjoying the language.

It's midnight in Japan, but I will try to field questions if any.

[0] https://zen-lang.org/zig/
[1] https://www.zen-lang.org/ja-JP/docs/ch06-interface/
It seems every article on Neanderthals has to be prefaced with a story of how we believed that they were brute club-wielding cave dwellers, but this discovery has changed the way we think about them... Can't journalists find a different way of spinning this story?
You can do that on a Nikola too. You need to start in a hilly area and ensure that you are going downhill. Nikola leverages gravity to deliver a form of transportation that uses the cleanest possible energy - gravity.
You don't need an approved charger, just one that's well-made. It's easier to use a well-known brand name as a shorthand during the selection process, because it's generally not feasible for the end user to evaluate a charger on a technical level.
You don't have to learn to code to use FOSS.

> Life is about balance; extremes are rarely useful - especially long term.

This is the moderation fallacy.
"licensed medical professional" != "developer"
lol - just look at the code of conduct fiasco with Linux over the last year or so. If you think FOSS is immune from ideological injection your deluding yourself.
Why are so many projects allergic to screenshots? You put so much work into something and you write a really good readme but then not a single image after stating 'Improved UX, that's still in line with Emacs traditions'.
I disagree. Software can go into 'maintenance mode', that's fine, but there is otherwise no difference between done, abandoned and dead.

For a real example, look at lodash. You could easily argue it's 'done' and that it has better alternatives now, but look what happened: a security bug was discovered, the original author pretty much abandoned it, and it took about a week to figure out how to get a working build while meanwhile many thousands of other projects were failing due to npm audit checks.

The fact is even if nothing really needs to change in your project, the ecosystem around it can change requiring updates to your code.

It's fine to say "This project needs no new features and is in maintenance mode", but otherwise, if you're not willing to deploy new releases, "done", "dead" and "abandoned" all mean exactly the same thing.
Just wait until they figure out how to write a Visual Basic GUI to track the IP!
I'm happy to see that Academia has embraced Python the past years. When I went to college, almost every science class which required coding / scripting used MATLAB. Luckily stats classes either used R or Octave, but MATLAB was generally heads above anything else, in terms of usage.

I have observed that some businesses and groups, that sprung out of Academia, still heavily use MATLAB. I guess that's logical - as their users come from MATLAB-heavy environments.

But still, it kinda sucks because:

- MATLAB is still proprietary, and costs money

- The larger the codebase becomes, the more incentive there is to stick with MATLAB

- You somewhat limit yourself on potential candidates that can (or WANT) to work with MATLAB.

The only true benefits I see from using proprietary languages like MATLAB, would be very specific and optimized packages / libraries, along with good support...but then again, being dependent on vendors for updates is rarely a comfortable experience.
I believe you should consult with a psychiatrist as soon as possible. The brain chemistry is really delicate and you should not risk medicate yourself. If you start taking stimulants, soon you have to increase the doses (homeostasis) and it will lead to more problems.

I had a similar problem: I couldn't sleep longer than 2 - 3 hours without waking up randomly. Now I'm taking a medicine every day and it's helping me regulate my life.
Trust the science. Use the technology to have a happy plain life.
> Many "developers" do little more than glue together bits of framework boilerplate.

Funny, I always thought of that as an software engineer's job.
I liked this course when I learned python:

https://dabeaz-course.github.io/practical-python/Notes/Conte...
I wonder the same thing. I first noticed this back when the iPhone came out. At the time, there were frequent posts from guys like this one complaining about Apple/Jobs fanboys, and the language they used was very similar to what you see here. "It's all fraud, Jobs is a fraud, fanboys are zealots," etc., etc.

I don't get these people. I'm not sure if they are paid shills, or true believers. I suspect there's a bit of both to be found. But I will say this: in my estimation the haters outnumber the fanboys by at least a factor of 100.
What’d You Say to Me Bill? My Trucks Are the Future of Logistics
My primary and secondary school used Free Software extensively. They ran Ubuntu on all school laptops and everyone used LibreOffice. The web browser of choice was Firefox. The teachers recommended us to use LibreOffice at home too in order to have full compatibility for our assignments.

