skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1. Yes, we will largely return to offices. Digital tools remain sub-par as replacements for direct human contact / communication, and that isn't likely to change soon. (Mayyyyyybe mixed reality will finally make a dent here, but meaningful computer-supported collaboration is still a very active area of academic research. Haven't found any tool that comes close to the fluency and reliability of a quick huddle around a whiteboard.) As others have noted, there's also a lot of investment in commercial space - so there will be economic / political pressure to return to office work.

Will this happen in 2021? No idea. Some workplaces have announced full-remote until mid-2021 at the very least, and any cure / vaccine will take time to fully study, productionize, and distribute. It might take a few years to fully return, and there may be a slightly higher proportion of WFH even after that.

For a historical perspective: consider that humanity has weathered catastrophic pandemics before, and look to what happened there in the longer term. This time around, we have the further advantage of much better medicine / logistics than, say, during the 1918 flu. (We also, of course, have both the advantages and disadvantages that come with much faster communications channels.)

2. Absolutely not! By working from home, I'm taking on additional office-related expenses that would normally be paid for, plus expenses related specifically to remote work (e.g. webcams). If anything, I'd expect the company to help cover those expenses, and/or bump my salary up to compensate for added setup and logistics on my end (or even just to reflect the reduced overhead on their end - if they save money having me work at home, why shouldn't I see some of that?)
yes, that's a trade-off in this privacy first approach. if several people are on the same ip address, visiting the same website and having the same user agent on the same day, they look the same to us.
To simply be a programmer, one must only write a program, nothing more. The essential skill I guess would be literacy, knowing how to read and follow directions, knowing how to use a keyboard, not much.

To be a good programmer, if I have to pick only one "skill" I would pick systemic thinking/understanding. This starts with the ability to learn and eventually understand how a system works. The next level is the ability to create a working model of that system in ones mind. Someone who can do that will be very successful at programming anything in any language on any platform given sufficient documentation.
DigitalOcean Launches New App Platform
> Don't get me wrong - this isn't some "back on the old times stuff was better" - but i really feel this path in computing should have been pursued more.

Itanium had security segments; they are probably described in the book IA-64 Linux Kernel: Design and Implementation.

One of the Itanium designers founded Secure64 Software[0].

They sold Itanium DNS appliances and the OS used the security segments.

The linked page describes some of the security features of Itanium; I'm not sure how many of them are found on other platforms.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure64_Software#SourceT_Micr...
qrop looks nice. Thanks for the pointer.
If you thought HNers were insufferable whiners regarding RAM or NAND soldered to motherboards, just wait until they start marketing monolithic CPU+memory chips.
Must be you :-)

Never seen either - I use Firefox as my primary browser and 95% DDG, 5% Google for search.
haha there's a man thats been doing this for a long time. Every bug I have is an 8 man meeting (me being the only one who actually does anything) to explain why my TPS report cover wasn't there and how we can prevent bugs in the future.
UML for C Programmers (2005)
You can read about it in Abraham Pais' scientific biography of Einstein, _Subtle is the Lord_.
I'm 6 months into my COVID illness, and I'm still having fatigue and breathing difficulties on a daily basis. It started with severe breathing difficulties, but I was never in the hospital, and it has basically been going up and down in waves since then. X-rays shows that my lungs have recovered, but I don't feel good at all. I'm 37 and in great shape. I am so damn tired of the discussion being focused on deaths: If 2-5% of infected get long-term symptoms like me, it's going to be an absolute onslaught on the health care systems in the coming years.
> I'm in no way part of the just-the-flu crew

One thing I don't get is why saying C19 is "Just another Flu" is somehow taken as downplaying the virus. Seasonal Flu kills as many as 600,000 people annually. Do their lives not matter because they are taken by a regular old virus and not a novel coronavirus? And why doesn't the media report on every strain and mutation of the seasonal flu that could cause "long term effects"?
I guess the regret comes from not knowing sooner. I was around 30 when I was finally diagnosed. When I think how this diagnose could have helped me 25 years earlier to get the right knowledge and support to manage life it really makes me resentful.
Which in turn has more than a passing resemblance to Rebol...

; Comments!!!

