skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If I told you that the U.S. was “93.3% American”, would you conclude that the U.S. is a homogeneous country? Because that’s exactly what everyone who cites the “98% Japanese” statistic is doing for Japan.

...yes?

I find both those numbers insanely high, since the proportion of non-citizens here in Switzerland is 25% (country-wide) or 32% ([0], Zurich).

And this doesn't exactly make the country a melting pot either.

[0] https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/prd/de/index/statistik/themen/b...
Not this simple. Refactoring might mean invariance, but the more comprehensive your tests are, the more they also test the moving parts. That means, they have to be changed too. Many people forget the maintenance costs (and this has a much broader meaning than the refactoring example). Tests themselves have to be considered as a software (or more general) artifact with a cost.
A lot, majority, of local parks in China cities, which are largely apartment living, have outdoor areas with various iron equipment like dips and pullup bars, rowing, basically calisthenics, and spaces for older people to do synchronised dancing or taichi. Benches (for sitting, not presses). Quite communial. A big positive if stuck in an apartment. But the park doesn't look like a gym and not a lot of the frames will be occupied, but if you want it, it's invariably there and pretty social; all free.
Show HN: DoNotSend, a messaging system over DNS requests
A while ago, I posted about I made a fun POC of hacking the DNS protocol to send messages to a server (creating a communication service relying on DNS requests/replies): https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/jf8zbf/i_hijacked_d...

To summarize the idea, the project is using QNAMEs to encapsulte the client messages (encoded in base 32 as a subdomain, for example: encoded-message.dns.server.com), and the server decode the message and sends a DNS TXT reply which content is base 64 encoded.

Well it only worked on the same machine at the time (or when I had luck and had a server binded to my port 53 somehow (to have a port appear as open|filtered, something must be binded to it, and I struggled for a lot of time before understanding why my requests were answered with ICMP type 3 error, port unreachable, when going online)).

Now it's fixed, and what's even better, I can send a DNS TXT request to Googlge (8.8.8.8) about encoded-message.dns.site.com, and since I've registered as my own DNS, everything the other big DNS don't know about will be forwarded... to my server. Thus I can just use the command dig on linux to send messages to my server, from everywhere in the world, which is the main point for this project: DNS requests are often unfiltered (that doesn't mean they aren't logged by your ISP !! the goal of the project isn't to avoid log but firewall filters), thus when you have a limited connection (no access to internet), oftentimes DNS requests can still go out on the internet. Which is very interesting (but slow) to communicate from an airplane to someone on Earth, if you don't want to pay $50 to have 2GB of Wifi on the plane. There are a lot of other possible uses, and that's awesome.

PS: yes, I know about iodine, arecibo and such things. I just wanted to try to do it on my own, to learn more about the protocol
According to some folks on Twitter / Reddit it seems to be running FreeBSD 12. Someone ran an nmap to try and fingerprint it.
I actually find Racket easier to work with than some mainstream languages. It just gets all the basics right. You don't need huge libraries like Pandas because the base language is reasonably fast and comes equipped with the powerhouse "for" macros that make most data processing easy.

Macros are used all over the place in Racket and implement a lot of the core language. One of my favorite ones lately is the threading/pipeline macro.

I think JS has been debating about this for several years now, but implementing this in Racket is not only easy (available as threading-lib if you don't want to write it) but better than if it were a core language construct. It can be better since using a syntax-parameter, you can rename any of the "keywords" necessary to implement said macro as a user of said macro if you want to.

Also, since Racket macros track source line information, you don't need to choose between good error messages and performance.

I also feel like Racket strikes a nice balance between dynamic and static. Function and variable names being misspelled is a compile time error, though types aren't checked at compile time. However, Racket had a very sophisticated contract system to help address that as well. If you really want something more thorough, there is even Typed Racket which has easy interop with the rest of Racket and is actually a sound type system unlike TypeScript. (There is apparently a way to bypass the runtime checks when calling untyped code, but this is done for performance and is uncommon, not like with TS where "any" lets you do whatever you want).

I should also mention that while Typed Racket is a full language and does some pretty involved stuff besides just basic macros, people have also been working on a library that lets you create new type systems at the macro level by specifying the type reduction rules.

One final advantage of macros in Racket's case is that by implementing language features as macros, it is easier to see what the overhead of some particular feature is. Looking at fully expanded Racket code is like looking at the disassembly in C except names are mostly preserved, stuff just moves around and new stuff names come in as well.
But how do I reach you :) ?
The title on HN uses the word slavery. The actual tweets do not.
Interesting idea! I think it might be a frustrating user experience because you either completely browse and post on the web browser or do it from the app. Doing it in between may not be a smooth experience.

