skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We don't have a guarantee of a vaccine but we've already gotten better at both treating the disease and at defending ourselves from it. People and businesses didn't change their habits overnight. They're much more prepared now than before because of that extra time. And again, dying later rather than sooner is a benefit in itself.

Sweden has had 4000 extra people die early in the pandemic directly related to the strategy they chose. Treating that as "you just wait and see if it doesn't pay out in the end" is not an argument for why their strategy is better. And it's not true that there was any constitutional problem with doing lockdowns as they did do them. Just less because that's the strategy they chose.
The original analogy is pretty disingenuous and conveniently ignores a crucial detail: in the cereal example Kroger (presumably) still gets paid when the discounted box of cereal is sold. Whereas what they're asking for is the equivalent of Cheerios demanding to be placed on Kroger's shelves while cutting Kroger out of the transaction entirely. Why would Kroger ever agree to that?
I was thinking the same thing.

Debt is perfectly good metaphor for the collection of issues described. Just like one can get into financial debt via student loans or reckless credit card spending, tech debt can be accrued many ways.

Additionally, talking about the origins of tech debt also misses one big thing - many of us primarily work on other people’s code. We inherit the debt, so it doesn’t matter how it gets there.
Ask HN: Given a chance to train a Pigeon, what one skill will you train her for?
Did you know?

Pigeons were used for sending messages and invitations not only in ancient times, but as recently as early in the 1990s, during World War I.

If you have been given a chance to train a Pigeon.

What (one) skill will you train her for?

P.S. - The average peak speed of homing pigeons is 60 miles per hour.
This is not really communist style - they poured a lot of money into it post revolution. Search Hotel Černigov in Hradec Králové for a truly communist one.
That's contrary to the findings of the special council, who found that wikileaks did communicate and possibly coordinate with the Trump campaign.
The Dynamic Notebook
Exactly. This is not a term for developers. It is to explain tradeoffs or current state for anyone looking at the big picture.

I think the article is misunderstanding that we makes the whole article moot.
It still dilates the northern hemisphere and squashes the southern hemisphere though.
Sure. Maybe not in 2020, or even 2021, but at some point travel is likely to resume to pre-COVID levels. How long that takes is anyones guess, but the desire for a more efficient aircraft to cram even more people inside of to save on costs will always be a priority for any (remaining) airlines.
Wow wtf did I just read?
> I would recommend to just call it for what it really is. Bad code

If you work on a team, that just isn’t going to fly. I can’t imagine the toxicity of an environment where someone constantly was calling out other people’s code as being “bad”.
I've worked in multiple places, I am in London now. Jobs prospects are extremely variable by location. (It's near zero for most of Europe that could be qualified as deep countryside).

You're extremely lucky to have found a good opportunity in a good company. I will guess back that you live in a major metro area.

France has very little tech industry for many reasons that would be too long to cover. Even the largest national companies that need technology do not hire. If you're familiar with the myth that it's impossible to fire in France, in short that's true, once you have a job it's for life. One consequence is that no company is open to hiring, they only resort to staffing/outsourcing agencies.
How's it relevant that the company is a "contract house incorporated in the Isle of Mann" when its "ownership structure is a company within a nest of shell companies"? You think that island of 50km on the long side hosts this world class pilot training center?

When handing over the responsibility of training pilots to some entity inside another entity, like layers of an onion, it means you outsourced it into a black hole of regulation and competence. That structure is made to specifically obscure what these "cost saving" measures actually imply.

When we're talking about this kind of critical activities you want them happening somewhere where you can actually hold people accountable. Somewhere with visibility, transparency, and working judicial and legislature.
I wanted a monochrome terminal but was willing to tolerate traditional ANSI color. Once you start with 24 bit color you may as well start using a VNC client.

What sapped my will to live was the impossibility of doing a C-u C-x = on the overlays to determine how their contents were styled, forcing me to go into the source code of a ton of different packages to go fishing for face names to coerce to visible values.

Yes it’s possible but it’s insane. Emacs carries around all of this terminal baggage but many module developers seem to have forgotten about terminal users. Additionally, theming is conceptually broken in that it creates an MxN problem with themes and modes’ face names. This could be solved if modes stopped with the proliferation of mode-specific face names but good luck with that.
I don't think nice color schemes are the point - although I do highly appreciate them.

I've tried Spacemacs and it's pretty nice. Using it in vi-mode, it provides multicursors that are far more advanced than in any other editor I know. Also it has a sidebar.

On the other hand for me Spacemacs is pretty buggy (macOS + Linux), I sometimes have to redo commands. Some important vim shortcuts are not implemented and the sidebar is also not always working as it should. Therefore I refrain from adding more plugins to the mix.

