skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Can you go outside with a book at all? Even if you live in an apartment, there should be either some shared courtyard space or a balcony. Even just going out into the hall. That's basically what students did when I was in the dorms at college. Put some physical space between you and your work environment.

I live in a house, so I can just take a seat on the patio out back (as long as it's not cold or raining like it is today), but there should be some equivalent. Do that for an hour then go back into your apartment and sign in for work.
cannot reply to the below so doing so here

> Sure, but there are ways to fix that. I'm not really a big fan of corporate taxes just because they seem to always either find a way around it, or they just raise prices. It's hard to escape.

There's no way around payroll taxes for employees. The ones they elude are corporate income taxes. If they have to raise prices to cover the cost of insuring drivers, or paying their share of social funds, then good. Because if they don't, its the public that bears the costs.

> I think the issue here is the definition of full-time work is not enough. It has to include other things, like having to physically go to a place of employment, work hours that you're told to work, etc.

There is more to it. What you're arguing for is an escape rule if hours are too low, that supercedes all of the other logic.

> Here's the actual issue. These gig workers, or contractors, or whatever you want to call them need benefits (healthcare etc.) that the government isn't paying for.

No, the government (the public) is paying for it, because Uber and Lyft aren't.

> The government needs to pay for that by raising taxes and/or lowering costs, etc. The way to do that isn't to make Uber and Lyft leave California and leave those workers without any sort of income.

The government needs to do that by raising taxes on Uber and Lyft, which is largely the point of making these people of employees. Is there a middle of the road version where uber just pays the proportion costs that drivers earn pro rated to the hours they work? Yeah, maybe, but that's likely not viable either. Uber is already in the red because their business model is bad.

If we imagined them paying their fair share, would you support an explicit subsidy to help keep them in business in CA? God I hope not.
Quibi officially announces it's shutting down
Pedantic note: they're not really imaging individual atoms directly; it's a composite view of the structure based on averaging thousands of different images of copies of the molecule in different orientations. This is true of other structure determination methods such as crystallography of course. The breakthrough here is that these are exceptionally accurate measurements; when I tried learning EM in the early 2000s it was still mostly just vague blobs.
I mean, it's a five minute walk to the bus stop, but it's also just a 15 minute walk to every type of store/gym/restaurant I need. So, while I personally don't use the public transport, it's there if I ever need it.
Incompetent bureaucracies do exactly this - "you do not develop a new weapons system just to run a speculative planning exercise". One of significant reasons why USSR failed as a state.
Should I Buy the Dip?
"The Cold Equations" is pretty much the sole story on a list of SF shorts I'm finishing writing up that I don't actually like and am pretty much just including because it's on so many lists--possibly for the same reason :-)

And not only is it completely unrealistic in order to make the point of the title but everything about the characters is so 1950s feeling that it feels incredibly dated.
I just format them with Gnome Disks (that uses LUKS in the background and supports many filesystems) and use a strong (LUKS) passphrase that goes in the password manager.

Has been pretty reliable and widely available.
As someone who bought the Windows Phone it was glorious. When Windows Mobile 10 arrived it was fantastic.

Such a shame they sold it off and yes I know the reasons but it was the best phone I've had in the modern century.
Does anybody know how to fix the problem of the taskbar's icons getting stuck to "orange" (notification)? This is for me a problem especially with Skype as I never know if somebody posted a new message into the chat or not (but it happens as well with other programs).

Better explanation of problem is for example here (none of the proposed workarounds work for me): https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/4qlgqp/taskbar_i...

I didn't have this problem in Win7.
Cylon Library for Fast, Scalable Data Engineering
You can still get artifacts due to freezing. But the lack of crystal packing makes it much easier to detect functional conformational changes in different copies of the molecule on an EM grid.
Panel: SQL or NoSQL? Schema or Schemaless?
Not-invented-here (NIH) coders end up worrying about this kind of situation. People who develop "creative" systems by working ground-up starting with foundational system logic. They create proprietary systems really fast, and those proprietary systems often do some wackadoodle things in the name of internal logic.

As a result, those systems are typically harder to maintain or secure by just anybody, even by some experts who are not from the NIH mindset (here's where the author's approach isn't really fair, IMO). Proprietary systems are are less likely to present the typical bell curve security issues that an automated scanner would pick up.

What they are more vulnerable to is puzzle logic--the "what's going on here, hmm let's have a tinker" approach. Which is exactly what the author presented and it also matches his broader approach of "let's have a tinker...with freelancers".

It's a subjective security vs. objective security approach. Both sides are important. But both sides should know about how the other side works.
Bic.[1] The cigarette lighter folks. Their lighters are such a ubiquitous, wonderful tool that humanity forgot just how big a deal fire is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soci%C3%A9t%C3%A9_Bic
The details seem to weaken the headline:

> In a new report, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says solar is now the cheapest form of electricity for utility companies to build. That’s thanks to risk-reducing financial policies around the world,

aka 'subsidies'?