I wish the official APIs support account login. I would have implemented it already.
Carefully read the comment to realize this "feel good" piece is written for a western audience:

> "This article was clearly written more from ignorance than knowledge and is not based on knowledge of the actual culture in Japan."
Another source making similar claims and who claim to back them up are Strong Towns: https://www.strongtowns.org/book

I haven't looked into it, but I heard about it via the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes whose creator makes videos based on his experience and on his reading of Strong Towns. Starting point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg

Disclaimer: I'm a dirty European with a natural bias against American suburbia and I haven't read the strong towns book. Also strong town's presentation looks a bit like a cult but that might just be my impression.
Meta on the site’s presentation:

If you’re going to use thick light link underlines (text-decoration-color: #ccd6ce; text-decoration-thickness: .2em; text-underline-offset: .25em), please also turn off descender skipping with `text-decoration-skip-ink: none`. With this style of underline, descender skipping becomes a surprisingly large distraction if it kicks in, achieving precisely the opposite of what it was introduced to achieve (reducing distractions and improving readability).

(Tested in Firefox and Chrome on Windows on a 2× display. In Firefox, shifting the underline about half a CSS pixel further clears the ink skipping. In Chrome, it already clears it by about 2.7 CSS pixels, because the default underline position already takes font metrics into account, which seems a very-dubious-to-wrong choice to me once you’re offsetting, but is currently within spec since the `text-underline-position: auto` spec just says “The user agent may use any algorithm to determine the underline’s position; however it must be placed at or under the alphabetic baseline.” `text-underline-position: from-font` explicitly opts into this behaviour (works on Firefox), and there is no way of opting out (so I don’t think there’s any way to instruct Chrome to draw the underline touching the text baseline).
Actually Facebook always gives an explanation by referring to a particular breach of terms. It may not feel sufficient or fair to the banned, but you do get a reason for why you are banned.
It's permeable to O2 though unfortunately
I think that currently the biggest nightmare when it comes to packaging is that installations are usually not self-contained. If you can create a virtualenv or run Poetry, your headaches are over and you'll have a very pleasant experience. I don't think I've ever had a problem running stuff with Poetry and the way it does locking.

All the problems come before that point, with multiple installations making it so you don't know which installation you're using, which version, etc.
How do you test wordpress without deploying it? \s
I was, sadly, uprooted as a teenager from a dense city to a suburb. I cannot imagine worse situation for kids to grow up.

Everything you wanted to do, it took driving by your parents to get you there. Or relying on spotty public transit.

I grew apart from my school-friends, as they could share their evenings on fun and play, while I had to go back earlier (commute did take quite a long time) to be able to do my homework etc.

My sleep quality also plummeted as I had to wake up 1-1.5h earlier than my friends to be on time for morning classes.
As a European, the (default) food options I see in the US make it very difficult to eat what I would call a healthy meal. You really have to make an extraordinary effort, which I don't experience back home and therefore I can't be surprised to see it translates in these obesity statistics. To place that all on personal agency seems not very productive to me, back home there are efforts made that make easy and default options meet a minimum level of healthiness. I don't see why Americans can't do the same, and why you would want to count on billions of individual choices if you can solve with a (health) program. This kind of thinking made us into programmers, right?
Could you please comment the relevant part here?

I cannot search on mobile.
I've recently replaced this with my reMarkable tablet. Pricey but I love it as a paper replacement. Very open and hackable too (if a bit fragile).
There's no way to verify the balance offline. But, generally speaking, the offline mode is only used if there's a network/connectivity failure, and there's generally no way for a fraudster to know in advance if that's going to happen.

The acquirer (ie: the merchant's bank) accepts liability in the case of fraudulent transactions. There are limits on offline transaction values, and merchants that have high fraud risk may not allow it at all.
Spot on. I am currently working on a project that has over 25,000 multisites running in WordPress Multisite. The amazing thing besides the sheer number is WordPress has not been a problem, throw it on AWS and the scaling issues are solved. People who proclaim that WordPress can't scale have never built anything scalable with it.
In the case of suburbs it's the opposite. They are the result of unsustainable subsidies granted by a electoral majority to benefit themselves.
Yes. Pretty much a club house, pub, community center whose membership consisted of veterans.

The suburb was built within a decade of the end of WWII and during the Korean war. So it was a safe bet that most households had a member who was a Veteran or related to a Veteran who could wave them in.

As time progressed, less and less households in the neighborhood would probably qualify. So its no longer a community centerpiece.
An Oddity in Vim
> because of unoptimized DB queries, and because of PHP

Don’t blame PHP. We use it to handle millions of concurrent users and it does it without breaking a sweat. It scales horizontally better than basically anything, Modern versions of PHP are remarkably fast, up to 3x faster than Python in recent benchmarks.

