skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recently had my own host of cable internet issues.

So about 3 months ago the RJ45 cable in my cable modem melted. I thought it was a freak accident. I checked all of my networking equipment, checked my outlets, etc. No problems. So I installed a new cable and then everything was fine.

Cue 2 weeks ago. Connectivity became intermittent and then finally I had no internet for almost a week. Comcast wouldn't be able to send anyone out for a month. So I started digging around for the problem. A little over a year ago they sent out techs to work on my neighbors internet and in the process foolishly cut my coax. So I started from the cable tap and worked my way backwards.

There wasn't a continuity problem from what I could tell, no one either intentionally or unintentionally cut the cable. Then I look on the back of my house where the coax from the street is bonded to my home's grounding rod. Everything to the right of the bond was completely melted and still super hot. NOT GOOD.

So I did some testing of the bonding wire to the ground, the resistance was 37 ohms (should be much less than this). And there were no other electrical problems. My thought at the time was somehow power was being backfed from the cable tap to my home. So I removed the cable from the street and disconnected everything inside that was touch this cable.

Almost immediately I start getting voltage drops in my house, can't even run the microwave. That's when I realized what was really going on. The cable line was being used as a return path because the neutral for my neighborhood was at least partially severed.

It was so bad that if I increased voltage load in my home past a certain point then the streetlights in the front of my home would completely turn off.. Yes I could turn city infrastructure off and on by toggling the voltage load in my home.

The power company within a few hours had a crew come out to diagnose and fix the issue since it's actually potentially dangerous. They confirmed for me it was indeed a bad neutral. As soon as they replaced it I spliced my coax line, reconnected it, and everything worked perfectly.
The Android app hasn't worked for me for the past four months. I reinstall it clean it completely etc but I still get error messages about a slow connection on 250mbits Internet and notifications doesn't get updated or not sent at all.
Messages I send on the app takes around 25mon tog et sent, if they do.
Calls stay open and steal battery due to notification getting stuck forever...
I reported errors multiple times but no change. They just pile on more features for management without a thought out into UX, which only gets worse and worse or bug fixes.

If you are in a meeting you cannot send code to another chat member you ha e to use the other window to do that.

Go check the latest blog posts on Teams blog, they all talk only about management features, cuz that is what the tool is for, for managers to keep track of you.
What an absolutely tone deaf thing to say. "It can't be our product that's using out dated philosophies. It's the users that don't know how to use it properly"
International Electrotechnical Vocabulary
Ernő Rubik on why his famous cube is a “metaphor” for the human condition
Another example recently cropped on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24544232

> Parsing is not where the time goes.

Not with the current algorithms.

But let's agree to put this argument to a rest. I generally agree with you that

1. Current software practices are wasteful, and it's getting worse

2. According to 1. most performance improvements can be attributed to HW gains.

I originally just wanted to point out that this was true in general, but that there were exceptions, and that hot paths are optimized. Other tendencies are at play, though, such as the end of dennard's scaling. I tend to agree with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24515035 and to achieve future gains, we might need tighter coupling between HW and SW evolution, as general-purpose processors might not continue to improve as much. Feel free to disagree, this is conjecture.

> And yes, you have to modify the software to actually talk to the hardware, but you're not seriously trying to argue that this means this is a software improvement??

My point was more or less the same as the one made in the previously linked article: HW changes have made some SW faster, other comparatively slower. These two do not exist in isolated bubbles. I'm talking of off-the-shelf HW, obviously. HW gets to pick which algorithms are considered "efficient".
Loved this:

“ X-COM provides the merest glimpse of what it must feel like to be an actual commander in war: the overwhelming stress of having the lives of others hanging on your decisions, the guilty second-guessing that inevitably goes on when you lose someone. It has something that games all too often lack: a sense of consequences for your actions.”

All a consequence of getting to name your soldiers. Humans have so much affection for something they can name...
I also use Gandi. So far no problems (but I'm not very picky). I think the main reason to use Gandi was that I could search for any domain without the fear of it being bought the next day by squatters. I don't really like their web UI/UX though.
Open-Source Maintainers' Must Haves
Boyd had a veritable fetish for fighters that were cheaper, less performing but smaller and maneuverable.
He also came up with the OODA stuff, if you're really into that kind of thing.
They aren't stupid or lazy, they're just raised with the (mistaken) impression that they're better than everyone else. But they are capable of working, just not doing the same jobs as the lower castes. So they're hired to be the leadership layer.

Outside of India they're hired because they do have good qualifications, or because they come with a strong recommendation and connections. And again, they're not incapable of doing their jobs just don;t expect them to do "low end" jobs.

