skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many years ago I was working as a IT tech trainee, and our company had gotten a contract to upgrade some ~350 local office Unix servers to NT4 for this company. The clients used Windows 3.11, with home directories shared over SMB. Number of users varied between 20-30 to a few hundred.

Clients would still be running win3.11 on the same 486's, but instead a trimmed netboot variant which connected directly to a remote desktop on the NT4 server (Citrix).

The NT4 server would be configured and set up centrally and then shipped, us techies "just" had to copy over the user docs and mail to the new server.

See each user had a home directory and a mail directory, and after copying the data we had to go to each directory and set up the permissions. We've gotten documentation on how to do it, which involved the usual right-click property dialogs, finding the right user in the list etc.

This process was very tedious and labor intensive, not to mention error prone, and was the majority of the several days of on-premise install time.

After a couple of installs my inner programmer took over, and decided there had to be a better way. So I spent a day writing a few batch files that would copy the data, and then iterate over the directories and calling "cacls" directly. At the end I had a small tool which sent an email to an SMS gateway.

After that all we had to do was hook up the new server, start the batch file and go for a 2-4 hour lunch until we got the SMS. Then we could verify the log files from my batch files that everything went ok, possibly fix one or two small issues and go home. On most installs we were done the first day, rather than spending 3-5 days.

I distributed these files to the group and got a lot of praise from the other techies. Then my boss popped by and that's when I learned that in the contract, they would get paid by the number of users per location as they had estimated the work by that. So we would still get paid for 3-5 days of work, while the vast majority would be done in less than one day, and none went more than two days after my scripts were used. So me, a trainee, earned the company a quite significant amount of money by being lazy.

On an side note, this project also taught me the importance of planning.

This project occupied the majority of the available techs in our company during the 3 months of rollout. Servers were prepared at our headquarter and shipped so that techs started install on Mondays, and each Monday for 12 weeks roughly 30 servers got installed. The rollout went flawlessly and on schedule, with only a disk cable coming lose during transport of the very last server causing an issue.

However, the project group had been sitting next to my office so I knew they had spent one and a half years planning and testing. A significant portion of that was the logistics of the rollout itself.
There are economic reasons behind it. My company used to invest a lot of training in the employees because most employees were working for the same company a very long time, more than half till retirement. I got a lot of training ~ 20 years ago as a new hire, while the new hires today get almost nothing, not even the bare minimum to do their job. Why? Well, a few weeks ago I had a meeting with a team from a very well known IT company for a project and they all expressed their amazement when they heard I am working for such a long time in one place; people now stay 3-5 years in a company and move on. Why train them, to make them better for the next job?

Companies that invested a lot in their employees paid less than companies that had no such expenses, so it became common to have a new hire, spend 3 years on trainings and leave for a better salary. This competition pressure made us adjust and move the training budget into salaries.
LG OLEDs with Gsync are absolutely amazing.

My only concern is the longevity of OLED.
> This has rung true in my life many times over. I've tried complicated note and habit tracking apps that just do far more than I ever need and I tend to get stuck in the weeds, missing the forest for the trees with these types of platforms.

Exactly. Use something simple that works for you. Design a system yourself if you can. Here is a system that works for me, either on paper and with a simple text editor in Markdown.
https://github.com/YJPL/personal-kanban

>[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21222150: "if you can't do it on paper first, you're not ready to computerize the problem."

So true.
The vast majority of the train system was built on public land that was provided to those private builders for free. If they had to pay for the land they never would have built in the first place.
AI researcher describes influencing the world using targeted simulations
> This is one of the reasons I paid the premium and went for a Sony instead. They haven't done anything stupid like this yet

Oh they have. Many times over. Two instances affected me[1][2] and that was enough to swear me off all Sony products for the last 10 years. Only now am I contemplating buying from Sony again (a PS5). I don't think any multinational company is above trading their customers needs for a few extra quid.

