skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It also quotes the old study that people barely ever reuse their reusable bags, when I think more people are far more well-aware now

I agree, (anecdotally) every time I go to the supermarket I notice that the vast majority of people walking towards the supermarket are carrying reusable bags. This wasn't the case just a year ago when it'd be very rare to see even a single person bringing their own bags.
When ytmnd was all the rage I had https://pi.ytmnd.com/ open for way too long and it unintentionally burned the first 9 digits into my memory.
There is one huge weak point in coding teaching: almost none of places where kids could publish their works. I'm not talking about simple code snippets but something bigger like real desktop, web or mobile application. There are some nice places in game industry, mostly addons for popular games. And besides that - literally nothing.

You can easily publish music, video, writing, but not working and ready to use software project.
I'm not sure if this is a bad thing.

There are far too many degree programs with dismal graduate employment rates in their field of study. It pains me to think of the many who are shouldering student loan debt for degrees that are barely employable.
Depending on whether you fly into O'Hare or Midway, you've got a significant or a somewhat significant journey into Chicago after you land. This doesn't negate your point, but needs to be taken into account for city-to-city service.
Side loading is incredibly rare as a phenomenon.

The important part of this discussion is not on the user side. Yeah they can sideload but really they won't do that because of IAP, of all things.

The important part of this discussion is on the developer side. Going through Google will mean they get to shape what apps developers can even economically build without falling back to sideloading (which just won't happen, see above) and we already see how "great" that in the iOS ecosystem.

Of course, you are in camp "IAP means clear and central subscription management, it's great for me!" then you might not care or even welcome this.

I happen to be in camp "What is good for the user should not be contingent on the business model allowing for a 30% cut going to google." There are and will be products/services users want, but not at 1.30 times the price, and those will simply become impossible now.

On the other hand... Let's just watch Rome burn and then see what we do with the ashes?
It's really cool stuff, straight up science fiction, we're living in the future and all that.

Buuuut wouldn't it be nice if all that Sciencing that is figuring out how to tightly control plasma in the most extreme of conditions was applied to something like, say, developing fusion reactors to solve our existential energy problems instead of making faster boom-booms that rain Revelations-style death and destruction down from the heavens?

I mean, don't get me wrong, some technologies can just be weaponized no matter what so bits of the fusion plasma research would still get siphoned off into some black budget somewhere. Let's be realistic here. But wouldn't it be nice if the knowledge trickle-down was going in the direction of solve-our-big-problems first, then worry about the self-apocalyptic boom-booms?
Rethinking the Way We Benchmark Machine Learning Models
It seems silly to pay so much for a chair with largely cosmetic benefits to have to place PTFE gliders on it to keep it from ruining your home
I only every heard of one murder of an advisor, that took place in 1978 at Stanford

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

Edit: Here is a NYT article about 2 other incidents

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/27/science/27murd.html

According to this article, Streleski bludgeoned his professor, not his advisor
Who reports the “low hanging fruit” security issues?
Huh, people get so wild about Apple, but Google takes your money and also sells your data. The saying "you are the product if the service is free" doesn't stand with Google.
there are very few trains anywhere in the world that are profitable if "profit" is determined by the balance of cost vs income.

most countries with extensive, speedy and reliable train service measure the "profit" of their systems by considering other measures in addition to these two very simplistic measurements.
Ask HN: Is it still possible for an individual to quit the internet?
How do you do it without being a total hermit? Can you even come close?

For all the talk of exit vs. voice, and the internet as the destination to exit to -- is there any meaningful way to exit from it without isolating yourself from society?
> Regional high speed rail is already in the works. Here's an overview of the Midwest plan, with a map: https://www.chicagoarchitecture.org/2010/01/16/midwest-high-...

Those blog posts are from 10 years ago Is that plan still current? What have they actually built in that time?
Finding topics can be hard - but usually I find my topics bubble up from my own interests and conversations.

Most often it happens when I notice that something I take for granted seems to be less-well understood, or perhaps misunderstood, by the community I am talking to.

Ideally I try to focus on a take-away, something people can go home and immediately implement or apply.

Obviously the conference itself matters - both in topic, but also projected audience. The topic should take people from where they are to somewhere new - and clearly to do that you need to understand where they are, and their goals.
Not really "some Amtrak Lines". One, and only one line, between the lower-mid-Atlantic and southern Florida.
I'd argue you are also substantially underestimating the scale and numerousness of biology: your body alone has more bacterial cells than there are stars in the observable universe - all you need is one viable cell to seed an entire planet. A planet teeming with life if it was shattered due to a collision would catapult billions or trillions of seed containing rocks across the galaxy. We have three unfathomable scales competing each other - light years in distance and 100s of billions of stars, billions of years and quadrillions or more of seed cells potentially floating in space. Of course any of these factors could he off by a few orders of magnitude but it's hard to suggest one hypothesis is more valid than other without data.
There's also the question of using a SAX or DOM based parser.

