skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a saying from game designers (e.g. Zachtronics) that the UI always has to have some element of frustration to it. The most elegant easy to use interface to a game is a 'push this button to win' button. This might be one of the reasons why you still have the physical interfaces design surviving in video games, while we don't see that in desktop UIs anymore (outside some niche software).

That being said, SC2 goes out of its way to make it frustrating. They intentionally design such frustrating UI elements into the game to act as skill differentiators. For instance, a Zerg player needs to click every N-seconds on each of his queens to spawn eggs or risk getting behind. That makes SC2 overall one of the most /execution-/oriented esports, where the perfect execution of a good strategy is the largest differentiator in skill. In contrast, dota2 is a very strategy/game-sense oriented game, where the top players are not necessarily mechanically the best.
I’m going to be modestly cynical here. I don’t think they will take advantage, not for a decade or three minimum. The Tories were foolish enough that they thought Brexit was a path to prosperity to begin with, and Labour is allergic to anything not owned by the state, at some points proposing expropriations in the power sector which were exciting enough to get pension funds to move money to special vehicles in Asia with treaties saying the UK won’t expropriate their holdings.

The biggest macro thing would be free trade treaties with markets like the US and Asia (obviously including China, but elsewhere too) and streamlining regulatory standards to be efficient - not to be all “oh no the big capitalists will exploit everyone,” just better targeted and less bureaucratic; you can glimpse this in the way the UK was first to approve vaccines for covid.

But all that has to compete with maintaining trade access to the EU and that’s a huge barrier if it remains and a huge loss if it doesn’t.

What’s supposed to make startups and tech more competitive there now? Maybe if the Euro collapses in a banking crisis somehow (?!?) but I’m not seeing it.
Would you mind naming the company?
In 2010 California adopted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonpartisan_blanket_primary.
Like Apophis in 2068?
I don't read it out loud but iny head, and try to find a pattern out of it like a pair of two number/character
There's a tendency to downplay the difficulty of many fields, science, engineering, math, and computer science. It's a white lie designed to bring in more women and minorities, but I think it does great harm.

What I've seen:

* A person is tricked into thinking software engineering is like baby intro "get into CS" projects, and by the time they find out it's not for them, it's too late. I know several people who went this route, and range from having gone on to law school/MBA to working retail. The law school/MBA types are extremely successful, with the dual background. But I feel pretty bad for the folks working retail, with crushing engineering school debt.

* Companies have a severe shortage of qualified employees. Under-qualified employees have a severe shortage of jobs. I feel bad for people who can't find jobs.

My own opinions:

1) No, code camps are not sufficient prep.

2) No, application-focused CS undergrad programs are not sufficient prep (where you'd historically learn Java web development, or the current Microsoft stack)

3) Yes, having rigorous background in something, be it machine learning, low-level systems engineering, compilers, or what-not makes you far more effective. Ideally, a few.

4) Yes, freshman weeder courses are important

5) But no, having "highly-selective schools" like MIT or Stanford is not helpful (and no, it's not sour grapes, I went to one of those). Anyone should be able to try a freshman weeder course, rather than going through insanely competitive admissions criteria which correlate poorly with the ability to do this stuff.

I will say familiarity with code varies person-by-person. I'm generally known as at least a 10x developer, since I've created several major tools with name-brand recognition. I'm not great at jumping into other people's code, though. The article would have resonated with me if everyone's brain was wired like mine, but...

... one of the best developers I've worked with can jump into complex codebases in what seems like overnight (a couple of weeks to be literal), and work with them better than the original developers. You toss him a complex system with a bugs, and it will be debugged in a month, where it'd take me a year or two of work to even understand that code. On the other hand, I wouldn't trust him to write a new piece of complex code.

So it seems we're wired differently. I'm better than he is at imagining a new system, foreseeing possible use-cases, designing an architecture that's general in the right ways to allow all conceivable uses, yet constrained in the right ways to still be simple, and then building it quickly. I'm better than him at designing novel algorithms and data structures too. On the other hand, if I have a bug in a third-party library, I'll take literally 10-100x as long to fix it as my friend. And he'll be better at understanding the algorithms and data structures in existing systems (you can throw something complex like Cassendra at him, and he'll understand the design and its implications nearly overnight).
I saw a list of European unicorns (on HN in fact I think) and probably about 2/3 were UK/London based. That’s right now. The other ones are scattered around, so this might be your best bet in this part of the world.

As another comment says, you’ll mostly get political comments, so here goes: UK universities, while still very good, are dropping quite significantly in various league tables since Brexit. This is for a range of reasons: non-UK applicants now get a full US-style price, with little support or loans. They are less attractive for academics too. 2/3 of UK unis dropped since the Brexit votes, Cambridge is at a historical low of 7th in the world, behind ETH. Student visas are sth like £1000 per year on top of that. If you think this will continue, and talented and driven young people will choose other countries, this will extinguish, in the long term, the supply of talent to startups and tech.

