skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why is that easier? Suddenly at some point in the year your entire schedule shifts by an hour?
I bought an alarm clock in 2004 that had "automatic" DST changes as a feature. It was apparently implemented with hard-coded dates to change the offset, as when the dates changed in 2005, it changed on the wrong date. Made me late for work one fall day in 2005. I got a new alarm clock soon after.
My New Best Friend for Testing a Chatbot
Crazy idea here, but how about a....compromise! A one time 30 minute offset and we'll really screw everyone up, but it's equal to both sides.
Not that many people may be using Oracle and PHP together, but last summer I decided to take a closer look at some performance aspects since I'm wanting to move certain PHP things to the cloud, while our Oracle database remains local, which would introduce some extra latency.

In some basic testing on my local machine at work just connecting to our local Oracle database introduced a good 60 ms - 100 ms for a request (before running any sort of queries) and due to PHP's nature this recurs on every new request.

I had searched for options for a long time in past months/years that would allow PHP to have some sort of connection pool the same way languages like Java/Go might allow, but had come up short each time.

I don't even recall how I came across it, but last July I finally learned about Oracle's Database Resident Connection Pooling feature (and then reminded my coworker about wanting to try it out in November) and was able to run some tests and it does a good job of eliminating most of that unnecessary connection waiting time for PHP applications so I was pretty happy with that testing and it didn't seem to increase the load much at all on the database server side.

Even though it might not be as ideal as a truly separate Connection Pool being managed at the application server level, or outside of the database, a Connection Pool available for use at the database level still has benefits so it would be kind of neat to maybe see more of this sort of approach be available with other vendors (if it isn't already).

EDIT: Forgot to add that as a result of the DRCP testing, even though moving the PHP side to the cloud introduces extra latency, with the time savings of the DRCP change, it helps reduce latency enough that overall it results in a time savings over the normal/conventional connection approach when the PHP code is local so for me that was a win (hopefully I'll get to try using it in production in the near future, but waiting on my colleague to sort out a few things with enabling it in production at the moment).
I'm against this because it will require software changes.
> "Free speech is a good thing" - Sure, but that means 4chan, QAnon, anti-vaxxers, and the like also get loud, free speech now.

Echo chambers are very powerful tools. People don't like to find out they are wrong and modern media platforms make it very easy to surround yourself with content which re-affirms your existing beliefs. It's also extremely easy to unintentionally trap yourself in an echo chamber. The content feed algorithms on most popular social media platforms are basically designed to trap people in echo chambers in order to maximize engagement.

All of the groups you mentioned maintain their limited popularity by capturing their members in information echo chambers. The thing is, people can only be released from echo chambers by exposing them to alternative sources of information. Giving any organization the power to restrict free speech is dangerous because you essentially give that organization power to legally enforce echo chambers.

Personally, I feel safer having fringe groups like QAnon and anti-vaxxers running around than relinquishing that sort of power to any organization.
WordPress really simply exists as a subsidiary of Automattic, nothing more, nothing less. It's very obvious once you begin to dabble in the WordPress ecosystem.
Certain comments have a special meaning to some tooling. In this sense, it's not very different from Javadocs.

For some examples:
A comment that appears right before a type or function definition is exported as documentation by the "go doc" tool.

Another one is build constraints, which appear as a comment at the top of the file, like: `// +build linux` to say "only include this file if the build target is linux."

Other tools use their own comment format to recognize comments meant for them.
If a goal is for a myriad companies and entities of all shapes and sizes and with wildly differing priorities, timelines and focus, to all do exactly the same thing at exactly the same time... isn't a government decree exactly the right tool for the job?
You end up with a situation where say 20% have shifted and 80% haven't. Then over time, like planets falling into a ring of orbits, everyone ends up shifting back because too many other people are on the other schedule. These sorts of things need critical mass to have effect.

That said, with all the lockdowns and isolated living, I do wonder if the social conformity effect will be as strong going forward.
Every time I tried to find reasons for their continued existence strong enough to outweigh obvious downsides, I was met with utter failure.

Copyright causes massive bookkeeping and furthermore, severe artistic repression. It's also easy to see that, by far, artists don't create things to actually make a living from copyright-based forced royalties.
Patron and Kickstarter have shown that we are very much capable of funding artists remotely, either in an ongoing, post-payed basis for the former, or a pre-payed, project-specific funding way for the latter.

As for patents, it should be easy to demonstrate concrete societal harm through monopolization and inhibition of progress (by blocking multiple recent inventions from being combined); as example for the former I give Sawstop (there are many reasons to not want to buy a whole machine from one specific vendor), examples for the latter are small firearms (handgun/rifle) design and the core technologies the https://www.mpegla.com/ practices rent-seeking on, which are embedded into hardware, but e.g. foregone in favor of software decoding (or appropriate alternatives for the other things they administer).