More than once, I've had to update a program using 32-bit perl from DOM (simple, fast) to SAX (slower but more control) as documents grew and the scripts crashed due to Out of Memory errors. Using SAX gave us event based handling to ignore certain nodes, or cache them to disk in another format as they got too big, and other fun stuff.

Rule of thumb was to multiply the document file size by 10 to get the memory footprint with a DOM approach, because of all the objects, relationships, and metadata that has to be stored for everything. One individual records got up above 100MB on disk we were in the danger zone.

Whereas JSON just loads into hashes and arrays and tends to not pose similar problems.
He also wrote an excellent introduction to semiconductor physics textbook, that Berkeley hosts for free!

https://www.chu.berkeley.edu/modern-semiconductor-devices-fo...
I think moving forward that anyone who proposes a change to any kind of data format spec should be required to implement that new part of the spec in the six most popular programming languages/implementations of the spec at the time.
Amtrak wants to remove the entire central portion of the Southwest Chief, turning the entire route between Kansas City and Albuquerque into bus service only. This was even before COVID19 happened. God knows what they will plan on doing post-COVID.
FWIW when driving, tolls along that route are roughly $10 each way... and that's low for the midwest.
Absent links to research papers confirming outlandish claims on plastic bags' environmental safety. This article reads as a petrochem industry mouthpiece.
And we know marine mammals die in large quantities due to ingested plastic trash - bags, bottles, nets etc. My friend lives on Canary islands, and she's observing casual plastic pollution (said bags, straws, cig butts ) with growing despair and disgust; paper bags may contribute to global warming by releasing methane while rotting in landfills, but they won't choke turtles and won't strand dolphins.
Correct, it doesn't add to your muscle mass when fasting, of course, that wouldn't make sense. What it does is increase fat oxidation and prevent the breakdown of your existing muscle. The net of it is a better final body composition; specifically a better fat:muscle ratio.
I don't know reliable numbers for this and I'm not sure they exist. Would love to hear though!

But just take stock of your surroundings. Think of everyone you know, and think who of them sideload apps on a regular basis. Now correct for the tech-affinity of your social surroundings (probably high if you hang out on HN...)

For me, only the most hard-core of my friends sideload at all. Everyone else goes with stock apps. So sideloading should be in the regime of "count the zeros before the first non-zero mantissa digit."
> I watched my dad spend his career getting promoted into misery. He worked so hard to climb the ladder and was successful at it, but it took him too long to realize it was making him miserable.

With every job I've had, I look at the people senior to me and ask "Do I want their job?"

Sometimes the answer is "Yes", but more often than not, the answer is "No." When it's the latter, you have a few choices:

1. Try to carve a unique senior role for yourself. I've never succeeded at this. In a big company, roles tend to be predefined. Or at least, if you're in a department where they aren't, then you likely would have answered "Yes" to the question above.

2. If you enjoy your work, just work to stay in it, do well but not get promoted. Accept your station in life.

3. Find another job.

I've never regretted following 3 above. It hasn't led to better opportunities or pay, but it does keep me active.
I'm sure the reasons for this trend are incredibly complex, but I suspect that undergraduate degrees are increasingly failing to accurately signal competence, pushing those wishing to distinguish themselves to pursue graduate studies.

So many factors are leading to increased number of undergraduate degrees... not limited to degree mills, grade inflation, standardized testing, and availability of virtually everything in undergrad curriculum available for "reference" online. This simultaneously increases the number of undergraduate degrees while decreasing the average quality. Institutions that rely on the formerly strong "has a degree" signal are finding that the signal is weakening. Undergraduates now failing to signal are somewhat forced to pursue more education.

I see the same thing happening with masters degrees. Universities seem to increasingly offer combined BS and MS programs. I don't believe strong MS students are formed by tacking on just an extra year to a BS program.

Finally, another observation on STEM fields: due to the funding situation and glut of PhD's it appears to be incredibly difficult to build a solid STEM career without a PhD. Undergrads in certain STEM areas try to leave university only to find out that they actually need more credentials to meaningfully work in the field they just spent 4 years studying for.
Thinking of it as graph helps due to its many branches, but it's still hierarchical.
Blur attacks bypass Bluetooth Classic and BLE security mechanisms CVE-2020-15802
I'd bring my paper bags back to the grocery store and fill them again, they'd usually last about 3 runs to the store before falling apart.