[1] Sony BMG copy protection rootkit scandal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

[2] Removal of "Other OS" feature from Playstation 3's after users had already bought them:
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3088169/sony-agrees-to-pay-m...
The life time of TVs is simply on a different time scale than most smart thingies you connect to them. It's an appliance like the air conditioner or dishwasher, not a gadget you throw into the bin and replace. The intelligence of your media center should be elsewhere, in a dedicated gadget that you can easily replace and upgrade, connected via a standard, dumb interface like HDMI.

I own a 2012, 60" Sony Bravia and the picture quality is stil superb compared to recent models (except OLED). Its HD and not 4K, but it makes no difference, my eyesight is not getting any better and I might use it for the next 5 to 10 years probably. It's internet capabilities are laughable, pre-smart TV. Picked it up for 100 quid second hand, no doubt some idiot replaced it with a "smart" piece of junk with thinner frame, less durable LEDs, and now, good God, mandatory advertising.
How the Web Works (For Front End Devs)
If it only emerged in the 80s, then it's hardly insurmountable.
This Chrome extension (Subtitles for YouTube) already can overlay custom subtitles on youtube. It will even automatically search external subtitle websites for the url of the video you're viewing and load subtitles for that video from those websites.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/subtitles-for-yout...
If I'm reasonably happy with Chromecast (not interested in litigating who spies on me most here), is there some setup I can achieve with just a large PC monitor and some HDMI jiggery pokery to hook up a sound system? I hate the thought of paying for all this gunk I never use, I really just need the panel.
Red Hat's Stratis 2.2 Linux Storage Solution Released
Show HN: Time-Boxed Meetings
Electricity and water are fungible (at least in reasonable household or small business quantities). Dependency on these resources doesn't necessarily require other dependencies.

Dependency on internet services is transitive. From the same talk[1] by Dan Geer I quoted in an earlier post:

> The root source of risk is dependence, especially dependence on
the expectation of stable system state. Dependence is not only
individual but mutual, not only am I dependent or not but rather
a continuous scale asking whether we are dependent or not; we
are, and it is called interdependence. Interdependence is
transitive, hence the risk that flows from interdependence is
transitive, i.e., if you depend on the digital world and I
depend on you, then I, too, am at risk from failures in the
digital world. If individual dependencies were only static,
they would be eventually evaluable, but we regularly and quickly
expand our dependence on new things, and that added dependence
matters because we each and severally add risk to our portfolio
by way of dependence on things for which their very newness
confounds risk estimation and thus risk management.
Interdependence within society is today absolutely centered on
the Internet beyond all other dependencies excepting climate,
and the Internet has a time rate of change five orders of
magnitude faster. Remember, something becomes "a critical
infrastructure" as soon as it is widely enough adopted; adoption
is the gateway drug to criticality.

[1] http://geer.tinho.net/geer.ncc.8x18.txt
Yep, they can. AFAIK it's some real processing on the signal.

I do wonder what kind of content it can detect and in which modes.
Right, but in this case it's not a matter of what you have, but what you don't. Zig has slices as the only form of moving pointers around, and it doesn't have any pointer arithmetic. I.e. every time some data is traversed, the language ensures the size is known either at compile time or runtime.
HLS is one of those standards that I find absolutely maddening and clearly only exists because a number of things are completely broken. It also makes it much harder to capture or intercept the stream for your own purposes.

Browser/firewall refusing to accept anything other than HTTP? HTTP range requests broken? Connection keepalive broken? I know, we'll segment the video into blocks and send a list of the blocks to download as individual files!
Thanks :). I was thinking of a configuration that would allow web surfing / school work etc. Should be quite cheap.
Unnecessarily expensive. Just use any TV without allowing internet. Not connecting some (maybe not newest) TV vs not connecting commercial panel should be about same amount of work.