I expect it's relatively easy to figure out a lower bound for the environmental harm from not using hardware decoding or choosing H.264 over H.265 purely for licensing reasons (and tanking the higher bandwidth costs).

Trademarks, however, seem to serve a purpose.

As an example for the drug R&D world, handling at least human trials by having a shared pot that everyone who wants to can invest in, and which is payed back e.g. double or whatever a suitable scheme for determining the overall payback sum, financed through a fixed VAT levied on the drug in question if it ever happens to get sold.

It might potentially work better as a sort of bond auction, where the study administrators calculate the required budget, and public founders offer to pay X$ now in exchange for getting Y$ back via that tax system, while the auctioneer(system) takes from the offers that want the least return (in %), until the budget is reached. If the sum of all funding offers is insufficient, no money changes hands and the study doesn't happen.

I'd suggest a tax rate between 5 and 40% for such a system.

In the movie industry, people would put their money where their mouth is, and (likely through some intermediary agencies) pay to "make the sequel happen", or to choose which TV pilot shall get a first season.

There might be need for some sort of anti-tivoization regulation to replace what the GPL3 accomplished there, but overall, software seems to be hurt by copyright preventing a "on the shoulders of giants" process to soak deep into less and less theoretical cases. See ZFS vs. Linux, if you need an example.
DST is nearly 8 months of the year. Making it permanent is a smaller move than abolishing it.

"Standard time" is just a name. Daylight time is actually more "standard" from the perspective of most Americans.
Hi Slackwise,

This is interesting -> I don't think Ctrl+S should be exiting editing in any form, can you describe this a little bit further? When you hit this is it:

a) moving to Preview (you can see the changes you made, but in preview mode not page view mode (the page tree won't be visible)

b) browser returns to the 'view page' (page tree visible), but your changes are not published (you may see a tag at the top "UNPUBLISHED CHANGES")

c) something else (please describe)

Second question: what does the browser's forward/back buttons display after the 'ctrl+S' result?
I certainly prefer it, but I think it's too soon to say that "people" prefer it, unless you are aware of some kind of public poll that asked the question.
Surveillance in the Name of Covid-19
What's more likely to happen first: Tesla catches up on a century's knowledge and experience of car manufacturing, or the combined resources of the entire car industry catches up on a decade or so of technological advantage in batteries?
Hi ya'll. Health nut here. Specifically within the realm of digital therapeutics (think using wearables to produce better clinical outcomes). I've built a couple platforms for a "device agnostic health monitoring tool" and am currently working with the Quantified Self community - looking for help pivoting into a world that has revenue model potential.

I'm an engineer-minded sales person looking for a SME within the healthcare industry. Are you familiar with health insurance, medicine, clinical trials, reimbursements, CPT codes, ICD codes, etc? Let's talk !
What precisely should I think again about? If the VW was priced at the same level as a Tesla, do you believe it would generate the same sales?
Cool, that sounds a lot like Bill Buxton's experiments with two-handed input, but in VR!
This post unfortunately fails to honestly engage with its own counterarguments. Note to the author: you can't make a thinkpiece balanced by bringing up opposing points if you're just going to dismiss them out-of-hand.

>Second, it should be the default that the status quo is a bad thing; instead of justifying why something should be done, the burden of proof should rest on those who believe things should remain the same.

This is ignorant of the cost of change. That cost is the main reason why society collectively assumes that "the system works". Arguments for change have to first attack that notion - as communists, fascists, and all other kinds of anti-conservatives do. None of them believe that change, in and of itself, is valuable.

Likewise, the author's talk of opportunity cost neglects the price of failure - in doing a retrospective analysis (like the one of vaccine development), it's easy to ignore the counterfactuals that never actually happened. But leaving them out means that your analysis is meaningless. Would the author be convinced to write the same article if the vaccine had been rolled out in January, and as a result the world suffered a second thalidomide scandal?
You mean you would need to update your time zone database, just like you already do on a regular basis?
> I think it's much more honest to say that we don't have the answers.

This is virtually impossible given how much government, politicians, and even individuals have staked their identity and reputation on being correct and knowledgeable.

That's the most evil aspect of authoritarianism and despotism. The inability to admit failure, limitation and falibility. This is why Fauci and friends always couch their responses to criticism with dismissive explanations.

I'm constantly frustrated with the unimpeachable self-confidence that's so pervasive now. It's only worse when their failures are so apparent.
yeah if you can narrow down your 'unit of scale' life gets a lot better

'load clarity' one of the good reasons to break out into a multi-service arch
The government can't even call it what it is; Daylight saving time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time
We made that plugin ourselves and support it officially, it allows per-post choice to use the Classic or Gutenberg editor on a per-post basis... it doesn't mean that people aren't using Gutenberg. The numbers got driven up when a number of web hosts pre-installed it when auto-upgrading their users to 5.0, and continue to bundle it with new installs.