; An Array with no commas!
greatDocumentaries: [
'earthlings.com
'forksoverknives.com
'cowspiracy.com
]

importantFacts: [

; Multi-Line Strings! Without Quote Escaping!

emissions: {Livestock and their byproducts account for at least 32,000 million tons of carbon
Goodland, R Anhang, J. “Livestock and Climate Change: What if the key actors in climate change we
WorldWatch, November/December 2009. Worldwatch Institute, Washington, DC, USA. Pp. 10–19.
http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6294}

landuse: {Livestock covers 45% of the earth’s total land.
Thornton, Phillip, Mario Herrero, and Polly Ericksen. “Livestock and Climate Change.” Livestock E
https://cgspace.cgiar.org/bitstream/handle/10568/10601/IssueBrief3.pdf}

burger: {One hamburger requires 660 gallons of water to produce – the equivalent of 2 months’
Catanese, Christina. “Virtual Water, Real Impacts.” Greenversations: Official Blog of the U.S. EP
http://blog.epa.gov/healthywaters/2012/03/virtual-water-real-impacts-world-water-day-2012/
“50 Ways to Save Your River.” Friends of the River.
http://www.friendsoftheriver.org/site/PageServer?pagename=50ways}

milk: {1,000 gallons of water are required to produce 1 gallon of milk.
“Water trivia facts.” United States Environmental Protection Agency.
http://water.epa.gov/learn/kids/drinkingwater/water_trivia_facts.cfm#_edn11}

more: http://cowspiracy.com/facts
]

Some references: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebol | http://www.rebol.com/article/0108.html
> It’s an interesting idea that we still “need” typing practice. We do it every day why would we need to practice extra?

We all walk every day, but most people have terrible form and efficiency and would probably injure themselves if they tried to do it for long periods without practicing...
> They seem to be getting significant US opposition to their technology advancement.

Do you think that's related to China allowing zero domestic tech competition, but demanding that their companies be allowed to compete in the rest of the world?
Here is some more criticism of the EARN IT Act supporting that
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/03/the_earn-it_a...

Lindsay Graham has repeatedly sought to weaken encryption and mandate backdoors and key escrow. Also in June this year following the EARN IT Act he introduced the Lawful Access To Encrypted Data Act (LAED) which would mandate backdoors:

https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2020/06/there%E2%80%99s-n...

LEAD is extreme and has little support. It is widely believed that the LAED was not intended to be passed but is meant to help pass the EARN IT Act by making the EARN IT Act seem like a more moderate and reasonable piece of legislation.

The EARN IT Act is really a ploy by Lindsay Graham and others to bypass Congress on this issue which they cannot otherwise get passed, and allow a small group of people who are not even security experts to develop regulation and mandates (which will probably be against encryption) under the guise of fighting child porn.
Saving in the Age of Abundance
This would be the worst job ever if I didn't love it. I can't imagine doing it otherwise.
Should according to whom? Obviously, I would want to earn the maximum my employer would be willing to pay for my labor and the company would want to pay the minimum that would allow them to attract quality candidates.
This study's sample was pretty strongly non-representative; half the subjects had been hospitalized.
I've had a fever every day for over a month. At the beginning they were 101 and up, and my heart rate spiked over 100 for long periods of time (normally I'm in the 60's and 70's). Now the "fevers" are pretty low grade (under 100 but definitely higher than "normal.")

I'm also experiencing the crashes you mentioned - fine one minute and crawling back in bed the next. It's usually in the afternoons or evenings. But as you say, it's much better than before when I slept ALL DAY for several days.

To end on a brighter note, I am back to exercising 45 mins, 3 days a week. And I go biking weekends, for 1.5 - 2 hours. My stamina isn't what it was, but it's building back. I even decided to go ahead with a (virtual) race I signed up for. I'll walk/run with the only goal of finishing.
OMG I'd love to see that! :D Do one for VHS players too, please!
This implies that said governments are bad. Or have the perception of it.

You know who benefits from VPNs, privacy, and security?

The proud boys. Russia. China. Steve Bannon. And their bots, that's who. They are a threat to civil society at present, and they're using that very privacy and security to organize to destroy the thing you're trying to "protect" by drinking Barlow's kool-aid.
Canada’s largest technology park attracts global talent with virtual job fair
In theory, R7RS Large will fix the discoverability problem by picking a single blessed SRFI implementation of each kind of library, and giving each one a name like (scheme hash-table), etc. Whenever it's done. And who knows when that will be.

In the meantime, I'm in the process of building my own "alternate prelude" for several R7RS Schemes that chooses the latest SRFI for most of the common features you'd want (strings, hash tables, console text formatting, etc.) and polyfills them for Schemes that don't have them: https://github.com/ar-nelson/schemepunk

Also, the compatibility story in R7RS is better than you'd think. The biggest problem is that a lot of R7RS implementations are incomplete and don't conform to the standard. For the ones that do, it feels similar to JavaScript in the early 2000s: lots of little inconsistencies, but they can be polyfilled over with enough work. Someone just needs to give it the Crockford treatment and isolate the "good parts" that can be shared between implementations.
GitHub secret gists are publically accessible by design
Long Covid could be caused not by an active virus, but in long lasting changes to the body caused by a prior infection. One could imagine (entirely hypothetically) that a subset of COVID infections destroys all of the cells in the nose used generate further cells that detect smells. This would result in a permanent loss of smell, but fixing it require something different than just removing the virus from the body.
> It's proven that "doing nothing" helps with creative thinking. The inventions you are talking about are a product of both hard work and laziness.