I use few year old Sony like that, couldn't care less about any of these complaints. It requires trips to PC to manage content, which I think is the biggest hurdle of this approach for lazy couch potatoes.
So you’re positive after 7 days it all gets purged?
204 you say. Please don't make this rabbit hole deeper for me :)
You're confusing a Ph.D with an extension of a BS.

A Ph.D requires independent creation of new knowledge, and being able to go deep in a field. That's neither consensus, nor easy to evaluate academically. It's far more nebulous than most industry work. In many cases, they also require deep algorithmic and mathematical maturity.

A freshly-brewed Ph.D isn't going to be an expert in the mechanics of software engineering (e.g. setting up CI/CD, microservices, etc.), but will outclass most people with BS degrees in other areas. 5-10 years down-the-line, they will pick up the applied skills, while the BS won't pick up the theoretical skills.

Ph.D is also a signalling mechanisms: They were admitted, and they finished.

I'm not arguing for or against Ph.Ds, but your stereotypes seem grounded in, well, nothing. Ph.Ds have their problems, but those ain't them.
LF opinions on our project skill matching app
You may be able to connect it to your router but then use your router's parental control features to block the net for that reserved IP.
Topography of the human subcortex unveiled w functional connectivity gradients
Auto mechanics and welding you got in shop classes, not home ec. I was likewise tracked away from both, on the idea that I was too smart to need to know such things, and I haven't yet stopped resenting it.
I certainly hope there’s alarms ringing in a few heads about this.
While I agree that is much more common and the numbers of the study have changed, I'd like to see the actual tally.

Pretty much everyone I ask (including myself) has way too many bags. I've got a full drawer of reusable bags, and it keeps growing. While I'm totally onboard with tote bags, you can't always plan when you'll be buying, so I don't see the disposable bag (maybe not plastic though) as being something that can be eliminated.
Okay last straw for me, I switched my default searches to DDG. I hope that won't make Google go bankrupt :)
I think the best way to fix this before it creates legs is to have a huge backslash.

They should feel social pressure to backpedal this stupid decision by hurting their marketing for fear to be known as the brand that has ADS in their television sets.
Yes. I'm currently doing my M.Sc. in ecology, with a special interest in conservation, so I think about issues like these a lot. The most important lesson? Life's complicated.

It doesn't matter what issues (or proposed solutions) you look at - it could be GMOs, glyphosate, plastic, electric cars, nuclear power, bio-fuels, you name it - there is no easy answer. Some solutions are better than others, but all have some disadvantages.

It certainly doesn't help the environmental movement that many of its members display a very definite "green ideology". They go around spouting their preferred policies, ignoring or shouting down any objections (no matter how well founded). That really doesn't help our trustworthiness with the rest of society.

The nature of politics is such that we often have to pick sub-optimal solutions, and often on incomplete knowledge. But let's at least have a proper debate before settling on one solution - and not prematurely tout anything as "the only green way to go".
AFAICT this works over the same pin that could carry ARC which is arguably more useful to most people and usually available at least on one port. However, devices could also communicate via DDC or CEC too although rather low bandwidth is available it could be enough for some telemetry. Its probably possible to do this via HDMI info frames too somehow... or via direct wireless connections between these devices or infrared or.... the point is there are quite some ways to achieve communication between connected devices already without it.
> There should be an express option.

We have the technology now to sling the last car (could be a sub-standard-size car) to a shunt track at a station to offload passengers at the station, which redirects much of the kinetic energy braking it to speed up an already-moving outgoing car off the shunt track to connect to the train to onboard passengers from the station, without the train slowing down at all. Some folks were working on it in France and separate group was working on it in China if I recall correctly from a handful of years ago, but it never got traction. I figure the amount of space the shunt track requires (more length the faster the train travels through the station) and the costs killed it, but it would be skookum tech.

