skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> "Illegal" labor is ordinary and expected.

I agree with your entire comment, but I want to emphasize the part about illegal labor.

There are entire industries built on the back of illegal labor, and I think many otherwise informed Americans are not aware of this.

We have some fairly substantial mismatches between our labor market and our immigration policies.

Before someone says “just don’t use illegal labor”, please realize that this means that you will be out of business due to a lack of competitiveness since literally everyone else in your line of business does it.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, maybe it’s just better off staying like it is — the market is clearing. On the other hand, I kind of wish proper enforcement of the laws would happen. This would force these companies to pay wages that legal workers would take. This, of course, would require them to raise their prices to the end user, but it would give legal laborers more... of something... definitely money, definitely rights, and maybe a bigger piece of the pie.

I don’t work in any of these fields, but I know people who do. I would love to hear from HNers who have first hand experience.
Ask HN: Most efficient way for the inexperienced to learn PCB design?
I'm a software developer looking to get into hardware and embedded devices. I have some experience with digital electronics using things like STM32 discovery boards, but not designing my own circuits around microcontrollers.

As a developer I'm used to "learning by doing", iterating rapidly to correct and learn from mistakes. I'm having a hard time applying this to hardware, though. Microcontroller-based designs often seem impractical to breadboard. I could design a PCB, send it off to have a few samples made and assemble it myself, but that's a lot of time and effort (shipping and assembly) for a single iteration that no doubt contains numerous mistakes due to my lack of experience. It's also difficult to tinker and correct mistakes with a PCB, so I feel like I'd have to make a semi-educated guess about what I did wrong and send off a new design for fabrication that's likely to also be wrong.

I get the impression that experienced PCB designers can confidently whip up a prototype design and send it straight off to a fab shop, confident that it'll mostly work and maybe require just a few tweaks. Am I wrong about this? Do professionals do a lot of breadboarding? Do they use simulation tools that can validate a design with a high degree of confidence?

What's the most efficient way for someone like me to get started developing custom PCBs? Many thanks.
Interesting.... I felt that the MacOS was a bit blurry for my liking too. I thought it was my eyes or something, but looks like I'm not alone.
There would be immediate quantifiable benefits in terms of how people live their lives however. Being vaccinated is likely to allow society to move back to some level of normalcy.

Balanced against long term unknowable personal health risk as you say.

In the end my pov is it's better to get on with living now and if a vaccine offers that then I'll take it.
The benefit of laptop is that it's ... everything. It's a replacement for desktop, for TV in living room, for TV in bedroom, for something to look up stuff in kitchen or workshop, and you can take it when you travel, use it in a hotel room or in a train or plane ...

It's not perfect and perhaps not good replacement for many of those things, but it is so practical. Especially if you live in a small apartment where desktop and TVs would take a lot of space.
Interesting news today, Israel remains the only country on earth capable of freeing a spy in the USA convicted and serving a life sentence.

https://www.jns.org/us-frees-jonathan-pollard-after-decades-...

A complicated relationship.
IDK, the CPU has never been my bottle neck for work. I know it is for some use cases, but for general software development memory has always been my main bottleneck.
Did you do IPC-A-610 inspections at that company?
It doesn't help that Microsoft has completely abandoned ReFS. Maybe there were good technical reasons why it was a dead-end, I dunno, but it's really no fun being stuck with NTFS.
The Silenced Majority – Can America still afford democracy?
That is indeed interesting, I haven't seen it in the wild. Lot's of bad solder joints, shorted MLCCs- sure.
I'm now tempted to scratch the ones used in designs I have access to.
This largely matches my experience whenever I play with it.

Things generally work, but poorly with lots of little issues that degrade the experience and regular users wouldn't tolerate.

If you use linux you learn to tolerate the bad experience, but I think it's just because you adapt to deal with it and lower your expectations of what good even is.
As nice as it would be to use the opportunity to spread awareness, the subtext "Santa could possibly spread COVID-19 if he weren't masked" is probably best avoided. It just opens up a can of worms.

