skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To take this to the obvious parallel of software patents, patents get a lot of (deserved) criticism these days, but they exist for a reason, ans serve a purpose which I think is arguably still valid. Excessive patent length and patenting trivial things is bad. So is people stealing the hard work of others. There is a sane middle ground we should be shooting for, not wiping patents out entirely to the detriment of most (arguably all, in the long run).
But only in the sense that my kid's training wheels help them go faster on a bike. Since that only works up to a certain speed.

So... yeah, it is somewhat convoluted, but not as much as you seem to be implying. Take "kids chopsticks". They speed up kids, obviously. They slow down folks that know what they are going.

(Really, I could probably list a huge list of things that all work in this vein.)
> I’ve always been involved in my work, being proactive in bringing new technologies

This one I learned with the years, that it is so much work to introduce new technology to a team, sometimes not the most productive endeavor. Involves some perfect timing, support from key stakeholders and a team open to the idea...

Unless the current stack is absolutely insufferable, it could be better to try and find what's interesting about it and become proficient with it.
I was obsessed with the Amiga when it was announced in the mid-80s. I saved my paper route money (when that was a thing) and bought the Amiga 1000 as soon as it was available. I loved the computer and I am thankful for how it set me up for my expectations about what personal computing should be.

HOWEVER...

I'm perplexed how I keep seeing all these projects over the years to revive the platform. AmigaOS was good for its time but there's nothing it offers now that any modern OS doesn't do now. For how cutting edge it was, it was an unstable POS too.

GAH!
I've always thought fuel should be sold by mass, not volume (tank LPG often is).
Not very intuitive that a mine-resistant vehicle would encourage anyone to kill more civilians tho.
> Synthetic inertia involves configuring control loops in the battery inverters to cause them to have a similar response to a synchronous generator.

So you get a clock, monitor the grid, calculate the current that would be drawn from a short-circuited dynamo right now, and get the inverter to generate that current, all within a few microseconds, and without setting the battery on fire? I'm impressed.
Ask HN: Is Microsoft serious about Windows on ARM?
Homescapes and Gardenscapes ads banned as misleading
In the context of the article we are reading, this seems somewhat amusing. The entire trick, as presented, turns typing into an adhoc shorthand.

That all said, I confess I don't buy many of the benefits of alternative keyboards. I switched to colemak about a year ago and I think I am still below the speed I was at qwerty. Significantly so.

Of course, I don't know that this has had a major impact on my speed of getting things done. Plenty of other obstacles there.
Also, we need consider design as not something that needs to be trendy or has a finite time. A lot of design choices made in early 90’s are totally sound - technology has changed ofcourse so we should adapt but the way things are today - it’s chasing trends after trends without giving any thought. Design is not fashion. Changes should be made only when they’re needed, not because designers like a particular aesthetic or want to make things flat, or remove borders because it’s sexy, or go after magenta/purple themes today that are rampant cliches.

Have you tried searching for anything UX/UI on the web and only to find shallow articles, blog spam, nothing authoritative?

I have a hard time finding a good textbook in this area. Why aren’t there any textbooks one may ask?
> Apple seeds don't grow what you expect.

Would you mind elaborating on that a bit?
nobody is claiming that my experience is extrapolatable ad infinitum. However, if it was such a rare thing, what are the odds that someone like me would exist?

> An individual example is useless when the question is about if something works at (even minor) scale

That is incorrect. The plural of anecdote is data.
Exactly. Every seed would result in a different tasting grape. Some of the plants grown from seed would be susceptible to phylloxera too.

A better method would be to try to get the stem to grow. Basically dip the cut end in a rooting hormone and plant it.
Other than the part about reproducing from seeds, this is a pretty standard plant patent situation in the US. There are all sorts of restrictions on what you can patent, and the plant patent landscape is quite reasonable (unlike software patents). Plants like the cotton candy grapes in this post are really difficult to develop, and 20 years of legal protection is pretty reasonable. Remember this is agriculture- things move relatively slowly, and you cant corner the market of a variety in 20 years - you probably won't have patent protection by the time a plant reaches max market penetrstion anyway, but you'll have made your money during the first few years. And if you purchase patented varieties of fruit for your home garden (you might already have a couple!) you'll notice the patent fee for them barely registers - shipping costs are probably higher than the patent cost for your new citrus.

As I was alluding to though, there are restrictions, including that the plant has to be asexually reproduced and the infringing plant has to be identical to the parent, which does not apply to seed born progeny. Maybe there's some aspect of the plant variety protection act in play - I'm not as familiar with that - or maybe they're referring to using tissue from the aborted seeds present in seedless grapes to tissue culture out a clone, IDK.
You might really like pulumi. I'm kind of on the opposite end, ops>swe so tons of IAC and i'm using pulumi now as I'm more swe focused https://www.pulumi.com/ (ive no relation to them)
Incidentally these types of plant patents AND software patents are the two categories that are patentable in the USA but not in most of the rest of the world, so they definitely straddle the line of patentability.
Can your business adapt to change well? That’s the first issue with any monolith.
Mostly it's about the maintenance costs of owning and managing a server -- on Lambda most of these tools are "set and forget".