The sheer scale of physically moving around humanity might be a problem uniquely facing our civilization that previous civilizations didn't have to contend with. Maybe on an available watts/person measure we have more than previous civilizations, but it is a fascinating megascale engineering problem to me to wonder about the efficiency optimization possibilities. Not just moving people around the planet, but how to get people off the planet.
I don't understand destroying your brand like this. Samsung from the early 2000s to ~2015 meant quality. Is it worth the short term gains from ad revenue over long term customer loyalty?

I myself was a pretty loyal customer up until very recently when it came time to buy a TV and I specifically wanted one without ads ruining the experience.

I'm reasonably certain this will make this many peoples last Samsung TV.
But Zig has counterparts to exceptions, templates and anything you may want to do with them; it compares quite nicely with even "rich" C++. The one thing it intentionally doesn't have is operator overloading. In general, I'd say that the difference between Zig and C++ is that when you do some clever stuff in Zig, you need to be explicit about it so that the reader knows this call-site uses dynamic dispatch or that there is a destructor being called or that this operation isn't really the standard +.
While Google mandated their apps, AFAIK Chrome wasn't one of them. My Note 1 has plenty of google garbage, but no chrome.
Nah, those devices most likely run in "demo mode" which will obviously have ads disabled but is not suitable for home use... ;-)
But why do you think your android device will have fewer ads and spyware? Unless you rolled your own OS, it probably is infested with crud.
Why does HTML think “chucknorris” is a color? – Stack Overflow
Looks great! Very neat.
If you are able to find a good "dumb" TV, please let us know.
My new LG CX tv has an option in the settings for this (in Norway) so I can just turn it of.

My old Sony Bravia with android tv didn't even honour my DHCP DNS settings so I made the firewall reroute all the requests to my internal dns for "pi-holeing".

GDPR is a massive win for consumers, enforcement will come it just takes time :)
This kind of infantilizing surveillance of employees will eventually backfire. Especially creative people will be driven out by such appalling policies, b/c they either can not or will not put up with it.

Things like this are a huge reason for the current startup/indie startup /solopreneur boom, because people want to have more freedom and dont want to be treated like 9 year olds...
> In Silicon Valley, entrepreneur Kevin Rose launched an app called Rise to help people monitor their fasts

The app is called Zero.

From the actual results of the study (CMT is consistent meal timing, TRE is time restricted eating aka intermittent fasting):

> There was a significant decrease in weight in the TRE group (−0.94 kg; 95% CI, −1.68 kg to −0.20 kg; P = .01) and a nonsignificant decrease in weight in the CMT group (−0.68 kg; 95% CI, −1.41 kg to 0.05 kg; P = .07). Importantly, there was no significant difference in weight change between groups (−0.26 kg; 95% CI, −1.30 kg to 0.78 kg; P = .63)

Both groups lost weight, the IF group lost more but the difference between the groups is not significant. Not quite what the title or article say. It would be good to see the actual dataset.
"it's not obvious which one to use"

Perhaps this explains one system I saw that included entire encoded XML documents as attributes in other documents. On the plus side this embedding only went one level deep.
> The main problem for me is that it makes copy and paste more difficult.

Heh, that makes for a good snark for dismissing the white space complaint, it's all from copy-paste programmers! (Or is more properly black space for all you darkmode lovers)

> [...] you have to be more careful with what you comment out.

Not sure if I get what you mean? I think python lacking proper multi-line comments (making things you want to ignore a multi-line string isn't as neat) is an irritant, but I don't get how semantic white space impacts the complexity of commenting?
>except perhaps if you want to enable corporations to make parasitic profits from others' hard work.

Why do you think that's true? The GPL just protects you work if someone else wants to re-distribute your code. Look at Google, they can have their own private Gnu/Linux (no i don't talk about android) and never ever have to opensource it.
I have never seen XML 1.1 used in practice. How many parsers actually support it?
On your last point, I would like to comment so anyone coming here feeling discouraged: I am at a mid-sized biotech and manage a team of 15, one has a masters, and all the others started right out of college with BS degrees. I look for right out of college BS degree holders! The key to finding these types of jobs is moving to a city with a robust industry because it means there is a ton of upper level jobs that need supporting help.