UK’s attitude to immigration will also be unpredictable. On the one hand, it states that it is keen to attract talent etc, on the other hand visas will be largely awarded based on salaries (maybe not so good for early stage startups). Also there are no guarantees that eg the partner of a visa taker will be awarded one, or that visas will be extended. This is another reason why people might give the Uk a wide berth - and these would be potentially your cofounders, colleagues, investors.

On the flip side, finance was thought to leave London en masse, and didn’t. Banks etc established a presence in EU countries, but most of the business logic staff are actually staying out.

Also UK is at heart a country of innovation, where novelty and innovation are welcome, and entrepreneurship runs in the blood, more so than in many other places. Brexit won’t change that.

So... who knows? I’m an EU citizen, now also British and well settled here. I like it, but probably wouldn’t choose it now.
> Developers in the EU get shafted big time. Free health insurance is not worth half, or even one-third the salary.

It’s called solidarity
I don't think undoing the GDPR would be doing "the right thing", personally. I'm hoping that's legislation we keep for the time being, until we can figure out how to do it better. But fundamentally it's pulling in the right direction.

You're right that in a lot of the UK software folks are viewed as 'beneath' the management and business types though, and not valued in the same way as they are in other economies. Useless arseholes with few worthwhile skills can get paid a ton if they can talk themselves into a position as a delivery manager or project manager.
Well yeah, that's in case of failure - the Tesla autopilot can also save you in case of failure.
It's the inevitable logical conclusion based on how human reproduction works. The chance of getting the same spermatozoon in there, the same random genetic variations, the same developmental conditions and so forth is infinitesimally small if the same exact conditions are not met.

Even if we ignore all of that, there's still the swirling chaos of causality to contend with, forever altered by that small change...
See also https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary-addictions.html#...

"Dark patterns" is one of those soften-the-blow-aliases for fraud.
As a Canadian based in the UK for nearly 20 years, I'm making plans to go back to Canada or join family in the US.

London is expensive compared to Canadian cities, even Vancouver, but pay for tech workers is comparable, if not a bit lower than in Canada. The US has higher pay than both, but it's only about 30% and you have more cost out of pocket, especially healthcare.

Much of the energy in London in the past 20-30 years is driven by EU nationals. A lot of multinationals and tech companies are based in the south-east to access this talent pool. Many companies have whole teams based in London serving the respective European markets (French speaking, Germans speaking, Italian speaking, etc.). This will change in the next decade or so.
Slightly off topic but indirectly relevant... Any acceptance of a Government backed crypto currency should be contingent on moving all Government transactions to an open blockchain ledger.
Kid Spark Education
I used to be a bit more excited about RL. I mean, it's still definitely something I have to learn, but one aspect of it _seems_ lacking to me and is messing with my motivation to learn it. I'm sure someone will happily explain all the ways I am ignorant.

It seems like there is a lot of emphasis on "direct RL" or whatever where they don't even really think about the model much, but it's I guess often inside of the policy or something?

But it seems to me as someone who has just started learning about robotics, that I absolutely need to first verify that I have an accurate model of the environment which I can inspect. It seems like a lot of RL approaches might not even be able to supply that.

I mean what I am stuck on as far as creating a robot (or virtual robot) is having a vision system that does all of the hard things I want. I feel like if I can detect edges and surfaces and shapes in 3D, parts of objects and objects, with orientation etc., and in a way I can display and manipulate it, that level of understanding will give me a firm base to build the rest of learning and planning on.

I know all of that is very hard. It seems like they must have tried that for awhile and then kind of gave up to head down the current direction of RL? Or just decided it wasn't important. I still think it's important.
What's an RC batch?
Anecdotally, since March I have been travelling on public transport and going into crowded central city locations almost on a daily basis, yet appear to have (extremely fortunately) avoided infection. This includes over the past few weeks with new highly infections mutations.

Equally anecdotally, I know of several friends who have caught it from young children in school settings or crowded groups.
Show HN: Kids Science Book with Graphical Instructions and QR Codes
Hi. I am a scientist and a mum of twins 5 YO! During quarantine, I created and published a science book for young kids (ages 3-7) promoting actual science activity play in real life. The book has simple, graphical instructions on how young kids can set up and play with 12 fun science activities at home - having minimal parental support, promoting independence and decision making! This encourages kids to play and be curious independently! A QR Code links to a Youtube video creating a holistic experience of the activity through another type of media. We use household items only providing science that is affordable for all families! The book has suggestions on how each activity can be extended and kid-friendly explanations, so even non-science related parents can spontaneously play with science activities.