The kind of "doing nothing" that helps with creative thinking is very different from the kind of "doing nothing" that results from laziness.

> On a less serious note, I'd say that 90% of my programming work is driven by laziness. For instance, I test things in advance or design them in a certain way so I don't need to worry about them in the future.

That's not being lazy, that's long-term thinking and defering gratification – which is the opposite of what people typically mean by the term "laziness". In your post, you're conflating two concepts:

1) Defering productive work until a later time to free time for near-term non-productive activities ("being lazy").

2) Spending more resources (time, energy) near-term to be more efficient overall ("being inventive").
Bing Image Search doesn't come into the picture I think. It's Bing Image of the Day. It's usually a generic picture like hidden waterfalls or some spot in Ireland or some cave city in Turkey. The lock screen adds a nice factoid too with each picture.
I have the same, but in reverse. I can get the gist of German speech, if I'm expecting it and have some clue about context. If it's out of context, then it just comes across as a mess of sounds. I find it so strange that a sentence made entirely out of words that I know is so incomprehensible out of context.
This seems to be also an interesting way to read books. Those who don't have a habit of reading can get distracted very easily and writing like this keeps the focus!
I hope every VC is lobbying for this. What's the point in investing in tech if the market is full of big fat gorillas that will just copy everything you do and put 10X the capital behind it, not to mention hiring everyone at 10X the salary a startup can afford to pay.
The opposite, really. Nobel prizes are given out for major works which are now well-accepted. This can take decades, so typically the Nobel is given to now-old scientists as recognition for work done when they were young.
> Traffic and commuting is one of the worst little things of daily life. It's dangerous. It ruins the environment. Parking sucks.

I agree, but commuting has significant mental-health benefits. It provides a clear mental separation between "work" and "home".

I and several of my coworkers have noticed that we never feel "off work" anymore. Work just bleeds into everything because there isn't that 30 minute period (enforced by the need to arrive home in time to make and eat dinner) to clear your head at the end of the day and mentally switch contexts.
I agree with you and just want to add that anyone who thinks a 1.5% death rate is low fails at elementary arithmetics, since without measures and without vaccine we'd have to expect at least 80% to be infected eventually within 1-2 years.

Luckily, the estimates for the true Infection Fatality Ratio (IFR) are lower, between 0.6% to 0.7%, for industrialized nations. That's still a very high high number if we don't keep the disease in check or don't get a vaccine.
Empathy. You need to be able to empathise with the user. That user might be the person giving you requirements. The person using your product. The user reading your code in a year's time.

That's not all you need, obviously. No one thing is the magic bullet which will make you a better programmer. But the worst programmers I've worked with only write code which works on their machine, for their specific use-case.
Wouldn't this work both ways?

"The Deep State wants to read your Facebook messages!", etc.
I think this makes sense for IBM, but probably not for AMD and Intel. AMD and Intel are putting out new chips every year (even if they're just Skylake refreshes), so it's not too big of a deal to change the memory interface, and they are capable of putting in two flavors of DDR support when some flexibility is needed. For IBM, I don't think they release incremental chip designs each year, so it makes more sense for them to take the tradeoff of a flexible interface, so they can get onboard with newer ram faster.
it would be interesting to make the restaurant charge per-minute with food included.

Sort of like an all-you-can-eat buffet... Stuff that takes longer to prepare ends up costing more.
Intel desktop CPUs are monolithic. A 10900K is a single die, meanwhile a AMD 3900X is three dies: two compute dies and one I/O die (which are sourced from two manufacturers on two different processes afaik). An AMD server CPU has the same compute dies, except more of them, and a very different IO die.

The AMD compute dies are only connected to the IO die and other compute dies (and power). All IO connections exclusively go through the IO die, so the IO die can be customized to change the IO of the CPU without changing anything about the compute dies. It would be entirely feasible to just re-spin the IO die to add support for different memory, Thunderbolt or other IO ports. The IO die is also made on a cheaper, lower-density and performance process (14 nm / 16 nm) than the compute dies (7 nm).
I am very proud of the code base, but there's many places to optimize. I welcome contributions if you want to help out!
Communication is probably the biggest skill needed if you're trying to be an employed programmer working on a team.

If you're just trying to be a hobbyist and do stuff for fun then I'd say you need some things that aren't necessarily skills like curiosity, a love of challenging problems, and ability to easily retain information that you read.
One issue with learning to program,many people think learning the syntax of a particular language is programming.
The one thing all programmers need is a way of thinking about problems and systems.
Hard to teach.
To be clear, therapy and medication is the best available option, but not everybody has access to it. In that case, what would be the next best option? (That is what I am actually asking.)