I spoke with the IT manager of the school and he's a real fan of open-source. He gave a talk at a open-source convention about it (in german)[0]. In this video he talks about how he convinced the local government to budget this, how it saved cost and much more.

I think this is a great example that this can work and more schools should try this out. From what I heard, the teachers didn't have too many problems and my classmats were quick to adopt without many problems. If I'm honest, I experience more problems with the Microsoft stack in my current school.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fY47YY5BIGc
Got review ban for tagging 'Looks OK' for a question which I still think is OK
> Also it doesn't help that we have such a large financial services sector. This sector soaks up a lot of graduates that might otherwise be working in technology.

Historically - yes, but I'm not so convinced any more; young people / grads here just don't want to go into banking now (understandably IMO), and not sure the Fintech firms (that aren't pure tech) make up that much in terms of grad numbers.
Seriously Wirecard was sniffed out by so many short sellers, and eventually shorting it was banned... look at it now.
UNC Wilmington had their Blackboard installation go down for nearly a week in 2018 because of hurricane Florence. I know that was a big factor in their decision to switch to a SaaS. Not that they couldn't have moved their stuff into a cloud hosting provider, but like you said, that's a big ask for an IT team to do in one summer when there are off the shelf solutions.
Depends, if you look at projects like Elasticsearch, you see a shift towards using a lot of off heap memory and less reliance on heap over time. Mostly the JVM and languages on the JVM are evolving towards things like having immutable data structures, async processing and IO, using data classes/structs, etc.

A lot of my recent projects have actually been fairly modest in terms of memory requirements compared to a few years ago where I'd have thought nothing of using 4GB heap on a simple spring app.
literally who cares
Free UX Audit of SaaS App
Offering a personalized free UX Audit for SaaS Apps for a limited time.
I'm not really following your point?

Are you trying to say there's a global conspiracy to silence scientists who disagree with the prevailing theories of natural selection and evolution?
You obviously haven't interacted with many scientists. As a highly liberal group, they tend towards social justice. Telling them to cover something up is more likely to make them speak louder about it than actually stay quiet. Also, the vast majority of scientists get funding from their own country's government, not from China.
I disagree. It's blurry and not so clear cut but certain ranks need to be earned otherwise it's fraud.

For example what if I called myself a Navy Seal and combat veteran even though I'm not? That would be dishonorable and insulting to people who actually risked their lives.
The reason everything outside of school uses those products is that the workforce is trained to use them.
Maybe so. I disagree with much of Stallman’s platform. But regardless of that, I was just observing that the arguments offered in the article in addition to the rest of the dialogue about free vs proprietary software are mostly based on the idea of a moral or ethical imperative behind free software, and relies on an existing body of work to make arguments about why that imperative might exist. Since the article doesn’t attempt to justify the existence of that imperative, it mostly serves as a statement of position, rather than an argument that’s likely to win anybody over who isn’t already on board with the idea.
These are just teething pains for an emerging, universal charging standard. I will take some incompatibility between USB-C even for the next decade, if that means that I no longer need to carry more than one wire and more than one charger to power all my devices.
Maybe they believe that No. 2 is capable of making valuable contributions, but that the specific contributions made at the direction of the Zen founder aren’t valuable.
> many models predicted over 2 million deaths by now

citation needed.

Here are many models that we can backcheck: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/covid-forecasts/
With tongue firmly in cheek I have to ask you for evidence of the existence of such an entity as a "completely neutral scientist" :p
Out of curiosity: How did the pupils react to this environment? Where they annoyed or did they like it?
I see, fair enough. I think I may have misread your original comment.
Sure I did. But by that time I know exactly what I want to buy - I've discovered the product and evaluated it compared to alternatives prior to setting foot in the brick&mortar store (I don't trust store salespeople either). I never do casually browse Amazon, or type a generic description and buy something from presented search results.

