skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How did you decide what type of developer to become? Any advice?
How did you choose between front-end, full-stack, devops, ML, games, mobile etc.? What advice would you give to anyone considering their first role or to anyone who is thinking about switching domains?
In case anyone is curious, this story discusses the letter: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-10-07/caltechs-r...

It quotes, "More than half of the population in this state is made up of negroes — a very serious situation. For it means that under universal suffrage they could control the state now — an unthinkable disaster in view of the sort of people they now are."

In particular, the phrasing above of "reached a majority of the population" is exactly backwards, as Mississippi had been majority African American from the 1840s to the 1930s, and likely already wasn't at the time of Millikan's visit in 1951 (contrary to his assertion). African Americans historically have moved away from Mississippi and other southern states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_(African_Ameri...
Disagree. It breaks the Clojure idiom. Please reconsider.
This is great! (And someone should aggregate the results of this thread by popularity...)

Mine (Not including work-related apps or Gmail)

* Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com)

* Reddit (old.reddit.com)

* NY Times (nytimes.com)

* Polygon PC games (polygon.com/pc)

* ProductHunt (producthunt.com)

* Wired (wired.com)

* Behance (behance.net)

* Dribbble (dribbble.com)
This is also similar to providing massive numbers without any context. For example $x produces 2.3M tonnes more $waste than $y every year!!! Of course $y produces 8.2T tonnes a year so it isn't /that much/ of a delta.

Also vaguely related to my pet peeve of using large denominators to make numbers large and confusing. This factory produces 63M items a year! How about 2 per second, I can visualize 2.
"The problem I think is that a lot of advertisers, especially smaller ones, wouldn't want to risk pissing Facebook off with a lawsuit. Plus even if Facebook misleads advertisers in a way that results in them spending more money than they otherwise would...the fact is, Facebook could likely double or triple their current prices and those same advertisers would still pay it because they have no choice."

If the ads don't work, or do not deliver enough results for the price, the advertiser will take their spend somewhere else.
> Would you want to work for Noam Bardin? Personally, I'm disappointed to be sharing the planet with him.

Huh, maybe move to Mars and establish a just society.
My experience is that micro services are a method to enforce modularity. You don’t have any choice other than talking over interfaces (assuming you don’t cheat by sharing a database). Keeping things modular in a monolith requires discipline that is enforced by reviewing everyone else’s code.
As long as they are books to sell and conferences to present at, it's all cool and dandy.
Market to Developers Where Developers Are
> There are no errors; only conditions that you dislike.

This is true in mathematical sense, but unhelpful in UX sense.
Open-air dining with six feet of separation is almost certainly safe. There's literally no evidence to the contrary despite multiple court orders to produce any.
Custom two way bindings in ef.js make syncing properties with parent easy
The case is more like when you want to assert against some of the contents of a dictionary but not all (say 60% of a 30 key dict), and not all those assertions are based on == (and it's a multilevel nested dict).

There's no particurly terse why to write an example I'm afraid.
This! I did a rewrite of my resume with this theme 3 years back and it made a huge difference. So stress on the business value added, your role in the team, if you solved a particularly tricky problem etc. These also make good interview points.
Have you quantified that? How unsafe it is to your personally?

I don't know anything about your personal situation, but if you're healthy and relatively young the risk from Covid (first catching it, then having a bad time with it) in resuming these aspects of normal life may be extremely low, even compared to activities you wouldn't think twice about doing pre-pandemic - like taking a short car ride for example.

I think there are probably a lot of people struggling with this sort of thing. Cognitive behaviour therapy incorporating aspects of exposure therapy could be useful here.
This is from 2011, according to the commit blame info [1]. The advice appears to be from the standpoint of LAMP development a decade ago.