The real problem is Wordpress, it’s written like 20 years ago PHP to avoid breaking any plugins. The API is largely writing to global variables.

On top of that, the quality of the given plugins is usually dubious at best, and a lot of people just slather more and more of them on, and they often interfere with each other.
Caveat emptor: "The behavior for structures with cycle references is undefined"

Isn't this a pretty common error to occur in Python programs? It would be good to at least have a checked mode available, otherwise the "dragons may fly out of your nose" semantics feels like a pretty aggressive compromise in favour of performance vs correctness.
My biggest concern is the notifications. I already have problems with multi-device notifications while using directly the messaging platforms (Telegram, FB Messenger, etc.), I think that adding an extra layer on top would make the notifications even less stable (getting same notification on multiple devices even after reading the message, not getting notifications on some devices, not receiving messages, etc.)
Stabilize Synthetic Assets on the BCH Blockchain
Things may continue to work:

> we'll limit the quota to the quota for development

It remains to be seen whether new API keys will be able to be generated.
I'm curious if you ever tried MeiliSearch for this, I tried it recently for something unrelated and had a very good experience with it. Since you have the corpus already, it might be worth trying and seeing if it speeds search up? I'd be interested in the results either way.
Just use Firefox, instead of contributing to ChromeOSiffication of the Web.
FWIW I’m seeing people conflating Jamstack and headless CMS (eg Contentful) a lot lately. The latter provides an infinitely better editing experience for non-tech users. But the non-free tier can start as high as $500 / mo (the amount of shit you could tack on a WP site for that money...) and as one of the top commenters has said I think that even for a best-in-class headless CMS, the non-techie UX starts crumbling as soon as you start adding typical features outside of content editing (forms, analytics, etc)
Not sure how interesting this is, but since the article mentions Scandinavia and "homogeneous society", that's not really true either. Unlike Japan, Sweden keeps track, not of "race" but country of origin for migrants or children of migrants.

For Sweden, 36.5% of men aged 15-44 are either foreign born, or has at least one parent foreign born. This data is from the Statistics Sweden (SCB) for 2019.

In this cohort, 62.5% are from, or have a parent from, Africa/Asia (Middle East), 9.3% from Western Europe/USA, 3.5% from the other Nordic countries, an 24.7% are from "Other" countries.

I'm not sure about the data for the other Scandinavian countries.
Ironically it is accurate. Python2 was written entirely by men and so is virtually all of Python3.

Women have better things to do with their time, like studying law or medicine.
How does US water quality compare worldwide? Is Europe doing any better?
I'm also at 20 years, and he has hit the nail dead on.

I can add a few things:

* Operational considerations dominate language choice.
* Architecture too.
* Politics, leverage and all that MBA crap dominate all of that.
* Language zealots are net negative idiots and need taking outside and shooting.
* Actually apply that to all zealots.
* The root cause of the above is often insecurity; and it can be coached / cultured away.
* If your lead/management doesn't get that then they're in the wrong job, get out.
* If you see shady consultant types and "thought leaders" talking about something, then it's just the latest bullshitchain.
* If you see a junior developer say "this is easy", then let them learn the hard way, but manage expectations.
* If you see Senior level engineers constantly say "this is easy" when the problem isn't clear, then run for the hills
* The 10x engineer is only true in special cases and does not generalise.
* That ^ is why you need to work together so everyone is doing their 10x task.
* Incompetent engineers and bad actors can act as negative 10x engineers.
* The vast majority of people on the outside of the team (consultant types) are worse than the above.

With interviewing I have decent results just having an open form conversation, looking first for personality and drive and getting an idea of their technical knowledge by seeing how deep they can go (or if they even can go deep into a subject). References from someone competent dominate, mind.
What illness if you don't mind me asking? My mental health providers keep suggesting I apply for disability cuz of PTSD
None of that has the same positive effect as the churches in the US. Churches play a big role in making communities and keeping them together.
They made option 1 possible because people complained about option 2.

six was the #2 package on PyPI.[1] It's a library to help with option 1.

[1] https://python3wos.appspot.com/
A lot of words in this article in order to make a very weak argument. I assume he started writing before he started researching.

From wikipedia:

> Chinese people in Japan are the largest foreign minorities in Japan. They comprise 0.64% of Japan's population.

So the largest ethnic groups in japan which aren't Japanese all comprise a percentage of the population measured in tenths of a single percent, at the most.

Now let's look at The United States:

> Non-Hispanic white - 60.1%

> Hispanic and Latino (of any race) - 18.5%

> Black or African American - 13.4%

> Asian - 5.9%

> [continued]

Ethnicity aside, what about same-generation heritage/place of birth (immigrants)?