My company is headquartered in Cambridge, MA, but the main campus is now in Norwood, MA (30 min outside Boston). There are more jobs than you'd expect within 1h rail commute of cheap housing. If you're about to graduate with a BS in biochem, chem eng, or mol. bio, drop me a line. I would love to help you discuss your career!
On top if that, for multi lingual audio it is precisely useless, while multilingual audio is the norm in many countries or regions, as foreign sources are used as is rather than dubbed.
This sounds like a version of Whistler's statement when he was suing John Ruskin for libel:

Holker: "The labour of two days is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?"

Whistler: "No, I ask it for the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Abbott_McNeill_Whistler#...
"Why don't they just swap the NT kernel out for the Linux kernel" has been a pretty common catchphrase of Linux users for years. This isn't anything new.
The most common way in word processing to do collaborative editing is with 'track changes'. That has has quite a bit in common with version control and pull requests. There are different forms to do collaborative editing, real-time or asynchronous.
204 is a wonderful rabbit hole! You can use it to send messages to the server without refreshing the page without JS. It was a pretty common trick in the early 2000s
College has been a racket for a long time. There have existed huge issues on incentive structures and expectations. The hollywood dream of college life combined with the promise of adding value to an economy with a learned discipline.

The chasm that has grown between that fantasy and what the economy demands has been massive in the past few decades and the university system only increased it with political red tape.

I certainly agree that a layer that connects businesses with potential is the right shape. Something closer to the “apprentice” structure of before.
Thought about this, too.

I only use my TV to watch YouTube or Amazon Prime through the PS4. But as I'm burning enough time on that (the first one) already on my phone, maybe I should buy/build in aquarium in that place, once the TV dies. Probably more relaxing in the end. And ads-free for sure!
Long term, rent free and safe housing too.
Same in Austria.
And how is it different from, let us say, the current's sweetheart, JSON? (The comparison is not exclusive to JSON, though.)

JavsScript Object Notation makes a lot of sense to describe... The JavaScript objects.

But, nowadays, I see it universally applied.

As a recent personal experience, I had to use it to serialise communication between a C++ and a Java application---two statically typed languages, with basic types similar among each other but different from JavaScript.

To set the contract between the two applications, I had to write a JSON spec [1], which is written in... JSON. That was an abstruse and abusive use of JSON, in my opinion.

Then comes `jq` and its own notation, in which I suffer to do the basics of a simple XPath---e.g., return all the objects of a certain kind (i.e., a tag) in any level you find it.

Abuse happens [2] because there is a human behind it, especially under the lens of the adage "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".

The problem I see in this discussion is that people either want a "magic tool" that works at all cases, or they want to control the human behind it.

In my experience, it is difficult to get both: generality does not play well with constraint.

---

<digression>

I think most people just need to use a plain-text format [4] for most of the things they want, à lá RFC 822 [5].

</digression>

---

[1]: http://json-schema.org/

[2]: I believe this is a Fibonacci series: https://www.xorpd.net/pages/xchg_rax/snip_01.html

[3]: http://blog.aerojockey.com/post/iocccsim

[4]: https://www.arp242.net/the-art-of-unix-programming/#id290742...

[5]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc822
Show HN: MindPad – complete life organizer – notes, habits, to-do's, reminders
Yeah well just try to use XML as your config format and spit JSON out of it for your frontend, if you are using Java you'll quickly realize how obsolete and inelegant is this horror that they dare call JAXB.
City Journal is a far far right wing propaganda outlet. I thought such political stuff was out of place here.
I don’t know how to create a website (2018)
Honestly, if someone drives all the way to my house and back at my convenience (e.g. when I’m locked out), and only charges me €150 I would consider that fairly cheap.