[1] https://secure.phabricator.com/source/phabricator/browse/mas...
GTT has been a very helpful in setting up repeatable regression tests with CI.
FWIW I feel like that's the best part of UE4's blueprint system. It makes the engine API very discoverable. Type signatures in code take a lot more mental energy to parse. Dragging out a blueprint pin provides a nicely organized, context sensitive dropdown of potential methods, which is usually more helpful than a tab completion pop up imo.
Boo! Life is life, who are we to judge who's is more or less valuable?
Skype's niche in my cohort (poor college student in North America the early 2000s) was calling home to relatives without having to use an expensive telephone calling card or burning cell phone minutes. It was an important part of my life for keeping in touch without feeding the extraordinarily expensive university telephone system.

I moved all of my AT&T calling card spending to Skype once it had the ability to call telephone numbers because it was much less expensive to do so.
I bought mine at a Swedish online auction site. I suspect eBay is the place, but unless you are not getting an AT converter with it I would not pay more than $20.

If you find an old Packard bell with a 1.25 unit wide escape key it is certainly a BTC board. That is how I found mine. 25sek (about 3 bucks) without an AT converter.

Just look for retro keyboards. The 1.25 unit escape key is the first thing to spot. Then make sure it is the dome-with-slider one and not a foam-and-foil (which are certainly degraded beyond use by now).

Personally I think the future of tactile keyboards is rubber domes and either light-based sensing or EC style (like topre). No friction, yet great tactility instead of the almost-linear switches like cherry MX brown.
which stems from its ISO 3166-1 abbreviation.
The baseline usage of $387.79 seems like a lot to me. I guess it's good to have natural gas heat.
As far as I can tell, the linked study mentions "Asian" once in the introduction but not the abstract.

>Our primary variables of interest were median household income, percent Latinx, percent Black, and percent Asian.
Thanks for sharing. What do you draw your doodles in?
? requires the return type be annotated with an error type and the success case be annotated with Ok, for all functions up the stack, between the current function and where handling occurs. unwrap is purely local.
In rough order of time spent:

1. Hacker news (via RSS)

2. Washington Post

3. Ars Technica (via RSS)

4. Fox News

5. Various law & technology blogs & twitter feeds (via RSS)

6. Bluesnews.com
My two cents in addition to lebuffon's reply:

The occasional amateur gear is usually not enough to demodulate signals from Mars, since they're too faint. You'd need much larger dishes to, roughly speaking, "ingest" more energy into your receiver so that it become more distinguishable from noise and you can extract information from it.

It would be possible to demodulate with smaller, amateur dishes if the spacecraft transmitted in a very narrow bandwidth. It wouldn't make sense for space agencies to do that, though, since they would trade higher bit rates for cheaper receivers, whilst powerful receivers aren't that difficult to build and are totally on budget for an agency capable of launching a spacecraft.

But I must say that that would be a very nice citizen science project.
Hacker news
lichess.com
The verge
I never made such a claim. I implied we should focus on socioeconomic status, not race. If Latinos are disproportionately lower-income, then focusing on improving socioeconomic issues would disproportionately improve their lives while avoiding being racist or pushing a divisive, unproductive narrative.
I like web sites that I can easily access from inside the terminal. My goto browser is links and I usually check these URLs a couple of times a day:

https://text.npr.org
https://lite.cnn.com/en
> In [country] (and [other country], too, if I understand correctly), [Skype] was a way to avoid [international call] charges

^ That's why GP was saying they're similar
I'm saying that they're not in any way equivalent other than they are both sets of rules.

The government gets to determine whether you are an employee, because Uber is subject to laws. The government is also subject to its own laws, but there's no requirement that a government be subject to the same rules that it applies to a company that operates within its jurisdiction. Otherwise, why would we even try this in court? If Uber is entitled to identical treatment as the government, this case could have been tried in Uber's own court.'