Experienced Emacs tend to not use the Spacemacs theme and are working with solid configurations. Maybe a rock-solid default configuration would work.
And Java developers. And Ruby developers. And node developers.
Manifesto in favour of technological sovereignty and digital rights for cities
Unfortunately where I live, my last name is part of my address. One benefit is that I never receive incorrectly addressed mail.
https://www.heise.de/news/Data-Cities-Wie-Hacktivisten-Smart...
You could at least explain what features set it apart, in your opinion, from other type systems and why they are important in this case ...
There's a difference between using force within a legal framework (Proposition 8), and using extrajudicial force (cancel culture).

And that difference is that a sane instance (the law) can reject you if you're being insane, which did happen in the case of Proposition 8, but can't happen with cancel culture.

So you're justifying the usage of extrajudicial force with an already rejected attempt to use judicial force.

And you think that's fair, and you're the good guy.
China: We would like to compete with you on the world stage.

USA: Why would you threaten thermo-nuclear war like this!? You mad men!
If you can stand the eye-bleeding awfulness of Tumblr, there's also an interesting blog there which collects examples of non-Nazi Swastika usage:

https://reclaimtheswastikasymbol-bl-blog.tumblr.com/
It’s not that black and white. A simple hint when installing or downloading, “hey did you know that there are these starter packs?” would already do wonders.

It’s not that people are suggesting emacs tries to be everything to everyone; heck, by pure virtue of its extensibility, emacs is actually the one editor that could potentially be everything to everyone. But a simple startup screen, “hey, it looks like this is your first time using emacs. what kind of defaults would you like?” would do wonders and existing users would be entirely unaffected.
I would argue that the word is exactly right. Everyone who has been paying attention for the last four years knows the playbook. It's been literally dozens of times:

A bunch of NGOs or "government officials" make a ruckus, a handful of previously unknown people (usually women) make an accusation. No evidence besides "anonymous sources" and the whole nine yards. Days later, turns out it's all made up. That happened with almost every single one of "these" stories.

Unfortunately HN is currently even more politically charged than normal, so political stories survive since everyone is ignoring the rules. So a lie makes it into the minds of thousands. The later revealed truth is censored again, closing the circle.

That happened with multiple covid stories here (like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22730165 ) as well as political ones. I think HN should either enforce the rules, or push the following updates to the same spot on the site as the original lies.
The merge complexity in darcs 2 really hasn't been an issue in my usage. As I understand it, it is resolved for darcs 3, but maybe I misunderstood that from skimming what was going on. (The new theory seems to be different to Pijul's, and perhaps inferior.) I'd be happy with either as a joy to use.
My Hacking Adventures with Safari Reader Mode
It's an investment and the payback is considerable. I can start up emacs in any environment and it works the same. I could go back 20 years and use emacs without trouble.

Also I can move around in emacs and do stuff with macros that has saved me a lot of time. And emacs rarely has problems, unlike visual studio, which crashes occasionally and is permanently sending my dual-core to 100% of both.

Emacs refactoring, heh, not so good... So I use both, do main editing in emacs.
Until heads roll--actual criminal liability--then I'm afraid your point stands:

Catastrophic failures are a cost of doing business.
macOS Security Update 2020-005 High Sierra, Security Update 2020-005 Mojave
I’ve seen plenty of U.S. military personnel posting TikTok videos while browsing the app. Many of them are casually posting their experiences of reserve duty life but I’ve seen a couple taken from outposts in Syria.

Why is this tolerated if the U.S. Gov has major concerns about the PRC’s having access to TikTok’s data?
Meanwhile, the core lacks: multilingual, CDN support, caching. Essentials.
Yes!
I am now imagining a vive tracker built out of two candles spinning at 300hz

What could go wrong!?
Firstly, it's about scheduling and prioritising. If anything comes up that might be a blocker, or has been blocking you, or will in the future, you mention that as it relates to scheduling, and go solve the block whenever you want. There is zero expectation for you to wait for standup to raise any issue.
Why my submit is dead? -because I banned :)
Also talking about it in negative terms can create bias towards perfection. The bigger the company becomes the more important good code becomes, but in the beginning you might have to cut a lot of corners in order to get to market as soon as possible in order to start making money. In same way you would take a loan to get off the ground faster. If you want to write perfect code, yes coverage during that time it will simply take many times more time and 6 months to market might change into few years.

In start ups that became big people often complain about existing code being a mess, but if it wasn't created as mess the company wouldn't ever had become that big.
Presumably they're serving you ads based on the site you're visiting rather than tracking you from site to site across the internet. Kind of an old-fashioned way of doing things, but might make sense for niche publications like this.
The species has barely existed for the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms so there's not much past in that regard.

On our own timescale terms we have a rare tendency to group together for intra species battles, and a unique tendency to do that with groups numbering millions.