As for "what people say about" a particular product on Amazon, I don't even bother reading it.
I basically did this. I mean I wouldn't say it's a "lie" to simply omit things from you're resume that you don't feel are relevant or may hurt your chances. I shortened my resume to a single page and left high school and my attempt at college off of it completely. No one ever brought this up at the interview.

It's also not actually legal where I live for the employer to inquire about an applicant's age. After I was hired, the manager did ask me at lunch how old I was, I just replied, "I can't remember". Yeah, he probably didn't mean anything by it and he could probably look it up with HR. But I just honestly didn't feel like it should be relevant to my role at work.

I don't feel like this was unethical, perhaps slightly paranoid at most. Speaking of which, I didn't even tell anyone I had kids until I was out of my 90 day probation period.
As compared to the time before free public education? As a black person I'll say that it's not great now, but definitely better than the 1920s for anyone in my family. As southern sharecroppers, we were pretty much serfs.
Can you share your justification for non-compete clauses in employment contracts as well as contracts which take ownership of employee work done outside work hours?
I had a 3 year account containing videos of my game completely wiped without any notification. The account was terminated. I appealed and the bot effectively said "F you".

I have nearly deleted all Google services and my YouTube viewership is dwindling every month. I use one of the Invidious sites when I do watch YouTube sourced content.

I despise Google/YouTube with a passion.
Everyone has a differing body chemistry. I can only speak for myself. I do have some mild symptoms when starting a fast, but they go away quite quickly. It could be related to the fact that I'm not usually hungry in the mornings (excluding having done heavy exercise) and can quite easily go most the day without eating and from there it is not much of a stretch to go another day and another...
A Deep Dive into the 'Gentrification Font'
Fujitsu is using custom cores, but AWS Graviton (1 and 2) actually uses Arm Neoverse cores. The Ampere Altra will too.
While I understand Stallman's appeal to morals, the concerns a school has is preparing students for the future and technical support for administration.

The only software kids really have to understand before leaving school is Windows and Office, because every business uses it.

If you have an issue with a Microsoft product you can get help for it. The same can't be said for open source products.
I think that means it failed the Turing test, right?
Dude... what are you even doing?
Content-visibility: the new CSS property that boosts your rendering performance
I'm somewhat concerned about this kind of preloading. Given that network traffic is a huge, if not the major part of the total energy consumption of IT (I've seen estimates of about 40% of the total), this is adding a significant extra (according to the webpage only 50% of the triggered preloads are actually followed by a page view, which equals to an increase of 100% in initial traffic) for a gain of a few milliseconds.

Mind that reducing (initial) page loads by a fraction will do the same for you and even more.
Share the software. Sell services. Workshops, installations, consultations, support. Use money from sale of services to continue service. Repeat. Get some charismatic people to go door to door, splash around some booze and joy with top decision makers at large institutions. With friends in high places, suddenly there's no shortage of clients wanting to run free software and pay for your services.

It also takes the piss right out of proprietary software's only competitive selling point: being able to call someone to fix your broken software for you.
You know it's bad when Reddit has what you're looking for more than half the time. I constantly have to use `site:reddit.com` because otherwise I usually get a bunch of blog fluff with no real content that's designed to get me to look at ads.
Disclaimer: I too use moment in my daily project

Example snippet (CMIIW, it's as I remembered):

let date1 = moment("2020-01-01");
let date2 = date1.add(2, "days");
console.log(date1.format("YYYY-MM-DD")); // 2020-01-03
date2.add(2, "days");
console.log(date1.format("YYYY-MM-DD")); // 2020-01-05

Usually the date1.add operation won't change the date1 value, and any operation to date2 won't change date1, but it isn't. It's made worse because people like to return moment object outside function scope, so operation outside can modify the object inside and weird bugs happen.

It's actually a manageable problem IF you know the behavior, and only using moment object reference inside scope, and using immutable objects as parameter / return, such as milliseconds timestamp and js date.
Agreed, I have a donation to them in the works already.
Can you explain why you were banned from Zig?
Dark Sky has been promising a very good chance of light rain on Friday, it’s all that’s keeping me going...