We're now seeing over 235k posts a day made using the Gutenberg editor. The iOS and Android versions support the majority of the blocks now, and are being re-licensed using the MPL so they can be easily embedded and used by other apps. There's a public release of the Gutenberg plugin every other week and we're relentlessly working on making it faster, easier to use, and more flexible. People are creating things they could never have done using the Classic editor, and that's really exciting.

And of course the beautiful thing about open source is you can customize it and use whatever editor you want, as someone else mentioned, and given WP's very open APIs you don't even need to ever touch any of our editors, you can post using wp-cli, Git, Emacs, third-party desktop clients, sending an email...
Not parent and not about terrorism directly, but Tardigrade Ltd. was sanctioned in US (because it is an arms dealer without licence in US) causing all "Tardigrade" payments blocked (even innocuous ones): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24450828
India would probably appreciate that.
I've had the same issue for many years. I like the time still be coupled to the position of the sun and I also prefer earlier sunrises.

The issue here is that the individual choice you and I would prefer doesn't exist for parents since their schedule is dictated by schools.

Edit: also not all jobs offer that choice. Think things like construction, public transit or hospital jobs
If it’s always daylight saving time, then that is the standard time. We use daylight saving time 2/3 of the year already. Staying on DST is the least disruptive option.
In Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada the sun will "rise" officially at close to 10am for about a month.
Didn’t know how much more annoying day light savings could be until I had small children in the house.

You spend so much time trying to schedule bedtime for everyone’s sanity. Having an hour screw up the schedule because they aren’t tired or over sleepy is very annoying (for about a week).
Get a domain at namecheap, plus email. Ten or twenty a year. Web and thunderbird support. Become the customer instead of the product.
Hmm... I wonder if the United States government had anything to do with that regime coming to power...
step 1. do no harm.
Oreos and the Art of Crossword Puzzle Construction
This has been the case for well over 18 years, now. Congress can agree on literally nothing except futzing with Daylight Savings, so that's what they do to prove they're working in a bipartisanship-like manner.

What utter garbage and a laughable excuse for a government.
USDC runs on ethereum
Change one law, or negotiate with hundreds of thousands of employers, school boards, day care centers, among other things, simultaneously, in the hopes that they all come to the same decision. Seems easier to me.
So naturally, there are some complaints

> The Commission's announcement was met with severe criticism with .eu website owners claiming that revoking existing domains went against the right to property.

which if this

> EU regulations currently stipulate that .eu websites can only be allocated to EU citizens – regardless of their place of residence – as well as non-EU citizens and organizations established in a member state.

is "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" then it seems to me that this revocation is somewhat premature. It could be argued, that these domains were allocated in accordance with the law and just because the status of the owner has changed, that does not require Eurid to deallocate them, which would expose them to legal repercussions if they simply chose to do that.
Reminds me of the episode from Veep where Jonah tries to pass a bill that abolishes DST. The bill is written by an outside team of analysts funded by a private prison magnate, Sherman Tans. He packs the bill with extras intended to expand the prison population. Jonah accepts the bill because he's an idiot and doesn't like to read. He only got elected because he went negative against the president, a member of his own party. In the end, the bill fails because Jonah flies to close to the sun.
only a matter of time when we start seeing negative rates on mortgages.
Maine has passed a bill with a similar outcome (moving to AST)
You realize that there are between 194 and 197 countries in the world depending on who is doing the recognizing[1]. Could you please provide a citation for the 191+ countries you say the US has invaded?

[1] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/how-many-countries-are-i...
I am all for making things better, but every time I see the "it used to be better" argument I think you were just younger and more unaware then. People used to gossip about many untrue things that are now more easily disprovable with a simple Google search. There were more cults in the past. Mass media loved running with shallow scientific papers (everything became low fat and high sugar for example). The National Inquirer sold way more copies than the Atlantic.

The mediums are different now but the problems are still the same. Give it time and we will figure it out.
I'm moving a site from hand code to Wordpress. I'm using Gutenberg. It can be frustrating and it need to be improved but it gets easier to use after some tutorials.

Wordpress needs a solid out of the box functionality, without resorting another decision (do I use a plug in wysiwyg editor?, will it work with my theme?).

If I were writing paragraphs of text, I don't think I'd like it as much.