We have an evolutionarily unprecedented and unmatched phenomenon, advanced intelligence, which we employ in scaling the destruction in those battles, to the point we now have the ability to cause catastrophic, possibly existential damage to our species, at least as a civilisation wherein this discussion makes sense; let alone the collateral damage to our environment and co-habitees.

That's just the war stuff.

The peaceful things we do are too depressing to mention.
I’ve been working on a project at work to try to measure the interest paid on technical debt. And I think developers are the only people who can really measure that. Their time is the cost. The only way to understand how much of it is paying principal, how much is paying interest, and how much of it is just “buying stuff we actually need” comes down to having that conversation with the engineers.

One of the big things I’ve learned speaks to your point though: it’s not a natural way of thinking for most engineers. There are a few who are “natural complainers” who can tell the difference between “work that needs to be done” and “work I have to do because someone took a shortcut in the past”.

But actually many of the “natural complainers”, while they have strong “this is insane” detectors, they often complain about anything that’s not perfect. But that’s not exactly what we want. Many things are not perfect but they’re pretty easy to work around. That’s not an interest payment it’s just an annoyance.

And on the other side of the spectrum there are a lot of coders who have a “whatever it takes” mindset, and they can’t really perceive interest paid at all. To them, every necessary thing is reasonable. If it has to be done it has to be done. They don’t really think about how it could be done more easily in a different world... because we’re not in that world! Why think about a hypothetical!

So, I have some more thinking to do about how to teach folks to think critically about their time and past decisions.

And the other big learning I got is the recording of interest payments is only useful if it’s somewhat regular. So I think it has to be an official, required part of the production process. If people have to remember to report on interest paid, they just won’t.

The project is on pause right now, but I’d like to give it another shot with those things in mind. I think I’m going to wait until a time when it feels like it fits in with the needs of the managers though. Otherwise that second piece of “part of the process” is gonna be hard.

But if I can at least put an “interest paid” number on some tasks, my hope is that will provide a good way to identify which projects will “pay off” if they are “paid off”. Basically I want a vaguely rigorous way to put refractors and infrastructure work up against new features so they can be compared 1:1 during planning.

Also feel free to email me if anyone is interested in something like this at their company.
Microsoft claims to love open source – this alleged leak of Windows XP code is p
It’s common for countries to put themselves in the centre. U.K. does it for English maps, America does it, so does Russia and Australia. And it makes sense too because it allows you to give context to the other land masses (though it’s usually don’t for vanity reasons).
That's a really interesting concept. ‘Luxury beliefs’.

I find it similar to the 'victim blaming' call by Woke people.

The same people will protect their children, teach them what to wear and were to go and everything good parents should do. Basic Situational Awareness.

But if a protective member of the public service warns those who don't come from safe environments, it's victim blaming.

The Woke are the real 1%, very disgusting, appearances are more important than the health of the less fortunate.

But I think the upper class always end up where they begin. You are poor you live on wood. You are rich you live on carpet. You are really rich (A current Westerner) you once again live on wood. Wealth becomes showing you don't have to show it. I don't know how that fits in with ‘Luxury beliefs’.
Kexit: Internal border in Kent will see HGVs require 'Kent Access Permits' in a
This is a fantastic article, I really enjoyed reading it. A lot of stuff that I "knew", but have found hard to put together into a cohesive thought.

For those of us who are happy where we work, and enjoy our colleagues, work, and have satisfied with our compensation, does anybody have any recommendations for articles on how to work on our next salary negotiation opportunity? I know the jump will likely be below one that could be received if I jumped to somewhere else.
If new people don't use it, both its user base and developer list will monotonically decrease until both reach zero which may happen sooner than it could've been otherwise.
I absolutely loathe and despise the arrogant 'your code must be bullshit' attitude that runs throughout this article.

When you encounter other peoples' code and it looks a bit complicated, and not the 'obvious and simple' thing, your first thought should never be 'they wrote bullshit code', but instead 'what have I missed? What did I forget to consider for this function?'

I don't know anything about the glibc authors, or their code style, but if you go through your life assuming incompetence if someone wrote a function differently to your initial thoughts, then you are an arrogant prick.
It's locked up behind a paywall, but people confuse "correlation" with "equivalence." For this to be a catch-22, you'd need an amazingly strong correlation.

Also, most psychology results fail to replicate. A single paper has about a 60-70% chance of being nonsense, probably more.
So you deny it to be so?
They also could've taken far less money e.g. asking for less equity in startups.
That is how negotiating works. The candidate probably had other offers that were higher. Are they supposed to take your offer just because you were first?
And yet, they aren't the government and in no position to implement policy.

Do you have a point of any substance to make?
That isn't Emacs, that's Stallman, who is known to be stubborn.