I’m trying to forget that it says 0.01”.
That sounds like a business opportunity for the IT guy to develop a curriculum and sell it to other schools.
For those that believe in software freedoms as fewer restrictions, you have to accept that people may take advantage of your fewer restrictions. This is the cost of giving more (beer) freedom, and you don't have to abandon your principles because of how it manifests. (this has obvious political analogies in other restriction-less freedom contexts too)
> Now is a great time to sponsor the zig project on github!

Indeed.
those who "fast" also eats right? like other living being?
I'm not a doctor, but after reading Tripping Over the Truth: The Metabolic Theory of Cancer [0] I'd strongly suggest she start fasting, or, far better, order yourself a copy of the book (epubs available for purchase/torrent) and read it, decide for yourself. There are a lot of resources listed in the book for people who have cancer.

I'm trying to get people to read the book. Average people, for sure, but also people on boards of research institutions. I wrote this to one of them: https://josh.works/mike-clayville-can-have-a-huge-impact-on-...

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23496164-tripping-over-t...

The ideas contained in the book are explosive, with profound implications. It's a riveting read.
Single Objective Problems with Python
Not eating for few days - is not (yet) starvation, its not 'body wasting away'.

Its a state where your body and mind need to be the sharpest in order to catch food. Or else due to lack of fuel you will enter actual starvation (no fat reserves).

When you have reduced calories intake ~~500kcal a day you are signaling to your body that you can find/catch food but there is not a lot of it. Your metabolism will slow down in order to adjust to reduce calories. You loose muscle mass much faster than when not eating at all.

I have done multiple >3 days fasts and I havent experienced this sharpness feeling though. It seems some people do and some don't.

Also worth mentioning keto is natural diet of Eskimo people, they survived generations eating seal's meat and fat. So keto is not some crazy nutjob diet invention of 21st cent.
Changes are not necessarily enhancements, and the upstream project might not even want the "enhancements" that are developed in a commercial setting.
Easily the best Emacs config I've used. Tried some of the "big" ones at various times like Spacemacs, Doom, etc., but they're massive and Vim-centric. Wrote my own large config I had been using for the past year or two. Recently tried Prelude as it was recommended by some co-workers, and found that it did all the significant things my own config did with much better performance. Included my daily necessities (helm, swipe, which-key, magit, clojure stuff) and more out of the box. Just get rid of the scroll bars if you're not on Mac and good to go. IMO, a great representation of what Emacs should be "out of the box".
Why is enterprise web development such a grind?
A few months ago, I had occasion to create a front-end for an enterprise app and I was struck by how much boilerplate and yak shaving goes into creating a simple thing like a multi-pane web UI with proper auth. I seem to recall RAD windows tools doing the same things in a fraction of the time, and with much less boilerplate to maintain. There are, of course, still frameworks that allow for rapid development, but they are looked down upon by the pros.

Are we going to see rapid development come back anytime soon?
This. My sleep has greatly improved since putting a HEPA filter in my bedroom and I rather enjoy the white noise of the fan. Good units like the Sharp Plasmacluster I use have a large, slow moving blower (not a higher speed fan with fewer, larger blades) so the noise is very subtle.
Sure, but it's probably not in anybody's best interest for those of us with molecular biology (biophysics in my case) PhDs to do rebuttals of papers like this in an ELI5 way, so that hackers can understand how to recognize propaganda.
The Making of Dune II
Treating it as a dealbreaker seems a bit strong, but immutability has become very popular among JS devs recently. JS has pretty respectable functional-programming features, libraries like Immutable.js have cropped up to add memory-saving immutable data structures, and major frameworks like React and Redux play much more naturally with immutable data than mutable. The overall goal is scalability through reduction of side-effects. Whether the trade off is worth it or not, it's absolutely the fashion right now.
I see a lot of love for this, but there always has to be the other side.

I found this to make it SO MUCH MORE CONFUSING than just explaining how HTTPS works using words like Computer, Browser, Certificate.

My brain could not wrap around the concept of a ComPUGtor or whatever.

But I'm sure this works for some people - just think the site should have a "lose the comics" format.