I hope that there aren't any mall santas this year, and if they must, I hope they wear masks. The inconsistency wouldn't be great, but it's better than almost-certainly infecting a bunch of elderly men.
Linux desktop/laptop is totally worth it ... if you're already a software person. Which I am :)
> linux on a laptop is bad.

I think it at least partially depends on the hardware.

> - Suspend rarely worked without hacks, even with hacks laptop would often wake and heat up to thermal shutdown in backpack. Hibernate was similarly bad.

I did experience this a little bit, but it's been 2-3 years since the last time it happened.

> - 'Normal' apps often didn't work or worked poorly (Netflix, flash, Spotify, 1Password), things are a lot better on this front now.

No comment on this, I haven't really used any of these on my laptop.

> - Monitor support was typically bad and caused problems, connecting to monitor, multiple monitors, resolution issues on wake, etc.

Only issue I had with this was one TV wouldn't take HDMI output at the same time as displaying to my laptop screen.

Everything else has worked great.

> - WiFi was often a hassle and either wouldn't work without hacks or would stop working for an unknown reason.

Haven't had any issues with this, but I would imagine it would be highly dependent on the wireless card you had.

> - Sound would stop working for unknown reasons.

Yeah, audio on linux kinda sucks right now. I've never been stuck without a workaround, but I've needed workarounds multiple times.

> - Bad anti-aliasing/font support in general.

I've not noticed this, but I also haven't looked.

> - Personally I thought the UI (mostly gnome, then unity) felt slow and UI elements/chrome often took up a ton of visual space - in general things were uglier.

GNOME + Pop_shell at least has gotten fast enough to keep me from installing i3 again. This is of course a matter of personal preference.

I personally trust neither Apple or MS, but they both have their upsides.

To each their own, and happy hacking!
Facebook’s experimental hate-speech policy seems to be working
THIS. I have recently switched back to Ubuntu after a long period of time working for a big corp under a Microsoft ecosystem. I feel like my computer is mine back again.
I had such experience with Mac. It seems like for every little thing you want to do you need to install an app. This prompted me to check out Linux. I got XPS 13 and Linux installation was smooth and everything worked just fine out of the box.
I think it really depends on what programs you use.

I pretty much only use Firefox and terminals. So I set ~/.Xresources Xft.dpi to something that looked nice. Presumably a bunch of programs ignore this (otherwise I wouldn't be seeing complaints about HiDPI online).
Before records, the compiler did not generate code required to properly use classes (or even structs) as value types. There's a reason everyone is so excited about records.

I have apps with thousands of lines of implementing comparison/equality interfaces, overloading operators, etc. for my data objects. You can definitely write it all in Notepad, but it would be a massive waste of time.
> But there's quite a bit too learn.

There is an illusion that there is not as much to learn in Windows or Mac, and in fact all that knowledge is even harder to grasp as a lot of it is proprietary and not transparent.
Instead of xournal, I recommend xournalpp. Thing has backwards compatibility with stuff created on Xournal and has a bunch of extra features, and it's better if you have a stylus.
> The vast majority of the evidence is anecdotal

True. But how does that compare to evidence that the vaccine will have serious adverse effects?
I mean, I'm comfortable accepting that I'm an edge case and have the worst luck with linux installations ever, but I still think there's so many things that regularly go wrong (even for people that aren't me), that it's definitely not in contention for regular people's daily drivers.
Are the iPad versions in that 'console platform' category or PC category?
Who knows what happened at that factory, maybe someone made a mistake.
The part might also just have failed.
I am so glad that these posts are getting the attention of HN community.

Linux is not perfect but it’s competitive in 2020 for PCs. As we head to an era where user data collection is blurring the lines of ethics, I think we should at least keep the OS clean.

I switched to Fedora in 2018 and didn’t have to not look back. The fonts were crappy but that taught me a lot about truetypes, anti-aliasing and subpixel rendering.