> With the new, lowered cost of capital, solar’s cost per megawatt has fallen almost completely below both gas and coal worldwide.

'almost completely below'?
I work for Microsoft in the Azure space. I can categorically say that is nonsense. Full stop.
I remember reading somewhere that due to the differing pace of evolution and technology advancements, any intelligent living aliens we meet are almost certainly going to be gods or cavemen. I can't find the reference.
Ruby is a fantastically good language with a slow bloated runtime. That killed Ruby.

Python was less good and less bloated, but still bloated.

I think we use Python now only because our computers are orders of magnitude more powerful than a decade ago when I was watching Python Zope slow to a crawl and die.
Most people are only aware of the SaaS products used by their team or department. If you were to list out every single tool or service used across many 100-1000 person companies, it wouldn’t be much shorter than this list.

If you’ve never worked in sales, you’d be surprised at how many different SaaS products and services can go into running a successful sales department.

Sales people tend to be more sticky to their preferred SaaS products than engineers. You may end up with a lot of duplicated functionality across sales tools just because the VP of sales has always used certain tools for certain operations and has no desire to change that.
He donated to the campaign of a proposition aimed at removing rights from a group of people, many of whom were his employees. You can agree or disagree with the consequences for that, but at least get the facts straight.
How bare metal provisioning works in theory
It would fit in nicely with a Buran, it is quickly approaching it's current condition :) . Also reasons for building Buran and SM are rather similar.
Article doesn't mention any bomb and "shot up" is stretching things.
Laotze wasn’t really a trickster, that was Chuangtze.

Mid-grade Taoism.
Ask HN: Do you think attitude is important asset for your career?
Recently, I have been reading /discussing a lot about why having an attitude is important and how it helps you as an individual. But how important do you think that it is essential for your career.
You do indeed read it almost exactly right. I would propose slight modifications, though. Maybe re-word it into:

> City councils legally prohibit landowners from adding dwelling units to their own property.

Remember - all this "pent up" demand for housing is a result of homeowners being denied permission to modify their own property.

Historically, all cities evolved from fields because landowners incrementally upgraded their own property, when the price of rents justified additional improvements.

In the 1920s, city councils gave themselves permission to prevent property modifications "for planning purposes", and the US Supreme Court never struck it down.

The early goals of zoning were explicitly laid out by the mayor of Atlanta in 1922[0], with gems like:

Zoning will keep the apartments out of the private house sections. The coming of the apartment drives out the private home.

And:

The residence districts are further subdivided into three race districts:

R1 or white residence district.
R2 or colored residence district.
R3 or undetermined race district.

The above race zoning is essential in the in interest of the public peace, order and security and will promote the welfare and prosperity of both the white and colored race. Care has been taken to prevent discrimination and to provide adequate space for the expansion of the housing areas of each race without encroaching on the areas now occupied by the other.

Nearly every US city still has R1, R2, and R3 zoning, though of course no one includes the racial element anymore.

I gave a high-level overview/rant on zoning, racism, and Denver here: https://twitter.com/josh_works/status/1294726871574179840

[0]: https://josh.works/full-copy-of-1922-atlanta-zone-plan
The infrastructure required to "reuse [water] almost indefinitely" is a major investment for any municipality. Major investments are generally seen as constraints.

I live near Santa Fe, and the mid-to-long term forecast for water supply is pretty dire. Humans have lived in the area for a long time, and it's not likely to become completely dry. But will there be enough to support e.g. a doubling of the county population? This seems unlikely, even with the sorts of changes in use and infrastructure that you mention.
Lion is the Catalina of its era, right down to all the broken legacy apps (because no Rosetta). Catalina is much worse, mind you.
Jack O'lantern Origami (Tutorial)
Folded from 1 piece of paper.
Happy Holloween!
Now that I think about it, I'm really curious as well. I didn't work in Cloud, but my perception is TK is really reshaping GCP as well as the Gsuite to whatever it is now.

Sundar's role seems to really be give his lieutenants free reign which I guess makes sense seeing as how he now oversees all of Alphabet.
https://www.irfanview.com/

UI is old, but is the fastest.
This statement ignores the prices. Just look at the prices and you'll see there's no way anyone thinks they're paying for an expert.
From a business standpoint, I would have to agree he did turn them around from a business standpoint.

As a user of Windows since 3.1 (w/out networking). I do the same as MekaiGS "I honestly have no idea where all the Windows settings are anymore so I just search instead."

It was like multiple teams designed different parts of the settings but they never had any meetings or talked with each other.