And another surprising fact, when I was working together just with someone from a higher caste he would have the same attitude around me that the lower caste guys had around him. So even if in a top caste they'd concede that "the white man is superior". And while I appreciate the conviction they put in the whole class system to the point where they will accept me as being superior based purely on the color of my skin, I still found the whole thing disgusting.
I played a good chunk and then I decided to see what would happen if i just shot everyone. I mean literally everyone, civilians, guards, everyone. I was disappointed to see that this tactic could actually have carried me to the end (I played a good 20% of the game like this to see how far I could push it and... I just didn’t hit any major resistance so in the end got bored and gave up — a little bit after deorbiting the ship, for context. It’s my understanding that’s reasonably close to the end although I can’t be sure since I didn’t continue)
existing discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24551808
Show HN: Sborex, the low code app platform POC, documentation
18 month? What were they doing? A spectrum analyser is standard equipment.
I work in Fintech, our customers are banks and the like. They actually buy our software because it generates value directly instead of trading in human attention.

Maybe you think banks are just as bad as advertisers but I tell myself I am enabling the tens of millions of Americans who have retirement accounts. The day-to-day is enjoyable nonetheless.
For an interview in this article: https://www.econtalk.org/andy-matuschak-on-books-and-learnin...
If it's just a (static) website and going to be low traffic, github-pages with a custom domain works well.
> And many of the more modern models have never had fatal crashes, making this kind of comparison impossible.

They haven’t had any fatal crashes, but also haven’t flown tens of millions or more of flights either, so I agree, kinda apples and oranges for the Airbus neo models (their “equivalent”, using that term very loosely, to the 737 Max).

The A380 is the best example though of a zero fatal crash, but hardly any flights by modern standards (I think it’s flown under a million commercial passenger flights total in history, but can’t find a conclusive source). It also had two “uncontained engine failures” causing emergency landings, but thankfully no deaths in either case.

I’d argue personally that the 777 is a very very safe plane too, despite the numbers not fully supporting it. Of the fatality incidents involving the plane, one was shot down by a missile, one mysteriously disappeared from the earth with no plausible technical failure, and the final one was a clearly incompetent flight crew missing the runway at SFO.
"Rudimentary creatures of blood, and flesh, you touch my mind, fumbling in ignorance, incapable of understanding."

-- Mark Zuckerberg
I feel like the author is referring more specifically to troubleshooting issues when production goes down, which I'm fine with if I have no other people asking me for updates. But, I burnt out at my lost job trying to do support, because there was individual support baked into every contract for our SDK and not remotely enough people to handle it all. I was hired as a software developer, not a customer support person, and they are not the same thing. It's unfortunate, because it was my first and highest paying gig after realizing that I also have ADHD, and it was a good company. Thing is, if I have a problem to solve or task to complete, I'm not going to think about how long it's been since I replied to whoever about their pet issue. I'm just going to zone in on my thing, and if the guy next to me doesn't break me out of it by cracking eggs on the desk and burping, then I'll stay on that thread till it's done. That's how my brain works, and expecting otherwise is naive. Anyway, this constant context switching and battling my apparent insufficiency killed my spirit for the work and I turned into a blob of productivity. It's as stupid as expecting me to cook while programming, because either the food, myself, or the code will get burnt.
But Android isn't Java, and Kotlin's penetration on the Java platform is ~2-4% and no greater than Scala's (or not much greater, and certainly no bigger than Scala's at its peak). It's a great achievement for an "alternative" Java-platform language compared to others -- and because Java (the platform) is so big, this translates to a respectable number people compared to many other languages, especially when you add the Kotlin-on-Android people to the Kotlin-on-Java people -- but let's not get carried away.
My wife quilts, and cuts fabric frequently on a laser cutter. It works great.
Sure, but this was my point, x264 is very fast on commodity hardware, the overwhelming amount of video delivered is still h.264, especially on live video, and in particular for low-viewership, live user generated content.

If you want/need to transcode to VP9 or AV1 at scale with good quality, yes, you'll absolutely need GPU or ASIC accelerated encoders, of which there are a couple for VP9, and none for AV1 today.

h.264 will get you to 95-99% market penetration on the device landscape.
"…is that it doesn’t change."
Hi, I've put together some hints on how somebody can try what the visual app/service platform I'm creating now, is capable of.
I've always seen Rust as a transitional language like SmallTalk or ALGOL. It's a glance into the future of programming and the Next era of modern languages but probably not the next 40 year language itself.
In the UK "popped in" is still used a lot e.g. "I popped in to Tesco on the way home"
Things are a little different When you have multiple people trying to work from home.

Even if a single connection is limited to 8Mbps a fatter pipe helps because you have more than one connection at any given time. Oh and fiber can do xMbps both ways I believe. Even Comcast gigabit is only 30Mbps up.