Also, there are some restrictions on medication in certain countries (e.g. Japan):

https://addadhdblog.com/adhd-in-japan/?doing_wp_cron=1601997...
Hello! As of now it only updates at the end of the page. I plan on adding options to have it update after every word or line in the very near future. Thanks!
I prefer the idea of internet governance via third party instead of the state. Flip it on it's head, where instead of government spying on everyone, we're in control of the surveillance democratically through consensus. But there needs to be some kind of governance of some kind.
> Not anymore though from what I hear

Still a ton of fun. I consider it better than the original - more content to enjoy.
downsides are basically that in order to gain the benefits for the user privacy and compliance with regulations, you lose a bit of accuracy depending on the situation. we cannot see whether the same person returns to a site on a different day so count them as a new unique visitor.

i assume that using the referrer header to count uniques has even more downsides as i imagine the number of unique visitors with that method would be much higher than it actually is.
Ask HN: What's a good browser extension for making LinkedIn more readable?
As the title suggests, I am looking for a Safari/Firefox/Chrome extension to make LinkedIn more readable. Currently the website is cluttered and slow to scroll. I would like suggestions for extensions that you have tried. Thank you!
I don't know the sense of OP, but there's a difference between 'programming' and 'software development'--the latter is done in a team. Often the terms are used interchangeably but the skills to make one a good solo software writer only overlap with developing in a group.
What is supposed to happen with different types of chemical bonds? If half of a molecule is inside a black hole and half is outside, the half inside is necessarily constrained to the black hole, while a molecule outside does not have such constraint. The chemical bonds should be also necessarily broken at least for a moment, since an atom inside black hole can not exert electromagnetic effects on an atom outside black hole. Wouldn't it create a bias across your whole body with some really weird atomic / chemical consequences?
Ehh it doesn't seem to be a problem. Understanding the function doesn't require thinking about those 900 lines at once since the code for handling each message type doesn't interact with any other code in the function.
could you add some modifier?

"iff a =/= MAXINT"
In SPARK/Ada you'd have to constrain the input for something like that or it wouldn't be able to discharge the proof. Suppose you wanted a simple function (which is too simple to write in reality, but for brevity):

function Increment(A : Integer) return Integer
with Post => Increment'Result = A + 1;

It would find the counterexample for the situation where A is equal to Integer'Last. So you'd need to add a precondition like:

function Increment(A : Integer) return Integer
with Pre => A < Integer'Last,
Post => Increment'Result = A + 1;

(doing this from memory and not fluent, so syntax may be off but the idea isn't)
> If you're not paying for it, you're the product.

“You are not the product being sold, you are the livestock being farmed.”
I think this is teaching a lot of people how much of work is BS.

Now that a lot of the distractions and meetings are gone lots of people are realizing they really only work a couple hours a day and spend the rest dicking around or stuck in pointless meetings.
This name will not work very well in the french-speaking market.

Fion is slang for asshole in French.
Former permaculturist here - who at one point was working on this very idea, as it happens.

I think permaculture appeals to a lot of programmers, because it's almost like programming with plants. It presents itself as "these plants relate to each other and support each other and you can compose them into guilds that will provide you food with minimal maintenance!" It's complex system design.

The problem is that it's not actually based in hard science. We don't know if the nitrogen produced by nitrogen fixers is available to plants around them. It might only become available once those plants die back. The studies that support the idea of dynamic accumulators measured nutrient amounts in the leaves - not the nutrient amounts in the soil as the plants grew and died back. Most of the "companions" are based on folk tales, not research.

The whole permaculture design system is the classic "anecdote is not data" fallacy turned into a design system. It's based on individual observation, not careful data collection and experimentation. The criticisms of the reductionist approach that science often falls into are well taken, as are the criticisms of industry's failure to account for unintended consequences when applying science. But that doesn't mean the alternative is to go back to a pre-scientific approach of individual naturalists observing the world and making proclamations based on their observations. Which - having spent five years embedded in the permaculture community and philosophy - is exactly what permaculture is.

This failures of anecdotal observation means that permaculture in practice often boils down to the very thing it was meant to change: humans thinking they can engineer and control nature to fit their vision, instead of learning from nature and fitting their vision to the natural realities. Permaculture doesn't actually end up designing systems that work with nature most of the time, it designs novel ecosystems with non-native plants that could have massive unintended consequences.

There's a lot to be said for the core concept of farming in nature's image, and I think Mark Shepherd is potentially on to something. We do need to explore whether we could redesign our farm systems to be habitat and feed us at the same time. Food forestry as an idea is a really promising one.

But the suburbs need to go away if we're to live sustainably, not be turned into a bunch of experimental gardens. And any agroforestry system needs to be built to fit into the native ecosystem it is a part of, using native plants. And we need to base our approach to designing a permanent culture and regenerative agriculture in science and careful research, not individual observation.