There are days when I would rather use Microsoft Bob
than Windows 10

Or better yet, Microsoft Joe Bob
http://www.bytebrothers.org/joebob.htm
"Go Microsoft -- Go Intel -- Go America," and "QuickTime is for Pinko Hippie Wimps."
India buzzes with fake news of 'civil war' in Pakistan
Well I'd point out that Facebook gave us react, basically altering the default programming paradigm for webdev, and Google, well Google plays God and judges all Webdevs via SEO. Plus regardless of what folks think of Flutter, Google has done some incredible work there. There's some very interesting things happening with it related to WebDev that are slowly but surely coming. Real cross platform native desktop support (as in compiled, not interpreted, imagine no more electron apps taking up huge amounts of RAM and being slow while they do it), ahead of time compilation to native platform code for arbitrary dart executables, and transpilation to js from Dart, which will soon have sound null safety enabled by default, all in a single code base is pretty wild. So, I'd say Google is making moves in a very interesting direction.
They don’t have to hire someone from Vietnam. They could hire someone from West Virginia for 1/4 the price of a SF developer a day after college. Maybe even less.
...no?

I wasn't making a specific claim, so didn't find the need to present data, you know, for the claim I'm not making.

> I love this. You're conflating a business model that doesn't work under a set of (possibly) onerous regulations to a failed business model. Who has it failed for? And don't say investors, because these are smart people who believe there is a path to profitability.

It's a failed business model because it cannot operate once these companies are asked to pay living wages - which they don't. Hence...failed. If I were to open up a factory and paid my workers $0.50/hour and then got shut down for not paying minimum wage; the burden of that failure would be on me, not the state that's asking me to pay minimum wage.

Who cares about investors?
Some SSH honeypots accept more than one password for root. So, if 'letmein' and 'changeme' get you a root shell, it's probably a honeypot... but it could be a very broken PAM config as well (I have seen this firsthand).
> no new ambitious projects are started with Ruby

What does this even mean, only lazy ass projects are started with Ruby? Yes Ruby is declining in popularity, as does PHP. It doesn't mean these languages are dying, there's just way more options to choose from these days.
It's funny to hear people, typically those with some stock involved, talk about how revolutionary 5G will be. Poor range and interference almost negate the benefits of increased speed. I can't think of any app, etc. that is is currently inhibited due to the lack of 5G. Can anyone name something that 5G actually makes possible (other than giving companies like AT&T an opportunity for a marketing gimmick)?
Skiing might be a bit better - most of the passes are going with a reservation system at least at the beginning.
Use Your Bike as a Backup to Your Backup Power Supply
Falsehoods programmers believe about time zones
Oh, so that's what all the JS slang was about in all those webdev vacancies I've seen over the past 10 years or so?!

I'm an embedded guy (very little idea about webdev stuff). Nice summary :)
In the IT/Tech DD world, we call this "Back Office" vs "Customer Facing".

Some of these applications appear to span both.
Still trying to wrap my head around the fact that I've have a chromium based browser from microsoft on my iphone.
Really? Last time I was there around a year ago I was able to connect Proton.

I believe the paid plan of ProtonVPN also offers TOR connections. Not a specialist on this, though.
This is a fundamental problem with blockchains, and it cannot be understated.
The progress of Cryo EM has been extremely impressive. I wouldn't have thought you could push it to actual atomic resolution. Even with X-Ray you don't achieve that for typical protein structures.

It'll be interesting to see if and how quickly these advances can be put into routine use.
Their tech stack is far more bleeding edge than I would have envisioned. I wish they gave an idea of why they chose to use k8s at the edge. I can see how containers are useful for deployment, and the fail-over built into Kubernetes is really nice, but I'm shocked that's the simplest/best way to do it at the edge.

I would have expected some VMWare product, just because it's "enterprisey". Shame on me for judging.
I don't think anyone was under the impression that it's 'free money' to everyone involved.

It's 'free money' to the person it happens to (original poster).
1. That might have been a good thing back when updates weren't dreaded, because they would rarely if ever add distracting UI elements or take away useful features.

2. If you're a small-scale Office user who's happy not to have the latest and the greatest, and you're happy to update your copy of Office every 5-7 years, then a yearly subscription will not be a good trade-off.
> I really don't get what is the hate with the central banks getting control over the money

Because every single CB in the world devalues the currency they govern.

Bitcoin and other coins, on the other hand, are deflationary by design. Which means, while they can drop in value, they will not do so because somebody decided to turn the printer on and print a few trillion BTC. BTC is capped at 21 million coins. And some of it gets lost every day, so its cap is actually shrinking.