Where in the US can I get:

1. Cheap land to build a house

2. Under half an hour drive to Costco/sams club

3. Paved road to property

4. Water and sewage

5. Electricity

6. Fiber gigabit Internet

What else am I missing?
Growing up, I've pretty much never learned anything from lectures or textbooks in school. In math/science you prepared by doing the exam review questions and the "humanities" type courses, to be honest, I still don't know.

As an adult I took some Coursera courses and it was much much better. There are problem sets that test your knowledge after 10 minute chunks of lecture, but the biggest difference for me was being able to 2X speed and rewind infinitely.

The ability to speed through the filler and replay parts I didn't understand makes me think that all lectures should be taught like this instead, and professors should just be available for questions and help with problem sets.
"The Amazon Web Services offer will not be available to request again until January 2021. We apologize for the inconvenience."

source: https://www.techsoup.org/products/amazon-web-services-credit...
Also space invaders in sqlalchemy (actually a decent primer) https://github.com/sqlalchemy/sqlalchemy/blob/master/example...
How I Made the Internet Garbage
Buy yourself an RTL dongle and a wide-spectrum omnidirectional antenna and run a spectrum analyser when the problems recurs. That will get you the frequency, bandwidth and modulation of the interfering signal.

I'm dismayed but not surprised that Openreach in the linked example launched straight into replacing sections of cable. They don't seem to spend much time actually analysing a problem.
It's not all rainbows and sunshine here. Having such a trainwreck of a neighbour to the south really shifts the window.
This is Openreach we're talking about. Everything happens in 6 month intervals. So those 18 months were likely: 6 months to realize there's a problem, 6 months to assign a contractor to the ticket, 6 months before their next availability for the job.
Some books explicitly claim to teach you a specific skill. And some people have that general expectation towards books. This is what the author criticizes, as I understood their points.
Yeah, but it tells them wrong story about what the root cause is. That is wrong IMHO. This is not a rogue corporation that has to be stopped, this is a rogue government that has to be stopped.
See if your password is stored in plaintext
It could be argued that Google is getting more evil relative to its size, not its age. Ergo, you can’t extrapolate the trend unless you expect them to keep growing infinitely.
With respect to your last paragraph, that's because Jobs doesn't really fit the mould that we "construct" as humans when trying to understand other people.

In general, tech industry leaders should be able to manage context-switching between technical and non-technical decision-making, but very few leaders can excel at it, if their life were to depend on it. This is why we have very few of them like Andy Grove, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs & Elon Musk.

A lot of engineers do not consider Steve Jobs to be technical partially because he was admitted to study a non-technical degree (unlike Andy, Jeff or Elon) and partially because of the way he is documented to have ripped off engineers he has worked with. The reasoning is if he was capable of doing the work himself, why hire someone else to do it or at least devalue their work in a way he wouldn't like to be treated?

Also in tech, we generally fall into two buckets: technical and non-technical, but Jobs as a person didn't neatly fit into either bucket as evidenced by this description taken from Wikipedia. It aptly describes Jobs in a way that different writers fail to do:

He was described by a Homestead classmate as "kind of a brain and kind of a hippie ... but he never fit into either group. He was smart enough to be a nerd, but wasn't nerdy. And he was too intellectual for the hippies, who just wanted to get wasted all the time. He was kind of an outsider.

This phenomenon, in IMHO, is why a lot of writers explain his contributions from the perspective they are most familiar with. A non-technical writer trying to extol his virtues as a business leader will generally not be qualified to speak about his technical leadership abilities, causing readers to think his technical skills are average at best (or even non-existent, similar to his contemporaries in business). The converse is true.
What a terrible take. If anything I'm convinced that reading blogs with pumped up titles and nothing important to say are the things that don't work.

Did anyone get the point behind the title in all that text? But sure, let's bring down the thing that has been the pillar of human knowledge for thousands of years because it's "static". Amazing...
Parents had the same issue with rain before they moved to fibre (which also barely works but eh, at least it barely works reliably.) Seems to be common enough that's it's trope-y.
Raw servlets and JSP is surprisingly nice when a little bit of server rendering is required. war-file is tiny and functionality is adequate.
Sweary Lightweight Agile Planning
> Of course it's a matter of personal taste.

To a certain extent yes, but TFTD is objectively even buggier than the original. IIRC it is even possible to put the original game into an unwinnable state by simply researching things in an unintended order. Fortunately OpenXCom[0] fixed this.

[0] https://openxcom.org
Upper management whose KPI are solely on base of profit make a couple of big fat paychecks over the year as ever more and more is gutted. Now that the dung pile has grown so big that it touches the ceiling fan, that guard of beancounter managers has long moved on to other companies to raze...
I love diagrams and pay for CloudCraft so I’m no stranger to the value of good diagram tools.