Because of the pandemic now, though, the store doesn't want me to reuse the paper ones. But I'll resume once the pandemic is over.
That number used to set the scale for the design rule set.

https://www.electronics-tutorial.net/Digital-CMOS-Design/CMO...
It's a random-number-generator seed, like any other. What's special in this case is that it's the starting point for a deterministic algorithm that generates an entire world. If you randomly discover a cool world, you can send people your seed and they can generate the same one.
Does he share the results of his tests anywhere?
Maybe going off on a tangent but as a German I never understood why in the US people have to study for some very basic jobs.
Jobs like nurse, pharmacist, physical therapist, etc. are 3 year apprenticeships in Germany. You apply directly at a company that is educating you on the job and you go to “work school” in alternating fashion.

On the other side you need some kind of education for almost any job here. Car mechanic, etc. So
it is not as flexible.

I just always cringe when I hear someone is going to university to study for a job. Many jobs just require more practical experience than knowledge. In the US the choices are extrem: either go to some university or do nothing at all and try your luck.
> While race and racism have, in popular discourse, been understood to refer to non-white people, we start with whiteness since whiteness has been the primary ideology that dominated the formation of the United States, its laws, power structure, society, and culture.

Why does anyone take this assertion seriously? "Whiteness" is not an ideology. Liberalism is barely an ideology. Multiple, competing ideologies have lived and died in American history; whiteness was not and is not one of them. Deconstructing white people into a strawman in order to attack it is offensive.
Lambda School’s ISA model is extremely good for the software training niche.

I think there are a lot of other models that could work if degree status gets separated from it’s theoretical purpose of education.

Why are all degrees for years? Why do all degrees cost the same?

A lot of the existing model doesn’t make much sense.

https://zalberico.com/essay/2019/04/08/lambda-school.html
They are self employed. They drive their own cars. They set their own work schedule. They engage with uber on per ride basis. They can be working for Uber, Lyft and the local minicab all at the same time.

They are not employees at all... and they must figure out their own holiday and sick pay.
Stackers ditched the wiki and migrated to Articles
Good. Hope it’s permanent.

Lambda is pioneering an ISA that only gets repaid if you find work in your field.

Let the schools fail that graduate burger flippers and retail sales clerks with $50k in debt. Nothing wrong with those jobs if you need work but you shouldn’t have a system setup to saddle young people with $50k in debt to do that kind of work.
It’s been relatively pointless for me seeing that the majority of my collaborative repos are under org accounts, which are not eligible to use the beta. Of course this is not the case for everyone, just my personal experience.

Otherwise, it’s nice. I prefer the flexibility of a self-hosted code-server instance that I can use for anything.

Waiting on them to enable org repos to really have at it with my team.
For building P2P / decentralized apps, could OT be used with some kind of leader election system?
Am I correct in thinking that you presume humans to be stochastic systems?
Time travel (reverse) debugging is a killer feature and only available for 2019 onwards. Prior to that you have to use their "IntelliTrace" stuff, which isn't nearly as good.
The cost of tolls, gas, depreciation per mile, depreciation time, monetary risk of accident, and etc could definitely make driving less economical than taking the train.
I agree that the system is very important - perhaps even more than the goal; but your example is less then ideal. The system is the journey - something that can be done for eternity and doesn't necessarily "finish". "Build core functionalities" is not a system, "code for 3 hours each day" might be.
I’m so inspired by Lambda I’m working on a startup where we use it in another non-tech field.

Time will tell.
BTW, if you leave a plastic back outside for a while in the sun, it'll disintegrate in a month or two. I discovered this because I believed "plastic is not degradable" and used one to patch a leak in my roof.

I have since switched to using soda cans. Cut the ends off, slice up the side, and flatten it. It makes for marvelous leak and flashing patch material. So far it has lasted for years :-)
Techniques for preparing are probably unique to each presenter. Some start by writing a paper, and essentially narrating that paper.

Personally I make flashcards - sometimes on paper, often in PowerPoint. I make a card for every major point (in no order) that i want to cover. Then I flesh those out with ancillary slides. Then I order them to make a narrative.

From there I refine it, add more, reorder, remove some, until I can do the presentation from start to end and there are no jarring jumps or omissions.

Obviously this is a faster process for subjects I know well, and where I have a specific point to make.

It's worth pointing out that it is harder to make a short presentation than a long one. Making a short one takes discipline (cut out the non-essential) and clarity (make your point clearly and with sufficient supporting material.)
Show HN: Lightweight runtime types for vanilla JavaScript
I think the person is talking about cases where working hard had a big impact, but the person did not benefit from it.

This is fairly normal. The only job I had where this wasn't the case was the one where the manager and his manager had grown from within - had worked on the same stuff we had, so they knew the ins and outs.

