skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Being concise and to-the-point is just as important as using simple English.

That blog post is too long for the ideas it conveys (kinda ironic?).
Here are some things I found tiring to read:

"There's an Italian dish called saltimbocca, which means "leap into the mouth." My goal when writing might be called saltintesta: the ideas leap into your head and you barely notice the words that got them there."

^ This analogy is distracting and not required to communicate a simple concept.

"It's too much to hope that writing could ever be pure ideas. You might not even want it to be. But for most writers, most of the time, that's the goal to aim for. The gap between most writing and pure ideas is not filled with poetry."

^Just delete this. What are you trying to say here?

"It's like trailing a long train behind you that readers have to carry."

^I don't understand this analogy. Long train I am trying to carry behind me? That is a ridiculous and distracting image you have put into the readers mind.

"If the friction of reading is low enough, more keep going till the end."

^This is an obtuse and awkward way of saying: "People are more likely to read things they easily understand"

"Indeed, lasting is not merely an accidental quality of chairs, or writing. It's a sign you did a good job."

^ Where did chairs come from?

But although these are all real advantages of writing simply, none of them are why I do it. The main reason I write simply is that it offends me not to."

^ Delete, doesn't add any value tbh
I didn't mean to criticize Duolingo for not being a silver bullet, but they definitely do market it as one. They literally say right on their homepage that using it for 34 hours is equal to a semester of university language class. When googling it I got an ad with the text "All you need to learn your next language".

FWIW I like duolingo, but I wish they were clearer about their strengths and weaknesses. I've maxed out Arabic, and am halfway through French. I got about 1/3 through Japanese before giving up because their approach just doesn't work for it. It clearly works much better for latin languages, and even in Arabic it's great for vocab but lousy for grammar and idioms. As I said in my top post, I think phone typing is an underrated skill, particularly for a foreigner in a new country.

Nothing short of time and immersion are going to solidly teach just about anybody a language, but I have some friends who've tried it and then got discouraged on language learning all together because of the frustrating parts of the app, and the fake sense of progress that's inherent in some of their marketing =(. On the other hand I'm on a 600+ day streak and have gained a ton from the app pressuring me to come back every single day.
Probably some Perl script running in a crontab that no one touch in the last 10 years.
64 debit cards ought to be enough for anybody.
I agree it would be prudent for the government to be more discerning with issuing loans (or imo not do it at all), but I don't think the schools themselves should be forced to do anything. most people already have access to perfectly good state universities that charge in-state students less than a year's wages at mcdonald's. I went to one of these and got a valuable education, minus the "cruise ship level amenities". if someone wants to blow $50k/year on a medieval lit degree at a mid-tier liberal arts college, that should be up to them, provided it is made clear that it's probably not a good financial decision.
Poetic anecdote, really enjoyed it.

Immigration is screwed in what way ?
I love Tachyons (CSS version). It saved me hundreds of hours.

To each their own: for instance, I used Sass but disliked it. It always seemed to add needless complexity to my projects.
"Finally, install evil-mode, the Vim emulation package for Emacs"

Anyone use this regularly? Does it kill off some of the upside of emacs?
I think Ireland's lack of a martial tradition from the British side was compensated for by the healthy martial tradition on the Catholic side. (No value judgement about the IRA intended.)
AP-NORC poll: 1 in 5 in US lost someone close in COVID-19 pandemic
An interesting path is to go from regular emacs to emacs with vim bindings, which is what I did, also in around 14 days. Its painful, but good for you brain. And you get the best of both worlds, or so I like to think.
> I've not heard of it before, looks very, uh, cool :-)

Indeed! I worked for IceCube for a bit over a year, several years ago, as a Winterover Experiment Operator - more like "on-site technician" than "frozen experimental physicist". Happy to answer questions about that experience.
Haha. I'll upvote you, because I want to see others' responses.
This comes up a lot on HN and the common objection is that the criteria you listed discriminates against talented people who have families (for example) and therefore no spare time to indulge their curiosities by learning new languages or whatever.
OK. I have no first hand experience, but I saw that Helicon makes a product which incrementally adjusts a camera's focuser.

https://www.heliconsoft.com/heliconsoft-products/helicon-fb-...
What is a hash function and the different types?
I would add that beyond that, electricity is usually a rather small (~25%) fraction of final energy consumption in developed economies, so really there's a lot more to worry about if we're thinking about climate, and that might well imply "lifestyle changes" as David MacKay called them.
JavaScript Use Cases of WeakMap
Yes, and nuclear facilities have significantly different standards from other facilities. The parent's comment is bad because the SMR wouldn't explode or leak if it wasn't properly winterized. It would shut down. But there is a lower chance of that happening simply because the significantly higher standards surrounding nuclear.
> systemd has taken Linux in the wrong direction in my opinion

Can you elaborate on that a bit? Where does it fall short for you and what's your preferred tool?
> but they're very expensive e.g. bookbaby.com quotes $90 for a 500 page book.

Wow, that is expensive. Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing does paperbacks for way less than that.

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201834340
This is an unreasonable expectation. The whole point of a maintenance window is to allot an expected time when there might be downtime.

Otherwise, the maintenance window becomes 24hx365, since "ensuring downtime is avoided during maintenance window" means literally - make a maintenance window have the same uptime as non-maintenance window.
The Performance Inequality Gap, 2021
An update on devices, networks, browsers, and the new baseline scenario for web performance.
I think it's because Tailwind is forced via a mountain of historical baggage to shove it's entire UI in-between two quotes with a tiny (practical) character limit when you might really like some tooling (IDE collapse, expand, summarize, tag) and some browser support (dynamically compiled styles).
I was thinking more "cool" in the manner of a singular vision in a creative execution like https://www.kodasema.com/ or https://vipp.com/en/hotel/vipp-shelter
>no fancy interface, no visual helpers, no auto-debugging... just coding in the most pure spartan-programmers way.