If you check out the book (Full PDF available on Medium Link),please let me know your thoughts, corrections/ feedback!

Thank you so very much
Disney through Fox now owns Firefly. I'd love to see Favreau reboot firefly. I think he could actually pull that off, or at least Something in that 'verse. Especially if he can get Whedon's blessing and some of the original cast members.
Merv
I’m against using jQuery as much as the next guy in 2020, but I had to use it recently because I needed JSONP and couldn’t find an easy way to do this without JQ. Did I miss something? (CORS not an option)
This doesn’t seem to be a recognition issue though. It’s not AR or deferred, it’s not being accounted for at all or tracked
In regards to GDPR, I agree it's the right thing for consumers, but it puts compliance pressure on startups. So from the perspective of a startup, I could see its removal being a positive.

(Note that is just from the perspective of a startup)
What good product teams do – what bad product teams do
You are right: the horizontal scroll only appears if you scroll down to the bottom of the page. But there is also a (more sensibly layouted) program shown on each streaming page (e.g. https://streaming.media.ccc.de/rc3/two, "Fahrplan" tab)
We play casually very often, and this happened the other night, and was the only time I've seen it. So it's not a good way to judge the (current state of the) game. The uptime is actually quite good, and you happened to log in at unlucky time!
I'm taking an adaptation of this class. My professor is simply reusing Silver's slides, so I'm watching the original lecture instead. Highly recommend!
What is the role of capital investments in economies that have evolved to a stage where highly impactful cognitive inputs are prized at ever-increasing premiums? SMEE and ASML lithography platforms differ not because one threw more capital investments at it than the other. This singular focus upon capital investments and capital flow (especially when it comes to share buyback machinations) in modern management finance practice reveals a "fight the last war" orientation.

Appropriate capital investment table stakes, now. Innovation isn't a machine you put capital investment tokens into until you get a breakthrough.
Why London as opposed to Cambridge or some of the other areas with a lot of tech?
The correct answer is to just apply a view and enumerate the wanted column names once.

Otherwise, dynamic column names (that's your search engine fodder) require introspection…

-- "Chinook" sample database
select column_name
from information_schema.columns
where table_name = 'Track'
except
select 'UnitPrice'

… coupled with the moral equivalent of PL/pgSQL `execute` (i.e. run-time eval) statement.
Usually the RSS feed is on the same domain, so you could simply whitelist automatically. If a user adds example.com/rss you'd add example.com to the whitelist. If you expect any kind of traffic you'd probably be refreshing the RSS feeds server-side on a schedule. You could then change all the URL's to signed URL's to use with your proxy (e.g. nginx securelink, ngx_http_hmac_secure_link_module and multiple other modules for nginx).
There is, just no scrollbar for some reason, but left / right keys work (at least in firefox)
Wow, you're like the opposition to Peta.
Studied physics with the intent to go to grad school. Realized after graduating I didn't want to do it because of the perverse incentives in academia (I'd still love to do research and get a PhD eventually if I can fund it myself and not be reliant on academia). Worked as a substitute teacher for a year, then in a mortgage bank for a year. Left that to accept a Fulbright grant, which I eventually had to decline because of the death in the family at the worst possible timing.

Since then I've been a teacher. Looking at pivoting into finance in Ireland/Europe (with a masters in Quantitative Finance) next year; was planning on doing it this year but, y'know, corona kinda destroyed finance jobs over there and I'd need a work visa (thankfully it's a high need field so it's a bit easier)...
In a universe where Euclid's postulates are wrong, like ours, you can still construct them. You're positing a universe where it's impossible to construct counting – i.e., set theory is impossible to imagine, Peano arithmetic is impossible to imagine, Church numerals are impossible to imagine…

In such a universe, how is conscious thought even possible?
Just installed it, I'm in awe because of the clean UI an aesthetic of it, and having your head floating around, just makes sense. At least I hope they inspire others in this line of superior UI/UX
https://www.recurse.com/

>The Recurse Center is a self-directed, community-driven educational retreat for programmers based in New York City and currently operating online.
> All of standalone LES activation ever in the history of human spaceflight had been successful in saving all occupants' lives.

> Space Shuttle failed twice on the other hand, each time killing all aboard, and in neither cases of it its integral abort systems/abort modes did help at all.

> So in theory the lack of capsule-only LES do not necessarily mean safer rocket, in the history and in the statistics it does.