It already caused a major fork, XEmacs, which used to be important, I suppose, but a combination of GNU Emacs catching up with the features XEmacs people wanted and XEmacs simply sputtering out has made GNU Emacs the last full Emacs standing again.
So... If we can survive in an artificial environment for thousands of years, why we need another star at all?
Mac OS wasn't this ugly.

Seriously: You can't just incorporate some design element and go "see, it looks like X". It won't. What most people making software seem to miss is that software look & feel isn't the design of widgets, but also click behavior, layouts, click paths, description texts, animations, delay after a click ...

/tangentially related rant
Phishing-Resistant One-Time Codes Autofill Delivered via SMS
And while at it, stop using all the "typical GNU bullshit". Let's see how far you will get.
I think all CMS I have used (aside for one I built of course)
Are annoying, and getting pixel perfect results is challenging. I presume that will become easier when we move to headless CMS.

The reason I like he and that often insists on it ,is because my team finds it both tedious and boring to have to make constant changes every time some in marking or legal or content writers which to ”change a few things” It is also far cheaper for them to so it themselves, and my team can can focus on on more important things. And yes there will be times when a developer needs to make changes still.

The company I am at now sends” superusers to pretty tremendously comprehensive training on how to use the CMS tool. Usually, one or two people from each department are chosen to be superusers.

That all works out much better than my team had to do the training. We were frankly not very good at it and it is far cheaper to outsource that for us.

All of that means that our team get magnitudes fewer phone calls or tickets about how to do X or Y since the go to the super users for help. If the superusers are not about to figure it out he or she contacts us.

This is awesome because when the superusers contacts us she can give a much more insightful description that a newbie employee with limited exposure to CMS's. To our tools. And often not that familiar with computers.

People often talk about CMS being too slow in production. We have very few problems with that.

We took a lot of time evaluating and testing the tools we use both for performance and for ease of expanding extending and customizing and developing And superusers how we believe our superusers will like the interface. And yes of course we had focus groups with potential superusers we're they could give us feedback.
It seems.
I am aware that in this case, it is just Google wrongly classify something that does not have explicit nudity as porn.

However, my question is, why are all major platforms banning pornographic content (video, novel, illustrations, etc.)? Or, why do we even sometimes view them as degenerating? Isn't the fact that PornHub is so successful a proof that we, as humans, do enjoy porn?

Also, this might not be true since I didn't do a research, but I really felt that almost everyone reading this comment have at least enjoyed some form of porn in their lives. If they are so prevalent, why are we banning them?

Edit: Although I do believe YouTube should allow porn and GitHub should allow open source erotic games, but I am mainly talking about Apple App Store or Google Play Store not allowing sexually explicit apps.
If this thing is coming to live with us for a little while, doesn't it deserve a better name than "object 2020 SO?" How about ... Lunacris?
Hydrogen-powered passenger plane completes maiden flight in ‘world first’
>>> Move to the US?

Moving to the US is almost never an option, because of VISA.

Even if you manage to get a VISA and find work there, you won't have the same career prospects as a local (culture, network, education, visa issues, etc...). Few companies sponsor VISA and when they do they know they got you by the balls because you can't change jobs without losing the VISA.
Is it bad to say that the Pictures look like a long forgotten but still cool MMO? No Players but the NPC are still active..
HN readers lean left? Most of us shut up about politics while on a tech site. Maybe people that lean left like to shout about it everywhere they go...
> Every “conspiracy” I’ve heard about the NSA and friends turned out to be true

And therefore every next thing anyone on the Internet concocted has to be true as well?

I get what you're saying though, and I'm well aware of the dual mandate. But you haven't given me anymore reason to believe this particular one, and I find it strange because I've never heard of any company in any country having to give their software to an intelligence agency before being allowed to release only the modified version. Implanting backdoors is not unheard of, but after they had great success with the clipper chip it's usually done without the company in question knowing about it.

You say the excuse was to validate some implementation, but in that case Microsoft wouldn't need to publish any modified versions, the nsa would just point out "this contains too strong crypto, can't export this" or "you made a mistake in algo X allowing attack Y". Not "please substitute this dll with our version and better not tell your customers!".
This is kind of orthogonal to the previous claim.

Morality is what you do when no one is looking.

If traffic laws are being enforced, it changes the calculus from "if I drive recklessly I can eat today" to "if I get caught driving recklessly and am fined I don't eat today or tomorrow".
Arch Linux Setup with Encryption (LVM on LUKS)
Drew...doesn't, actually, use much of it at all. I don't like the article, but you picked the one person who basically lives by what he rants about.
Moon has hazardous radiation levels, scientists warn
haha no. Society is not intentionally twisted.
Speaking off shell replacements: Are there any worthwhile ones today? I know Cairo, but it's "meh". The windows default shell is just buggy and glitchy as hell (even though I generally mostly like it - a version with fewer glitches would be enough for me, really).
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