But I looked at that cloud formation design and immediately thought “crap that’s probably going to cost way too much to run”. Anyone got a good up to date cloud formation to dollars per month tool and want to estimate it? (I’m on a mobile at the moment)
You learn facts by attempted to recall and by creating relationships to already known facts. So for humanities, you learn by making notes from test, trying to recall them, trying to write own essay based on the texts or answering questions etc.

The same thing as you do with math/science where you learn by actively engaging with topic.
Everything you say rings very true to me. Most Indians are very reluctant to talk about this. Of several that became friends when I worked with a team in BLR, only one became close enough that we could discuss it. He himself was from one of the very highest sub-castes (which he taught me was trivially knowable from his surname) but very enlightened. I was shocked to discover that all but two or three out of about fifty colleagues were Brahmin[1]. It explained a lot of the dynamics I had already observed, like why one of the best engineers in the place had never been promoted or why some of them literally wouldn't even talk to another. Caste, especially Dalit vs. everyone else, still seems to be very much a thing. But, as you say, nobody wants to discuss it.

[1] That's the word he used. It might well have been shorthand for a more complex concept that he knew I wouldn't understand.
Agreed. Yet that's likely what will happen. Similarly to the hype cycle. There's a trough between the peak and the stable region. Global coordination efforts reached a peak around 2016 (paris climate talks). The science is fairly settled, the models are just being fine-tuned, and any excitement for change is largely gone. What's left is slow buildup of problems, dread and finally maybe some momentum.
It's not for everyone. But as you can see in some comments here and on Twitter, the people who love it, really love it, which is not something you can say about the big old banks.

They know full well they're not going to win over people who are already established with a major bank.

So their very deliberate strategy is to appeal to young people, who are perhaps just getting a bank account for the first time or at least are not yet deeply entwined with a bank, and then hoping to keep them for long enough that they become high-value customers over the next 10-20 years.

So if you're not a young person and/or if you already have an attachment to a bank, you're not really in their target audience.

(Edited last line for clarity.)
Trick to change App Icons on iPhone and iPad (iOS 14)
Because most popular nonfiction could really be boiled down to a blog post or two, but it’s hard to justify $15 for a 2-3 page pamphlet.
Most egregious example I've seen of this is Eir (formerly Eircom), the main Irish telco. They used to advertise some of their _ADSL_ as fibre! By this they meant the exchange had fibre backhaul; back in the day many exchanges had microwave backhaul, in some cases as low as 8Mbit/sec for a whole town.
Random auditing by machine learning algorithms looking for suspect transactions.
Books work in different ways.

Memory isn't freeform, it's triggered and asssociative. If I ask you what you were reading a year ago, you probably won't be able to tell me. But if I mention an associated experience or concept, your recall may be triggered and you'll be able to remember something relevant - and talk about it, possibly in some detail.

People are much better at remembering narratives and parable than facts, and also better at remembering practical experience than theory.

Textbooks are useless unless you do the exercises and use your new skills to solve real problems.

But it's also why liberal political and economic books rarely have much political influence.

The right always frames its points as memorable narratives with an emotional kick, not as attempts at objective analysis. The left rarely understands why this matters, or how you can use that one weird trick to persuade people to do all kinds of stupid and self-destructive things.

See also the ad industry, talk radio, QAnon, etc.
So many great memories of that game!

One thing they miss, in the intro about "plug into the success formula", is that there was a single-level demo on a floppy that came with one of the gaming magazines.

The wacky thing about the demo was that you were given raw recruits with minimal weapons, and then put up against the most difficult aliens in the game! It was brutally difficult, even by X-COM standards.

The other cool thing about the original X-COM was the crazy stories that just came out of gameplay... a friend got the Blaster Bomb, and on his first use of it, had his entire squad get way back out of the way before he targeted the door of an alien ship. Turns out the squad wasn't far enough back, and it killed them all! Hurray for save games :-)
Orange France does that???

In my experience, Orange Slovakia refuses to do that; they have their Huawei OLTs, hand out Huawei ONTs and they only thing they were willing to do is switching the ONT to bridge mode.

That's not all: you cannot use any Huawei ONT, even if it is the same model as they use. You must use one provided by them. They are activated by serial numbers and they won't activate it if isn't their. So for a long time I had a router with SFP interface, but it was useless and I had to run the ONT next to it anyway.

On similar topic: how is IPTV done in France? Here, it looks like IGMP, the ONT does IGMP proxying and the upstream interface for the multicast subnet is a separate VLAN. (This is something, that many routers have problem with).
One of the more curious ones is FTTrN (Fibre to the Remote Node) - which is essentially a miniature VDSL DSLAM at the top of a telegraph pole. Well, that's how it started out - but it seems they're using it as a local node to run FTTP as well now - the only issue being that they want to run the fibre in the ground from the pole to the property, rather than taking the existing aerial route. (And that carries associated excess construction costs).

It has been popping up in quite a few villages in East Yorkshire due to being paid for by the county rural broadband fund.