Some of the perceived shortcomings of linux can indeed make the PC more personal.
What It Means to Be a Software Architect at Ssense
Q: Do you prefer pre-pandemic life to a global pandemic?

A: we like pre-pandemic better

It could also be weird wording like this.

I also suspect that different roles feel differently. If your life is meetings, WFH is tough. A.k.a. everybody high up in an org with all the power.
> Those ethics were created from within a theistic worldview, they weren't born from reason.

In many case, they were both; the existence of a theistic worldview does not prevent the application of reason.

> Adopting the ethics of a religious culture while denying the underlying assumptions is pretty unreasonable.

But we do adopt the relevant foundational assumptions, just not the irrelevant ones, where the conclusions are shared.

Of course, the conclusions are often different, because post-Enlightenment society often rejects substantive, morally significant elements of its precursors (in some cases, pre-existing religions have adapted to this and adopted, in whole or in part, Enlightenment values as well.)
Those will still eventually die due to log being written to the card using all available read/write cycles.
This is the same as Blue Apron that had heavy marketing spend to acquire new customers because old customers were churning very quickly.

If you had a scalable channel you would expect to accrue more customers as old cohorts retained customers, but this instead just looks like exchanging ad dollars for one, two-time purchase customers which is why the ad spend is so high and the life blood of the company.

Hard to imagine this company not getting hammered by the street unless they have a one-time lift from COVID shopping, but long term hard to bullish on this company especially when comparing their S&M expense vs R&D expense.
> What can we do, now, as developers ?

Don't buy Apple products.

Don't use Apple products.

Don't support Apple products.

Don't develop for Apple products.

Raise awareness among those who would listen.
Not everyone shares your sentiment [0].

[0] https://theoatmeal.com/comics/cats_actually_kill
Google plans to shut down Google Voice integration with classic Hangouts
Nope, that's not a good explanation. German measures we're about the same as the in Western and Southern european nations, even too late. Most others were 2 weeks earlier.

The best explanation is that Germany and similar countries just have proper healthcare for seniors, esp. the retirement homes. The protected the vulnerable better.
The bad countries are all united in cost cuts in those homes and healthcare. France, Belgium, UK, Spain, NL, Italy, US, Brazil. Belgium had the highest IFR due to not enough masks for caregivers. They had to share it. Spain et al also destroyed their previously excellent systems with the recent rightwing governments.

Socialism is apparently the best cure for COVID-19. Even if Germany is extremely rightwing, they still have proper healthcare and caregiving infrastructure.
>"This has nothing to do with regulations and everything to do with how much money the companies are willing to throw at the problem."

Regulations are the cause of the costs; I am not saying that regulatory compliance is a waste of money, but it definitely is a cost which should be considered.

Delays also cost money and reduce return on investment (ROI), so I am sure the pharmaceutical companies do spend a great deal of money to expedite the process. Could all drug approvals go through faster if the pharma companies were willing to run larger trials? Would the FDA allow for these larger trials, and expedite the process for approval? What about rarer diseases, are they worth curing or treating on a timely basis?
I can‘t get away from Lucida Console because all those more recent fonts seem to be only designed for HiDPI use.
Eclipse can show the call hierarchy for Java from a shortcut, for what that's worth.
My Linux experience has been bad, yet I would still choose it over the alternatives. I don't want to give up control over my devices or fight an endless battle against bloatware / spyware.

Some of the issues:

* Hibernate / suspend does not work reliably on my Thinkpad. I gave up trying to configure it.

* Encrypting my drive was much more complicated to setup than on a Mac.