I don't want to have to manage security updates, disk usage, or any of the other multiple things that come with owning a server.

I also could probably debate on the friendly-ness of just dumping all of these one-off services onto a single server (seems like it could get messy pretty quick), but I think you could probably go either way on that.

We are also an AWS shop for our "production" stack already, so there is no added overhead for owning an AWS account.
Seeds, no, but you might be able to culture any other living plant tissue into more of the same plant with the right growth media/conditions:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zx6g87h/revision/4

This technique seems hit or miss with apples.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/12538078.2010.10...

Maybe this grape cultivar was really successful with this form of propagation and the producer fears an end-user (or nation state) might do just that, but they taste so good, they went to market anyway with something they may not be able to control.
I think the point is that most people don't have such amazing genes that spending even more time than just work for decades in front of a monitor does not impact their bodies. The worst part is sitting. I want to move my body, and I sacrificed computer hours. I don't watch any TV at all already either, so there's nothing I could move from that time-budget to programming projects.
Headless Web Scraping with Python
It's not going to set any sort of legal precedent. If you don't defend yourself in civil court and the plaintiff doesn't make blatantly unreasonable demands, the court will issue a default judgement and wash their hands of it until you do go to court. If you're blatantly flouting the law, you're entitled to much better legal protections than this case seems to imply.
Isn't that the case here? They don't give out SWAT vehicles to beat cops. Even smaller cities have distinct SWAT teams with specific training.
This has been my experience as well. Using a non-qwerty layout is an annoyance when I use somebody else's computer or somebody else uses mine.

While I don't see myself moving back, I never recommend switching to others.
You misspelled "Buenos días" (assuming it's supposed to be spanish).
Perhaps I should have said hater. Yes there is a massive group in the middle that doesn't have a dog in the race only techies and nerds have favorite OS like other people have sports teams. On average people are buying boxes that come with software and using whatever came with their box.
Show HN: Backup to S3, FUSE mount resulting image
This is one of those "scratch one's itch" things. It does a full or incremental backup to a single S3 object, and a FUSE client for the resulting read-only file system. Backup and read performance is way better than S3 file systems that use a single object per file. Feedback welcome.
I was curious about the legality of this, and the USPTO has a very detailed overview on plant patents: https://www.uspto.gov/patents-getting-started/patent-basics/... . I.e., this isn't a "EULA", it's just really a description of the patent rules that cover these Cotton Candy Grapes.

I thought it particularly interesting that for some reason "tubers" are called out specifically as not being provided patent protection.
As a biologist, I assure you not any tissue or plant can be casually tissue cultured. Maybe in theory, but in practice I wouldn't want to be asked to try and turn a bit of woody apple fruit stem or sepal tissue into a viable clone!*

Far easier to just go to the farm during the right season and grab yourself a scion to graft.

*I'm getting enough of a headache from one of my side projects trying to tissue culture some plant tissue that actually has a practical purpose- I'd rather stick to grafting when I can to avoid unnecessarily complicating my life!
Check out my app called Cold Turkey Blocker:
https://getcoldturkey.com

You can count time used in non-foregrounded windows by going to Settings > Statistics and turning on the strict feature.
I charge $X to provide services remotely (on an hourly or monthly basis, whatever). Whether I live in a cheap or expensive area is completely irrelevant to whether it makes sense for the company to pay me $X.

As someone from the Rust Belt, a company that says "we'll only pay you more if you move to an ExpensiveCoastalCity" is insulting. Such a policy feels like coastal elites actively trying to keep everywhere but NY and SF poor.
Using Sysbench and Docker for Benchmarking
It would be much better for future business to have stories circulating from people who were safe after paying the ransom.
> The military also exists to enforce law.

No it doesn't. It exists to protect national interests. The rare exemption is when a state decides to deploy the Army National Guard or Coast Guard. The Posse Comitatus Act is very specific about this, and the U.S. Army Military Police Corps were slapped with administrative actions for violating the act when they intervened in murder spree in Alabama.
i recall zig being mentioned in the last ... I don’t know how many releases.
Theorists React to Potential Signal in Dark Matter Detector
I can report that Azure Function App development is at least pretty decent, as long as you have the paid Visual Studio IDE and Azure Function Tools (haven't tried the free version yet).

I tried AWS Lambdas a few years back and it felt way more primitive.
Complexity always exists. Sometimes it just exists in the interactions between what you think of as your application pieces (most often the case with microservices and lambda architectures).