I'm not misrepresenting you, I'm disagreeing with a false statement. The government's medallion system is not the same as Uber's structure with respect to drivers because drivers are considered citizens in their relation to the government, while they are considered employees in their relationship to Uber. The medallion holders are not entering into either an independent contractor or employee relationship with the government, they're following the law as all citizens (and companies) are required to.
Yes, there are obviously some ways to express gratitude that are preferable to others, but as long as the entitled/ungrateful/"you are _supposed_ to do things this way" comments outnumber the thankful ones, I won't start complaining about them.
Looking at other people's code I vastly prefer a feature branch with a summary name of the feature "new-checkout-flow" or whatever and then the commits as they where without squashing/rebasing. Mine tend to have quite a few commits cycling through:

- Stub in [classes/models/etc] for checkout flow
- Add basic test coverage
- Fix my API for easier testing
- Decouple foo from bar in new flow
- New checkout flow mostly tested
- New flow UI cleanup and add comments
- Fix nasty [N+1/O(n^2)/etc] performance bug in new flow
- New flow feedback from acceptance testing
- New flow ready to merge
- [And often enough/honestly] "WIP to share with..." or just
"WIP" for work in progress, "Fixing bug in" or whatever reality there was.

Going back at `git blame` etc 5 years later i can see from the branch names linked to the commit the why it was added and from the commit messages I can see something of at what point in the mental processing of designing/implementing that exact line made it it.
Ed Tufte pointed out that Japan’s newspapers were far ahead of American media in terms of presenting a large number of meaningful visualizations. He also pointed out that the Communist Party of Japan was the leader amping Japanese media on presenting charts. Needless to say there are important cultural factors at play here.
>Facebooks corporate incentive is to get you to FEEL like your getting good value out of advertising on Facebook and to get you addicted to doing it.

Even more reason for us to be doubtful about FB's claims that small businesses would be decimated without FB's invasive tracking.
You may want to check out Dino.im. For easy XMPP there is also Quicksy.im that's a fork of Conversations (from the author of Conversations) but using contact book for people discovery.
Off topic: You know, I know it’s a new institution, but has Her Majesty’s Supreme Court adopted a useful acronym yet? SCOTUK or HMSC perhaps?
We now know who this guy is a mouth-puppet for.

This past election cycle has shown Big Tech's true colors. They censor information to the world, tweak their algorithms to misrepresent situations, hide trending hashtags, etc based on California's preferred politics. They literally just got finished pooling their power to silence an entire political party (i.e. Parlor), and people still for some reason think they deserve the right to be gatekeepers of all information.

I don't say this because I feel bad for big media, I say it because big media content is certainly not made better by being pre-filtered through facebook's algorithms (or whatever big tech company). The current state of big media content is a fucking dumpster fire...at least more money to them might result in improved quality.
Here
Reddit
Deals sites (slickdeals, woot, meh)
>its not like you are forced to use their application out of obligation

Can I have my aging father call you when he needs help with Signal? I don't think you understand the network effects of messaging programs.
Could you elaborate on the first point? Do they run live race detection on streams and cut off access?
Yup. Hashing phone numbers is basically useless. If they truncate enough there might be plausible deniability due to possible collisions but I suspect the chance of collision is still quite low as they don't want to annoy people with false positives.
white hat hackers -- we got manners and shit
That seems like an entirely different topic from what is described in the article.
Chris Albon has a great pack on his website chrisalbon.com
I also use my git GUI to quickly review what changed before making the commit. That way not only I filter out irrelevant chunks/files, but I also compare the new lines to the old ones.
The common theme when moving up the 'stack' (whether it be technology or academic disciplines as in the graphic) is that complex systems (whether OS or biology) are not just a sum of their parts and have emergent properties you cannot predict just by looking at the building blocks.
I believe it is Microsoft trying the same trick as with their TypeScript thing.

An unsuccessful attempt at embrace, extend, extinguish.