* Trackpad does not feel nearly as good as on a Macbook

* Palm rejection is poor

* My desktop gets confused about audio inputs when plugging things (e.g. mic) in and out

* Random UI freezes when running lots of high intensity applications, often requiring a reboot. Sorry, but the UI should always be given priority on a non-server distro

* Various apps such as Slack do not work as reliably as on Mac

* Need to figure out my own VPN / dev config when everyone else on the team is on Macs

* I am yet to find a soundcard that works

I'm sure people will chime in with "well it works for me" or "have you tried X distribution". That's great, I am genuinely pleased for you! But let's not pretend that Linux always works out of the box.
No but, Ruby makes it trivial. No decompilations, no assembly, no debuggers necessary. Drop into an irb in a running process, change stuff and get out in seconds
Roblox has all this money, and they never contributed anything significant back to the OGRE project?
The reason renewables are the cheapest source of energy today is at least in part because Germany made a big investment early on.

Ensuring that there is demand allows investment to be made in production, which allows competition and learning, and acceleration of the decrease in cost.

Batteries are halving in cost every handful of years because there is a guaranteed market that allows construction of more production facilities.

Batteries are currently being deployed very cost-effective for replacement of gas peaker plants and for frequency regulation. They are also being deployed on the grid as "non-wires-alternatives" to transmission upgrades. As we transition to a carbon-free grid, they will find even more use.

A huge fraction of planned solar farms in the US have storage built in, because of the efficiency of reusing the same DC to AC inverters, and because for quite a while now, panels have been cheap enough that some panel generation capacity is thrown away in order to get more output at other times of the day.

It is a mistake to think of batteries as needing some sort of technological leap to serve our needs. If we had to, we could deploy them at current prices and build a renewable, carbon-free grid more cheaply than we could with nuclear. But we are only installing them as necessary as we replace aging infrastructure, rather than shutting down existing infrastructure that hasn't worn down.

As the cost of storage+solar drops below the fuel+operations expense of natural gas, we will start shutting down natural gas plants before their natural end of life, resulting in wasted costs. I have a feeling that any naturals gas turbine installed today will be considered a boondoggle within 5-10 years.

The future is now, when it comes to storage, we just haven't had time for reporting to catch up.
I work for Red Hat, can confirm we get Think Pads and they do work wonderfully with Fedora and RHEL. I don't work with the kernel team but I can't imagine it's a coincidence that we use ThinkPads and it works well on Fedora.
at what point does the bay area just declare war on china, india, and every country in africa for all the harm they are doing, on a global scale, to the climate?
I recommend Nemo. If on Ubuntu, follow this guide:

https://www.linuxuprising.com/2018/07/how-to-replace-nautilu...
And the log of abandonment of Google's support for its products gets yet another entry.
Follow-up article: why aren't there any songbirds in Istanbul?
There's even less evidence for a negative outcome from taking the vaccine.
It's the "maker" community, who are more than satisfied to glue together half-working things with no real knowledge --- or intent to learn --- about how they work.

In fact I'd bet most of them would be scared off by the several thousand pages of documentation an SoC like that usually would have.
I would probably use a NUC and a portable monitor before I'd use Linux on a laptop.
But GNU works better out of the box. TFA recommends Pop OS which is preinstalled on System76 devices, and comes with simple window tiling, which many devs swear by as a productivity booster.
The HD Video Feedback Kinetic Sculpture
Switch from Debian to Fedora. This fixed most of my Thinkpad issues.
This "and Apple pays top-dollar to TSMC to ensure they're the first on the new node" is Tim Cook's crowning achievement in the way Apple combines supply chain dominance with technology strategy.

They do not win every bet they make (e.g. growing their own sapphire) but when they win it is stunning.
More people should use Hypothesis
Linux always works out of the box on my Librem 15, which was designed to run Linux from the beginning.
It works out of the box if you use it on supported hardware (just like macOS). Buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled.
> Is it that I always use Samsung or SanDisk SD cards with the Pi?