Is this supposed to be a recursion joke? Sorry if I'm not getting it.
That’s certainly the hope of some in the government, though I’m not sure if I’d count on them to execute in supporting it. A lot of services based in the UK/London were there because it was a natural gateway to Europe, and that will no longer be the case since the new deal just struck doesn’t include them from what I understand. I see more downsides than upsides at the moment.
"From the depths" just turned into a logistic based rts, there's a block building aspect to it but plenty units on the workshop if you want to skip that part

It's also fairly often on good sales
The move from page-based pagination to cursor based pagination on the commits page was so that the underlying queries could be moved to GraphQL, which use cursors (specifically the GraphQL Relay specification). That was one of the first pages that was moved over, and these days I think it would be relatively trivial to add a “last” page, since the Relay connection has the concept of totalCount and we have a few tricks around first/last cursors. Theoretically the ordering could also be flipped to view the first commit on the first page.
Very curious to see if/how phones will innovate over the coming years. IMO there hasn't been an interesting iPhone release since the X, and although I don't know the Android world well based on friends' usage it seems those phones are even more long-lived.

Hopefully the underwhelming nature of hardware spec bumps will push more innovation on the software side, which still has much room for improvement.
Finland, Sweden, and Denmark have a much healthier startup scene than the UK does. You can also go further afield and explore places like Lisbon, which have a growing buzz.

In some ways they have a much healthier startup scene than SV does.

You won't earn $400k - guaranteed until the restructuring and breakup layoffs hit - but you will be happier and less stressed, and your kids will be too. And you won't be living in a city that has become a dystopian nightmare.

If you're all about the money then of course you won't get what's cool about the EU.

And that's fine. Because not only do companies have cultural fit, so do countries.
> What does it even mean to "drive" the economy?

To have transactions for goods and services. Anything that creates more transactions "drives" it. Generally the Keynesian view is that it is demand (for goods/services) that creates/drives activity.

If people are scared of losing their jobs (or have lost their jobs) they won't spend money because they may not have any more. If people are confident of their future prospects they'll be more likely to spend now because they have faith that they'll get more money later.

The best ELI5 of Keynesianism that I've come across:

> I would summarize the Keynesian view in terms of four points:

> 1. Economies sometimes produce much less than they could, and employ many fewer workers than they should, because there just isn’t enough spending. Such episodes can happen for a variety of reasons; the question is how to respond.

> 2. There are normally forces that tend to push the economy back toward full employment. But they work slowly; a hands-off policy toward depressed economies means accepting a long, unnecessary period of pain.

> 3. It is often possible to drastically shorten this period of pain and greatly reduce the human and financial losses by “printing money”, using the central bank’s power of currency creation to push interest rates down.

> 4. Sometimes, however, monetary policy loses its effectiveness, especially when rates are close to zero. In that case temporary deficit spending can provide a useful boost. And conversely, fiscal austerity in a depressed economy imposes large economic losses.

* https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/keynesianism-ex...
Comments like yours about "slogging through long form writing" are becoming more common. I find it concerning. Your summary bis quite inadequate to me and misses many points while assuming the one you're clarifying is the point. It isn't. Longer writing has great value; let's give it more room.
I'm starting to suspect there this is something pretty widespread thought history. I've been reading The Anarchy, which is a history of the East India Company (EIC), and it is full of blunders on all sides.

When the EIC first set out from London on their maiden voyage to India, they we're becalmed (stuck without wind) in the mouth of the Thames for 6 months. Just sat there, maybe 50 miles from home.

During some battle, one of the leaders was so high on opium that he was just dawdling around and got shot in the head.

At one point the EIC captured a fort next to one of their factories, then got so distracted looting that a few hours later the enemy returned, re-captured the fort, then forced the EIC out of their original factory.

The more I talk to people in positions of power (which is not many, but a few) the more I get the impression that everyone is just going the best they can against the randomness of the universe. (Side note - one of the may reasons I find conspiracy theories hard to believe)
I get the impression US salaries usually come out way ahead for software people (in other fields, not so much).

The only point where it starts to get questionable is when you consider stuff like, how much would you pay to live in a city that doesn't have needles all over the sidewalks, or, what is the value of living in a society that isn't brutally unfair and visibly dystopian?

Personally, I put a pretty high value on abstract stuff like fraternity and equality, and I feel like it has a really good effect on quality-of-life, but I can also see why people just go for the biggest paycheck. If you're planning on living in a kind of bubble, and just ignore the wider social context, you don't really need to live in a functioning society.
Strictly speaking, yes, there are risks associated.

But there's still a wide difference between those risks, and speculating on the (not-immediate) future.
It's not even the ads themselves that are to be deplored, but just that a large chunk of the smartest people of our generation are incentivized to spend their lives' work getting people to click on them.
$10K donated to our fren who mistakenly transferred $50k to wrong crypto address
Of course I can use Bitcoin if it's still allowed. I was referring to CDBCs.