If they just needed type checking, it could've been done with either tests, or annotation for checks at compile time, but instead they've developed a whole new language that gets more, and more diverged from the original one with each release.
XMPP gtalk was awesome, and killing it was foolish; my _entire_ gtalk contact list suddenly stopped appearing, and that didn't just include people in IT. Dancers, musicians, teachers, et al were using Adium/Pidgin to chat, and suddenly it didn't work.

The web chat they provided was incredibly slow on mid and low end PCs, but most of my friends didn't even get as far as trying it. Google talk stopped working in Adium and _they didn't notice_ because they were able to talk via other connected services.

Probably for the best, Google didn't end up the benevolent technocratic force for good that we hoped for at the time.
Most often it's a dependency of a dependency. The library you really want to use, is using the library you don't want to use. Economically it's not possible to not depend on anything, so you take some risk, and hope it doesn't later bites you back.
ULID. 128bit, human "readable", sorted (like int!), nearly impossible to guess/collide and has timestamp embedded. I love this format.
I’m not sure what C code bases you’ve worked with but refactoring in a large C code base is almost never local. Especially if it’s a code base that made extensive use of the gcc flags that disable making sure code does not alias.
Well I dunno about "always the case", but it's certainly accountable for ground-to-cloud.

What the seed does is create a place of high potential. I think which way the lightning flows is arbitrary at that point.
That looks amazing. I've used NetApp NFS filesystems that provided user level snapshots, where it automatically created snapshots of files. It wasn't after every command, but at regular intervals. You could access the files under `.snapshot` directory.

Searching now, it looks like this is part of NetApp ONTAP, and managed by a snapshot policy.
HN

Techmeme

NewsBlur for RSS feeds (newsblur.com)

Email - fastmail.com, hey.com, purelymail.com

R coding - https://www.r-bloggers.com

COVID related: vaccine tracker (https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations), Apple's mobility tracker (https://covid19.apple.com/mobility)

nytimes.com

Endpts for biotech news (https://endpts.com/news/)

Nature (https://www.nature.com)

Science (https://science.sciencemag.org)
To me the whole advertising racket has always seemed like a case of an emperor with no clothes. Has anyone here ever made a purchase that was influenced solely by an ad, or known any common folk who did?
Making sense of the mass data generated from firing neurons
It took time, and many thousands of dollars, before I realized that the vast majority of “likes” my pages received as a result of paid campaigns on FB were from accounts which were clearly not real people.

A simple look enough of their profiles revealed that, like would he expected from any fly by night CPA network, FB was using bots, or at least straw man accounts run by low-cost staff, to like and view content which FB was paid to advertise.

Worse, I found that the clickthrough metrics reported by them to off-FB destinations I advertised NEVER was anywhere close to what was reported on the destination, including when tracked by Google Analytics.

In short: like-fraud, click-fraud, and more.

I cannot be the only person to notice these things. I assume it persists because most people, self included, simply complain and move on once we notice the “game” but don’t sue.
Texans use 2021 Ford F-150 hybrid pickup trucks to power homes amid winter storm
Maybe they're finally capitalizing on all their locked-in users.
Digging into a MongoDB 3.6.20 concurrency bug
Launch HN: HiGeorge (YC W21) – Real-time data visualizations for public datasets
Hi HN!

Anuj here. My co-founder Amir (Aazo11) and I are building HiGeorge (https://hi-george.com/). We make localized drag-and-drop data visualizations so that all publishers, even the small ones, can better leverage data in their storytelling. Think Tableau with all the necessary data attached.

At the onset of the pandemic Amir and I were looking for local data on the spread of the virus. We visited the sites of large national newsrooms like the NYTimes and were impressed by the quality of data visualizations and maps, but they lacked the geographic granularity for our own neighborhood.

We then turned to our local newsrooms but found they presented data in tables and lists that made it difficult to comprehend the virus’ spread and trends. We wondered why. After talking to local journalists and publishers, we found that newsrooms simply do not have the resources to make sense of large datasets.