That being said, it's always possible to add a bit more complexity if you're not careful.
Because it’s a part of long-term planning and the lock-in variable a lower priority than all of the other factors.
I'm not sure what you mean? The induction tactic uses the induction principle (dependent eliminator) of the corresponding type. If you unfold the dependent eliminator, it boils down to a combination of fix and match. I don't see how you could get a term simpler than that, unless you mean something else by readable?
What difference does -ggdb make vs -g? I see it does extra 'tuning' of the debug output for GDB [1], but it's unclear what effect that might actually have.

[1]: https://clang.llvm.org/docs/UsersManual.html#controlling-deb...
Wild apples tend to be small and rather tart or bitter. Commercial varieties are not grown from seed but rather from cuttings from a mother tree somewhere. Planting Apple seeds results in apples resembling wild apples and not the cultivated variety the seeds come from.

This is because

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple

>Many apples grow readily from seeds. However, more than with most perennial fruits, apples must be propagated asexually to obtain the sweetness and other desirable characteristics of the parent. This is because seedling apples are an example of "extreme heterozygotes", in that rather than inheriting genes from their parents to create a new apple with parental characteristics, they are instead significantly different from their parents, perhaps to compete with the many pests.[51] Triploid cultivars have an additional reproductive barrier in that 3 sets of chromosomes cannot be divided evenly during meiosis, yielding unequal segregation of the chromosomes (aneuploids). Even in the case when a triploid plant can produce a seed (apples are an example), it occurs infrequently, and seedlings rarely survive.[52]

>Apples do not breed true when planted as seeds, although cuttings can take root and breed true, and may live for a century, grafting is usually used. The rootstock used for the bottom of the graft can be selected to produce trees of a large variety of sizes, as well as changing the winter hardiness, insect and disease resistance, and soil preference of the resulting tree.
That's why I wouldnt have a beer with 95% or so of this site. They wouldnt want it either, so it is fair, thank god.
Because that "cheap dedicated server" isn't all that cheap. Just the documentation for backups on your Hetzner server is ridiculous. Why, in the 21st century, should I as an application developer ever have to worry about that?

Let's say that Hetzner server goes completely toast at 2am and you get a pingdom message. You log in, realize you have to restore from backup. You fire up a new instance, and go through your restore procedure, and everything works great. You're lucky to be offline for an hour.

I cannot even tell you what would happen if an underlying instance running a Lambda goes offline, because it never happens. But let's say that an underlying machine dies in us-east-1. Lambda just starts running more instances of your code on another underlying group of cpus, and you aren't offline.
Astronauts Prepare to Receive Cosmetics and a New Toilet
I love the little trolling at the end with the stem in a glass of water! Cue, "Fight the Power"
Torqata | Lead Solutions Architect, Senior UX Researcher, Senior Data Engineer, Senior DevSecOps Engineer, Senior Full Stack Engineer, Senior Product Designer, Senior Product Manager, Senior QA Engineer, VP of Product | Remote | Full Time

We're building SaaS tools to help tire sales shops improve their profitability. https://torqata.com/

Our frontend stack is Angular. Our backend API stack is Python, FastAPI, and PostgreSQL. Our data stack is Google BigQuery, Airflow, Kubernetes, Pandas and Python.

We're also working on a blockchain project.

Please send a resume to me, dgilman at atd-us dot com
Apple trees aren't inbred - the seeds will not grow into the same variety as the parent. Usually, store bought apples will have seeds that produce inferior fruit since crabapples are used as a pollinator (apples aren't really all that self fertile) - so the seeds are hybrid crabapple seeds. You'll still get a tree that produces fruit that makes a good jam, but not great eating apples. Its not true that you're guaranteed to get an inferior quality fruit from planting a seed - otherwise we wouldn't ever develop new varieties - but the conditions that made your supermarket apple happen will result in a eating apple/crabapple hybrid more often than not. Because they don't really self pollinate, you're not going to be able to create a breed of apple that produces offspring generally identical to the parent plant, so the only way to keep a variety going is to clone it with grafting techniques.
I sort of remember somebody calculating back then that the total cost per byte of SMS messages exceeded the cost of the sending data through NASA's deep space network.
Would you have a link to your keyboard? I'm looking for one just like that, after having used a mechanical keyboard much like the one you described for a while.
The point about let exressions is excellent, and I definitely relate to the author. I think they're underemphasized in FP evangelism to people used to the imperative paradigm - "look, this is pretty similar to how it'd look in python if you were disciplined about not reusing names."
Regarding using light to disinfect ...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-experimental-ultraviolet-lig...
> In particular, when you first create a file, you need to call fsync on the directory that contains it, otherwise it might not exist after a failure.

Suppose you have created a file in a directory that is not readable. How do you get a file descriptor for the directory to call fsync on? It's an error to try to open a directory for writing.
#BlueLivesMatter
For the recursive functor application example on a tree, normal meta-programming would be a macro taking the type as an argument, and then generating the resulting case by case application code, at compile time.