Its not always super clear how to do things.. But I like that its the "New Standard" way of doing things, and gives Wordpress a better default starting point. Wordpress feels the heat from Wix and Squarespace, and this seems to be their reaction.
i'd expect nothing less. only surprise is that there hasn't been any 'hypothetically' here.
You certainly could write a procedural-generated test harness, where you generate a graph of user actions, then send them to the system. I've done that before for integration testing of user-generated event pathways. But my main concern was for accuracy and load testing, so at the end of the test, I would query the database and check the report against what the test case sent.

The problem with this approach is that it results in "wobbly" tests, that is, tests that fail non-deterministically. These are really annoying and will quickly cause developers to ignore test failures. So I don't like them as part of a standard testing suite.

It sounds like you may want to put more boundaries in your application. Rather than testing out all possible combinations, reduce the available combinations and test their enforcement. I think you're best starting point is to place hard limits on input and test up to those limits. For example, define the maximum length of inputs, allowable character sets, numeric ranges, etc, then write test cases to ensure those limitations are enforced.

It's difficult to know what the next step would be without knowing your tech stack or your goal. Why do you want test various permutations of user input? Is there some cause for concern if a user performs Action B, then Action A instead of the predefined Action A, then Action B? If that's the case, you should encode these paths into your software and have test cases to check them.

It sounds to me like you're looking for a magic bullet to get comprehensive testing without writing comprehensive tests. That's not really possible. You have to test what's important, then rely on logical implication for the rest. Sprinkle in good logging and error handling for the inevitable hiccup, and monitor the logs for improvements.
That's down south. Way down south.

(I am pretty much straddling 70 degrees north as I type this - sun last seen Nov 23rd, comes back in two weeks. Midnight sun between May 17th and July 26th.)
A good 1st step, then abolish US time zones. Works for China & India!

(While all the normies are groggy, it should then be easy to slip a change to nationwide UTC in as the coup de grace.)
I'm the founder of Bookmark OS, an all-in-one organizational tool - https://bookmarkos.com

Planning on a B2B version with cloud document organization (connect google docs, Slack, Box, Dropbox, etc) so you can search everything in one place.

Anyone interested with b2b SAAS experience contact me on Twitter https://twitter.com/DRLynam
I have used Go in production. I found it roughly takes 2-3x additional time it takes to develop the same functionality in Node.js (with typescript). But it runs faster. If you want to write code that is probably not going to be thrown away it may be wise to invest the additional time in Go. However can't recommend that for building experimental code/APIs etc which are time bound and may/can get replaced (or split into micro services) in future if it becomes massively successful..
Reducing the supply has the effect of not taxing your own citizens more than the rest of the world. Also, a tax at the gas pump hits the everyday Joe (or in Norway, Mittias) disproportionately. Lots of fuel is consumed without ever going to a gas station.
Or on savings accounts
> People do not always have good intentions

The statement about valuing intentions over outcomes applies just as much to bad intentions as to good ones. People with bad intentions don't always do harm, any more than people with good intentions always do good.

As for actual outcomes, I don't think the case is anywhere near as one-sided as you appear to believe. See below.

> Fixing these issues, whether by government, tech industry, or otherwise, will involve some level of "authoritarianism".

No, "authoritarianism" is what caused problems like your relatives' beliefs. That "previous status quo of large centralized media groups" did not just evaporate; it killed itself by throwing away whatever "journalistic ethics and transparency" it once had (and one can argue that it never had very much; it was just that before the Internet there were no alternate sources of information available so people could see how much politicians and the mainstream media were lying to them). Your relatives believe random Internet sources as much as NBC Nightly News because they know NBC Nightly News will lie to them--because NBC Nightly News, and all the other mainstream media outlets, killed their own credibility.

Why did they do that? Because they thought they were authorities and that the public would regard them as such--since before the Internet the public had done that, because the public had no choice. In other words, the mainstream media thought they had the authoritarian power to declare what is true, even if it's actually a lie. They still think that; it's just that the number of people who don't treat them that way any more is much larger now, and will only continue to grow.
If that happens house prices will go apeshit.
I want to believe you but their website says:

Leave.EU Group Limited trading as Leave.EU.
A company registered in England & Wales. Company
Registration Number 9763501 Registered office:
2430/2440, The Quadrant, Aztec West, Almondsbury,
Bristol. BS32 4AQ

Edit: EURid says it’s registered to “BETTER FOR THE COUNTRY DIGITAL MARKETING SERVICES DESIGNATED ACTIVITY COMPANY” in Waterford, IE
The Russian Energy Giant Mining Bitcoin with Virtually Free Energy
Will make working with IST India Standard Time slightly easier - the 30 minute offset is always slightly off-putting ;_)
Billions of people in the world exist at a 30 minute offset to UTC, so it's not quite as absurd as it sounds.
20 Cognitive Biases That Affect Your Decisions