(not all cryptocurrencies are deflationary by design, in case I wasn't clear)
I initially wrote it off as my core i3 laptop with Windows being slow but then same thing was happening with my shiny new Windows 10 Core i7 workstation. It's really not cool. It all the UWP apps. The new Calculator opens much slower than the older application also.
Nevermind that Signal is entirely open source and has been openly audited several times. Lol.
How Indiana Jones, Rambo, & others ended up in 80s Czechoslovak text-adventures
How to Visualize Decision Trees
I agree with a lot of this -- although I hadn't put the story about the galactic core together in the same way. A lot of this isn't made clear though. Can you point to some of the evidence you used to arrive at the conclusion that the high-tech civ is centered in the core, or that they're gating civilizations entering it? I think you might have picked up on some things I missed.

One correction: the Zones impact BOTH the speed of computation AND the laws of physics (whether FTL travel and communication are physically possible). They also make pretty explicit in Fire Upon the Deep that mechanical failure rates of certain complex systems (especially automation) increase rapidly as you approach the Slow Zone. And then within the Slow Zone they increase again as you approach the Unthinking Depths.

It is made explicit -- as you note -- that the Zones of thought are controlled somehow by the Countermeasure (or some Control System it speaks to). It is also clear that this system do not like the Blight and actively opposes it.

One other interpretation that struck me is that the Control System may have put in place the Zones of Thought simply because stars become so dense as one approaches the Galactic Core. Forcing the Transcend to the Galactic edges limits the rate at which any change can spread and allows for civilizations (and the System itself) to respond to threats such as the Blight.
my sci-fi perspective is practically on the side of charitable, but in essence more like disinterest.

in less than a century we went from heavier than air flight, to satellites, moon landings, mars probes, et al. and now we're talking seriously about terraforming mars and becoming interplanetary? it could turn out to be ~150 years from the invention of the lightbulb to people on mars.. insane.

another century or two of progress and that spacefaring civilisation, and their tech, will look nothing like 99.9% of the speculation. and may even look nothing like us lol.

so given the amount of time it takes for a ball of dirt to churn out meat computers, and how long it takes them to start making neil armstrong figurines. it would be reasonable to assume that all the other aliens are a few years ahead or behind us.

it is not easy to picture the kind of mind bending spaceships they might have because, for example, for us they are still being thought of as spaceships.

ex. you have to really think about what the internet is to not take the logical route and say that it's just copper, fancy glass and radio-waves.. it's actually extremely weird and magical. we have loads of stuff that is incomprehensible to our ancestors, and it's just going to keep going.

of course in this hypothetical universe, i assume that time creates consciousness and benevolence. which may not be the reality. but if it's true, and that advanced civilisations exist all around us and are enormous, magical realms of impossibility, then we will never see them because they are incomprehensible to us, and to them we are a curious entity which share some similarities to their own history – if that's even something that they still posses.
Not sure how useful the PhD who's been serving coffee for 10 years will be to the next Manhattan project.

Perhaps we should initiate some moonshot projects or something to keep the skills sharp. Low pay but you get to do (perhaps self-directed) work on the coolest problems. You would need an army just to process the applications I believe.
Is one worse than the other for some reason?
Things You Might Have Missed, October 21, 2020
I think you can make really strong arguments for productivity both being higher than normal times (due to overwork, less options for non-work activities, etc.) and lower than normal (due to additional childcare responsibilities, overall stress level, etc.). I think both make a good case for the OP's point that the current situation is not indicative of what we'll be able to sustain long-term, both good and bad.

Personally, I think the biggest thing my team discovered was how much of our work was actually able to be done remotely. We were all averaging roughly one day a week work from home, but I expect to be more like 2-3 long-term.
It's because all of the budgeting has been shifted to Marketing and Sales departments.

I'm sure. It's made for some painful discussions that I've just given up trying to have, and now I just point back to all of the saved email chains when interrogated for answers by superiors.

We're talking in the tens of thousands of dollars for email signatures.
I would be cool if you could analyze this from the peak of the bubble in 2000 to the bottom of the 2008-2009 financial crisis...
I'm planning on spending the winter months in Colorado and Utah. Monthly stays on Airbnbs were extremely cheap a few months ago.
There’s typically a rule that the shares with extra voting power cannot be sold. They automatically convert prior to sale.

Basically they’ve thought of these things and controlled for them already.
I dislike the patronising tone of your comment. If your first assumption is that the interlocutor is monolingual, that makes me think you are used to a quite unsophisticated company.

> I can start pointing out flaws in PHP, and you can claim that those flaws don't matter.

It is context-dependent. For some jobs it is a poor choice, for others - including most of web application back-end development - pretty much none of its so-called flaws actually matter.
A truly great and affordable city, that is also hot and humid in the summer and then frigid in the winter.
Just curious do GitLab actively recruit new grads compared to other companies or do they only hire experienced devs