In all other cases, it's a manager who came from another team, and while they were very technically competent, they had never done our job. They usually were not in touch with what was needed to get the job done, and placed little value on much of the labor needed to get it done. This usually leads to team members manipulating their way into getting someone else to do the real work so they can do their manager's pet project. They get the promotion, even though the pet project dies soon after, and the folks doing the bread and butter for the team stay where they're at.
Your point about PhDs is spot on. I’m increasingly seeing job postings with PhD asks for software and ent architecture roles that don’t seem to articulate the need for the PhD. Anecdotally it seems PhDs are also getting dragged into the credential race.
Agreed in most part

The only winning move is not to play. See what's best for you and don't worry about the alleged perks of a "better university" so much (especially not so much as to get into crippling debt)

Universities want your money but it's not educational quality that's bringing students, it's the fluff, the facilities and the "connections". Meanwhile some janitors are making more than some faculty members.

And you can definitely build a stem career without a PhD, don't buy into the hype
The actual security issue with a proof of concept explanation.

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/112630336
The PSU will let you know in advance that power is going out. I think the interesting question is which SSDs have FTLs that can safely "park" in this time to a consistent state.

Is there a standard for PSU's about how long they provide power, that SSDs could design to?
That weave Xorg background is absolutely terrible. I get why they chose it, but still. Code up a gradient or something.
Why would someone "deserve" to be left behind for not boasting about their performance?
If people are doing good work, they should be rewarded appropriately.
So in 17 years the US military emitted as much as the US passenger vehicles in 2 years? What exactly is their definition of “the world’s largest carbon polluter”?
According to the judge - Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony are also the new MS.....
There might be another side on this. There might be a decent manager who knows that the current employees don't have the skills to do the job. Being 5-10 years in the company does not necessarily mean you are a good leader or manager to be promoted and become team lead, VP of engineering or CTO. Companies do that same mistake all the time.
In my experience taking credit for others' work is far more important than doing good work or taking credit for your own work.
User Retention Platform for Mobile Payment Apps – CleverTap
How Mobile Payment Apps can use CleverTap, a user retention platform, that gives brands a larger share of their users; wallets and help them retain users .
I'm always surprised by the negative comments about US colleges. Sure, they are expensive, and many students pursue useless degrees, but is it that big of a deal? Most people really enjoy going to college for the social experience. It's the first away from home experience for most young adults. I doubt that Lambda Schools or Devry will offer anywhere close to the social experience that a typical US college offers, even if they give better economic results. It would be a sad outcome if college saw a huge decline and wasn't an institution available for future students.
And with regard to "Find another job". Consulting might be one of the best options if you like to keep doing what you enjoy most while getting good pay. I believe as a consultant (depending on your role) you might also be better able to avoid office politics. E.g. you don't have to follow some stupid "improvement strategy" with your boss to get a 2% raise at the end of the year.
Does anyone have any context on PrivacyWall.org? They use the same privacy-first language as DuckDuckGo in their marketing, are a B Corp, and somehow bid enough to be included in the default set in most countries.
> "I can do anything I want for three years and it won't show up in the metrics!" No, you can do anything you want and it won't show up in the SEC/Wall Street reported metrics, but you better believe Amazon has faster-acting internal metrics than that.

I can't speak for Amazon, but what he said is true in my company. We have metrics, but a 3 year horizon sounds right. Rarely do bad endeavors get killed quicker than that.
Safari 14.0 and Mojave 2020-005 Security Update Causing Major Problems
So... Uber should buy cars and hire people? Then they have to ensure that people stay at work for X amount of time... and they can't work at night without overtime.

You're basically saying that Uber should just close and we get back to the fraudsters that are minicabs. Awesome! Let's make people poorer because "social justice".
maxlamb captured my sentiment exactly... tech is not synonymous with "internet connectivity".

Modern vehicles (ICE or EV) are vastly more sophisticated than "putting together metal on an assembly line" -- they're modern marvels of all the physical sciences: chemistry, thermodynamics, materials science, electronics, mechanics, aerodynamics, wireless connectivity, reliability, safety, real-time controls, computer vision, sensing, and on & on & on. Vehicles are vastly more "technological" than most mobile phone apps, especially one like Uber.

Pure software companies may (rightfully) fetch higher valuations, but that's simply due to the nature of their economics: higher margins, pricing power (oligopoly?), and negligible incremental unit costs.
Sure, why not? I quit Facebook et al. years ago. The only place I still post is here, for a little catharsis; but overall I don't miss it much. Maybe you mean a full exit, not using the Internet at all even for information purposes; but there's no reason to be so drastic. Just exercise self control and become read-only, for the most part.

I am more in contact with the people I care about now. Voice calls and texts are so much more direct and personal; you become involved in people's lives, rather than perfecting the art of exchanging the role of being the bystander.

What are you so scared you're going to miss out on?