This would be much clearer and could automatically keep working if more cases were added (adding new node types is common when adding language features to abstract syntax trees).

This is a very awesome demo but my experience with other templating systems in IDEs (like autogenerated toString and other methods in Java) is that making boilerplate easy to write doesn't help make it easier to read or modify.
They are all hybrids and the offspring will not have the same gene mix as the parent. You’ll end up with apples with random mixes of characteristics from the grandparent apples.
Oh interesting, apparently Honeycrisp could have been a trademark, which would have allowed them to sell them indefinitely under that name excluding others from doing so, but apparently that got messed up because the name Honeycrisp was included in the patent name.

https://www.duetsblog.com/2018/09/articles/articles/if-only-...
"For those new to the term, a quick definition. Serverless computing refers to an architecture in which applications (or parts of applications) run on-demand within execution environments that are typically hosted remotely."

That sounds like the opposite of serverless.
One of my favorite recent hard sci fi novels. The science and engineering were all real, plausible, and the story was fun too.
I go through cycles. I'll have a long stretch where I come home and I'm just fried and can't do anything that takes critical thinking. And then I'll go through a period where either work is more boring or I've found something to do on the side that's so exciting to me that I have tons of energy and focus on side projects.

One thing I've been doing for the last 2ish years is having side projects that are really far removed from my work. So for example a lot of my work is infrastructure automation and related problems, so I've been doing some side projects learning basic electronics and hacking on microcontrollers. Figuring out why my I'm getting weird readings on a temperature sensor is a great break from figuring out why my load balancer didn't do the right thing.
The comment you replied to was on the right track, but you are barking up the wrong tree. Cloudflare is successful because the internet has fundamental issues that aren't going to get solved in the near future, like trivial abuse and a world where botnets are easier, cheaper, and stronger than ever. It's website and server operators who opt-in to Cloudflare.

It's more helpful to ask yourself why people use it instead of just harping on the downsides.
On Inglourious Basterds, Alternate Histories, and Possible Futures
Do you have any particular software you recommend for Speech recognition? Do you know of any software that can cope with programming language syntax without introduced a tonne of dictation errors?
To clarify, the reason you are likely ending up with a wild apple phenotype is not because that is intrinsic to the nature of apples. Otherwise, new varieties could never be developed. Crabapples are used as pollinators for farmed apples since apples aren't self fertile, and you'll end up with a hybrid. If you've got the space and the time (in this case a lot of time), breeding is a great hobby for anyone.

Another factor is that apples from seed take a lot longer to fruit, and as you mentioned, you can really control the growth characteristics of the tree with the rootstock. Unlike mangoes, the rootstock can result in the same scion variety of apple growing into a 50 foot tree or a 5 foot shrub- thats a huge amount of control!
I assumed the average kid, at least on the upper range of that designation, would have been able to type faster than the previous generation. I understand the youngest generation is now much more using touch screens, but I didn't think that there would have been a steady decline from say 20 years ago.
This author makes some good points - and I happen to agree. Tech Debt is like any other kind of debt in that it allows for you to have something today that you pay for later.

My personal rule of thumb regarding TD is this: Have we achieved Product Market Fit yet? The answer means a lot.

If we have PMF, then we're working on a product with customers and expectations around performance. Its important to do good work here because in all likelihood, this code is and will continue to be generally long lived. Its OK to take a little extra time and design something that is reasonably future-proof.

If we have not achieved PMF - all bets are off. The customer has no idea how elegant the code is and doesn't care - if there even IS a customer in the first place at this stage. Tech Debt here can be a savior in that taking some well-hidden-from-view shortcuts enables you to iterate faster, get more features in front of a (potential) customer, fix more bugs and generally Learn Faster.

By the time you have PMF you will for the first time know your Real Requirements (and not before). I can't even remember how many times Ive seen perfectly good code scrapped because of a change in direction at an early stage of a product. That was fine too because it was developmental code full of debt. Imagine if we'd fully engineered it only to scrap it?

I propose that Tech Debt can be a good thing in this context.
I agree with your sentiments. I've found that OpenFaaS[1] has been nice to work with and you can deploy it wherever.

[1] https://github.com/openfaas/faas
Spammers have learned this and will call twice. This got REALLY annoying when I was in work meetings and my phone would start ringing to tell me about my car's extended warranty.
Mostly.

https://www.nrel.gov/news/features/2020/renewables-rescue-st...

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy19osti/73207.pdf
This is a good point. I agree that going slower improves writing quality, in most cases.

But there are often times where I'm struck with a particularly well-crystallized thought, and typing speed becomes a huge bottleneck in recording its structure before the thought dissolves back into the ether of conceptual soup in my brain.