> There were a record 44.8 million immigrants living in the U.S. in 2018, making up 13.7% of the nation’s population. This represents a more than fourfold increase since 1960, when 9.7 million immigrants lived in the U.S., accounting for 5.4% of the total U.S. population.

Japan's population is roughly 2% immigrants.

Obviously, for almost all people who aren't racists, having a racially pure ethnostate isn't important. But Japan is pretty close to one, and The United States is a very diverse place.

I don't know what the point of this article is. This is the kind of article where halfway through writing it you realize you're actually wrong and you stop writing.
It doesn't. The only benefit it has is when it washes over your teeth and strengthens your enamel.

If you use fluoridated toothpaste, the fluoride in your tap water is pointless at best.
This is a situation where the word "toxins" is fine, and they're being broad on purpose because it's just a claim of existence.

> I have trouble taking any health advisory seriously

Please keep in mind you're not talking to the person that made a health advisory. You're talking to someone who is saying why it's possible for water to be unsafe to shower in.
I migrated to a homogeneous country in Asia and I've never reconsidered my decision. To them I am and will always be a foreigner, but it's bearable to live in a stable society with no racial unrest, low crime rate, overall conservative society with a subtle note of progressiveness, and other good attributes that derive from homogeneousness.
Speak for yourself!

When I was young and starting college, I was poor and lived in a semi-rural area. So getting back and forth to all the classes was very difficult. Not to mention I had to work two jobs to support myself at the time.

I would have fucking loved to be able to do my classwork remotely and just hung out with other students as my schedule allowed. Of course it was not an option back then.

I have recently went back to university to advance my degree and it has nearly all been online. Much better! Frankly I met many more people than I did back in the day through the online tools and the fact that the classwork can be flexible around my life, versus the other way around was very convenient!

I can see how this might not work for labs, but for most other classes it seems to be a very viable alternative.

Also, I think you might be surprised about how much value people of any age put on being near other people at the time of learning. It obviously is very valuable to you, but I would expect you will find just as many that couldn't care less about that aspect of it.
Swiss tap water is the most strictly regulated food item in Switzerland.

https://wfw.ch/wasserwissen/wasserqualitaet-schweiz#/
"About 2.2% of Japan's total legal resident population are foreign citizens" [0]

"Japanese people make up 98.1%, Chinese 0.5%, Korean 0.4%, and other 1% (includes Filipino, Vietnamese, and Brazilian) of people living in Japan, according to the CIA World Handbook" [1]

So Japan is exactly as ethnically homogenous as you would think.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_of_Japan

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_issues_in_Japan
> First, it’s $7.5 billion freaking dollars. Of OpEx.

So what? If that cost is necessary to run a platform that is safe for those who are on it (= from spammers, catfishers, threats, pedophiles or right-wing extremists) and that does not serve as a breeding ground for threats for society (= "freemen"/"Reichsbürger" groups, militias, neo-Nazis, antisemites, Qanon, ...), then this cost should be paid by the ones making the profit (=Facebook), not society.

> Second, it’s 250k human moderators who will feel obligated to, you know, moderate stuff.

So what? The digital equivalent of police(wo)men on patrol. Just because it's The Internet, it should not be a free-for-all land.

> How anyone could think 250,000 people running around with mod powers on people’s Facebook walls is not deeply, deeply problematic

The US alone has nearly 700k police officers for 300M people, that are running around with guns and regularly kill people, and yet society accepts this.
>The refusal to gather statistics on ethno-racial diversity is unusual

Is this true? I don't understand why any country would want to open the box of pandora that is gathering statistics on ethno-racial diversity. I always thought countries like the USA and China were the exception.
With a competent team, XP should work really well, right? So what happened?
> and they always made it seem like I was the crazy one for thinking this.

Ask them a specific question about their code three months later.
> there's also sphinx and xapian, also fairly widespread.

Sphinx is now Manticore, and as luck has it, a Manticore dev is in this thread, offering support: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25890828
Surely someone doing serious research would download the entire corpus and use grep (or equivalent)?

It wouldn't have the same nice interface and searches may take several seconds, but there's only 60,000 books...
> my teams are just as productive today (100% remote) as they were pre-COVID (100% in-office).

How much of this is the result of working with an established team that existed before you moved to work-from-home? Do you think the same will be true for teams that are created in a work-from-home setting from the start?

I ask, because I am worried about training and retaining new people. A lot of work is not satisfying in itself. Part of my motivation comes from working together with a group of people I've come to known well. Often I care more about the people I work with than the problems I am working on. I consider this people aspect part of my intrinsic motivation to work.

I fear that once we're all working from home, our motivations become more and more extrinsically. After that, why bother working for THIS company or problem? Can I trust myself and my colleagues to be involved enough to finish anything in the long run? Or should I start to expect anyone to jump ship anytime?