Public datasets are hard to clean, poorly structured, and constantly updated. One publisher explained to us that she would refresh her state health department’s website 5 times a day waiting for updated COVID data, then manually download a CSV and clean it in Excel. This process could take hours, and it needed to happen every day.

This is where HiGeorge comes in. We clean and aggregate public datasets and turn them into auto-updating data visualizations that anyone can instantly use with a simple copy/paste. Our data visualizations can be drag-and-dropped into articles, allowing news publishers to offer compelling data content to their communities.

Check out a few versions of what we’re doing with customers -- COVID-19 data reporting at North Carolina Health News [1], COVID-19 vaccine site mapping at SFGATE [2], real-time crime reporting in Dallas, TX [3], and police use of force at Mission Local [4].

Today, HiGeorge works with dozens of newsrooms across the country. Our visualizations have driven a 2x increase in pageviews and a 75% increase in session duration for our partner publishers. We charge a monthly subscription for access to our data visualization library – a fraction of the cost of an in-house data engineer. In the long run, we are building HiGeorge so that it becomes the single place to collaborate on and publish data content.

We’d love to hear from the HN community and we’ll be hanging out in the comments if you have any questions or feedback.

[1]https://www.northcarolinahealthnews.org/2021/02/09/coronavir...
[2] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/vaccine-sites-San-Fra...
[3] https://lakehighlands.advocatemag.com/2021/02/data-crime-tre...
[4] https://missionlocal.org/crime-data/
This isn't really about that though: the debate in the UK has been around the fact that Uber constrains its "contractors" as though they were employees, while not affording them the rights employees would normally have. They have all the disadvantages and none of the advantages of employment. I realise some might argue that there are some advantages of looser employment for those workers, and that may be the case, but we have employment law for a reason, and it's to protect workers from abusive practices.
But they won't leave, because high income people still live in New York and California. If high income people don't even move to new states, they certainly won't move to new nations.
This is mostly because it has not been funded to the level required for that timeline to be accurate.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._his...
More to the point, I think these statement show a lack of empathy on the part of the person making them.

'at least they're old'

This has wiped out FAMILES. 2.4M worldwide and nearly 500k in the US. And it flies past people due to fatigue and habituation.
Be humble, a lot of the great advice given here are a direct result of that.

You are not smarter than others, your code does and will have bugs and design problems, you documentation will suck, you will need ways to debug tricky bugs, the dev language you are best at is sometimes not the best for the task, you can't work more hours than others and you still need a lot of time to learn new things.
Promotion?

They described simply cutting off a stream because of the language spoken.
There's a valuable lesson in this: always reply! I wouldn't have dreamed of replying to an email like that, since I wouldn't expect to get any satisfaction from the sender. But incredibly he responded with what is probably more than enough info to secure a conviction, assuming he can be identified.
I miss quarterly visits with a friend in a town midway between us. Just us in a hotel room, watching movies, going out to dinner, looking for new places or revisiting the old, chit-chatting away. We still communicate now but it lacks the spontaneity of our usual routine.

On a weekly basis, I miss "camping out" at my Starbucks and reading, growing slowly more wired on caffeine. This is the lack that seems to have put me off of my game the most, despite it not having a whole lot of personal interaction.
What makes the specification superior in principle to the program?

For some domains, you can write a specification that has value in itself, it will be shorter and easier to review.

For other domains, the program itself is the best specification for the desired behavior. There is nothing special about a specification that makes it inherently more correct than a program. The specification may be large enough and detailed enough that it is essentially just as hard to review as the program output. The specification can have subtle bugs, just like a program. Even worse, the specification itself is harder to test, especially for corner cases.

It can be very easy to produce an excellent specification that solves a different problem than expected, especially for complex problems with many moving parts and many possible use-cases.
I still have about $3 in legacy Skype spend available. Microsoft sends me nasty emails that they don’t let you make prepaid deposits anymore that never expire. At some point I’ll finally use these credits and I’ll probably never use Skype again.