Quite possibly! Flash memory is absolutely not all the same. I wish someone would do for SD cards what Backblaze does for hard drives.
> - zfs's logical volume layer is rather more flexible than btrfs's - you can make a multi-device set of mixed disks

Can you please elaborate on this? Working on mixed disks was always a killer feature of btrfs for me!
I saw her take on this on Twitter and flinched. We had a similar experience with a > $5K eval board from Xilinx that we were basing a product on, and a customer wanted to start software development before the product was ready so we sold them a setup that was equivalent to our product in design (and embedded the Xilinx board) They found a problem which turned out to be a design defect on the eval board so we went to Xilinx for a warranty replacement, they refused saying they expressly disclaim any "fitness for purpose" on their eval boards and their terms of service disallow using their eval boards in a product. I rather rudely asked them why they charged money for them then.

A very annoying experience.
I noticed a lot of cats in the port of Jubail in Saudi Arabia. I was told they were scavengers and Arabs didn't usually keep them as pets, or think about them much at all.
My biggest takeaway: this question of how to be truthful about history and simultaneously sensitive to people who are traumatized by the memory, or have a unique or minority perspective - it is neither and easy question to answer, nor an easy problem to solve. Parties who would debate the question would do well to respect the problem and others who would offer solutions.

I lean more towards honesty and accuracy, and if you can't handle the truth then go read something else, but my perspective is probably closer to one of decadence, rather than persecution. Also, I haven't played the game but I thought the article was a good read regardless.
According to the FDA, 2/3 of their spending on human drug regulation is covered by user fees. Given that some or most of the rest must be non-approval related (ongoing supervision and overhead), and the approval work doesn't go away if they delay it, I'd guess that they have the resources to evaluate as many trials as are ongoing.

https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-basics/fact-sheet-fda-glan...
How can you know when it's really "The Year of the Linux Desktop"? Whenever you don't need a "how to make it not suck" blog post to get it to run for normal users.
> I can't imagine wanting to play a Viking protagonist in a "realistic" setting without the pillaging and bloodshed.

I get your point, and you're probably right, but at least one person (namely, myself) has no problem with violent fights in a videogame, but would not enjoy playing a game that required me to slaughter unarmed civilians. I still want to think of myself as a hero, not... that. All those Goombas had it coming to them, is what I'm saying.
I don't think the point is to reduce overhead. It may actually increase it, as long as the overhead for AOT wasm is more than 0. [1] As I understand it, containers have almost no CPU overhead. I have no citation for that.

Lunatic, to me, looks more like a web browser hosting many JavaScript sandboxes. But instead of JavaScript it's wasm, and instead of a web browser, it's only a host process, like node.js. (I don't know if node.js has a concept of running many side-by-side JS actors. Maybe it does)

So you have 1 Unix process hosting many Erlang-like actor processes.

I'm writing a little bit out of my depth, but I think the huge difference is permissions.

Sure, this all might be possible with containers. But Docker, the only container system I've used, is this huge thing. You have to install it, there's a daemon, it hooks into systemd probably, usually you need to be root unless you do everything just right. It requires kernel support for lxc, so I can't run it on the crappy little ARM boards I have to program.

Lunatic, like a web browser hosting JS sandboxes, is _just_ a Unix process. No root, no permissions. I think it will even work on Windows and OS X.

So yeah, if you're talking about web services where you can already manage many Docker containers on a Linux host no-sweat, it might not add much. But if this can be deployed on arbitrary clients with no root and no Linux kernel dependency, it's a very fun toy that must be useful for _something_.

[1] You may find this cool: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/02/securing-firefox-with-weba...

Firefox has a C++ font shaping library. Starting in FF 75, they compile the C++ to webasm, then AOT compile the webasm into native code. Resulting in a memory-safe sandbox for C++. There is some overhead, and it looks like a lot of set-up work. They don't give exact percent numbers on runtime overhead.

I don't know if Lunatic is doing JIT or AOT. I'll generously assume that one day they'll do whatever is faster. Part of the point of wasm is to beat JS performance, so I think at least compared to Electron or Node.js (JS sandboxes in a Unix process) it should be competitive.
How often do you run into packaging problems? As in, you need some software but it‘s only available for Linux via the Ubuntu repos?
FWIW, I've only gotten low quality interviews through Hired.