Why is this being shown off as simple and easy to use? Or am I misunderstanding the project page's message?
PyCM 3.1 released: Machine learning library for confusion matrix analysis
That's correct. Even any of the off the shelf tools would have spotted it so it's safe to conclude this was intentional.

Audits aren't the be all end all either, a determined scammers could have added the backdoor after the audit.
Essentially every Android phone will reach EOL because of software, not because of hardware. I still use a 10 year old android phone running android 4, and while the hardware is damaged, the software is what keeps it back.

iPhones last longer because their software lasts longer.
> The mainframe doesn't have that sort of path.

Datacenter-scale compute on non-proprietary platforms (e.g. leveraging OCP standards and best practices, which have been developed w/ significant input from FAANG and 'cloud' vendors) can easily tackle any mainframe workload. The implied path is obvious.
I think it's reasonable to compare tobacco + alcohol to marijuana, but from an outside perspective drugs like fentanyl seem to be in a whole different ballpark.
I completely agree with the maker's point that class names are the bane of CSS design. However, styled components have been amazing in this regard. I've tried a lot of solutions over the past 8 years and this is my favorite by far. No extra crap, but you still get reusability and the syntax is like plain CSS. I tried JSS but I can't get over defining styles as JS objects, not to mention made Typescript slow to a crawl.

React example:

```
import styled from 'styled-components';

const Button = styled.button`
padding: 4px;
font-weight: bold;
`;

const PrimaryButton = styled(button)`
background: ${primaryColor};
color: white;
`;

```
> An OS that represents the user should have the option to "allow" extraneous permissions (perhaps even by default), but return junk data - mock location, fake contacts, arbitrary device identifiers, etc.

Many Chinese roms have started to do this. They have option to provide fake or blank data when an app asks to access sensitive information.

I expect this to be available in stock android soon too.
There have been thousands of satellites and dozens of space probes powered by solar electricity. Space missions out to the orbit of Jupiter can be powered by solar PV (Juno probe). Actual fission reactors have never gone beyond Earth orbit.

Very deep space missions can't use solar power due to the inverse square fall-off of light from the sun, but even those don't use nuclear reactors. They use radioisotope thermal generators powered by radioactive decay. RTGs don't have any moving parts and can run for decades without maintenance.

I think it's astonishing and delightfully living-in-the-future that solar cells -- once so expensive that only space missions could justify their cost -- are now manufactured by the square kilometer and cheap enough to "farm" electricity here on Earth. If you're pondering speculative technologies of the future, a solar collecting Dyson swarm could provide more energy than all the fissionable materials in the solar system.
Is it because of runtime speeds (the slowness) that prevents microkernel operating systems from being more prevalent? Or is it just because Linux is good enough, and it became popular and free?
How do you deal with "I don't want to learn new language X"?

I do investigate some time with new languages/tech to a degree, but to the extent I have time to learn, I tend to want to go deeper in the things I have competence in already. There's generally always more to learn (between the language itself evolving and the ecosystem developing) such that taking time away from those areas to 'explore' some hot new thing tends to not have very useful ROI.

I've done 'learn new language X' for... way too many years already, and prefer to get better at what I know. That doesn't mean I never learn new things or new tech, but it's generally in service of a defined goal as opposed to "oooh that looks neat...".

I've been doing this as a hobby for 40 years, and professionally for around 26. I have the feeling some places would look at 'the old guy' (like me) as 'the stick in the mud who never learns the new tech', yet in some cases I've been 'learning new tech' since before they were born.

Some of the original question was rhetorical - I already know how some places react to the "I don't spend time learning multiple new languages/stacks every few months" line. But... keep it in mind that there may be other ways to measure that curiosity besides just looking at 'time with new language'. ;)
I used to live in the area and I pass through Greenfield often. Most of the buildings are likely still there and I don't think Greenfield ever recovered from the 1894 depression. It's also loaded with racists...quite the reversal. The only law enforcement around is in the next county over.
Daughter and friends while school wasn't in session, last year. Nothing formal; they appreciate "better redstone" tips and were delighted to show off the work they were doing but "real" was like a cognitive gap for them...

~12yo might've been too young, or too old; and my failures to communicate don't reflect on them. Still. It was disconcerting; I was tearing up TVs and stuff at that age and they fear to use a tool.
A bank in Boston once sent me a debit card that didn't meet the valid number algorithm. I had to go in there and show them the math step by step to prove it.
I know its not trendy, but, if you want to not bother writing software to handle redundancy, you can pay IBM to do it in hardware.

Seriously. if you pay IBM for a couple of z series machines, you can link them together in step, and literally blow one up, and you'll only loose a certain number of CPU cycles.

sure they are expensive, but its cheaper than buying a team of ten engineers for x years to make K8s do the same thing.
Transparent casing with the wires running to a slightly to large mechanical toggle switch that switches all wires. Then it looks like someone went out of his way getting it right.
oh, indeed it is not. Good thing I never put lasers outdoors.
I don't use evil mode, but I don't see how it could kill any of the upside of Emacs, which has very little to do with keybindings.
I sometimes joke that climate change orthodoxy is driven in part by the CIA in order to retard growth/industrialization in semi and non-developed countries in order to elongate America's hold on power.

I would describe myself as agnostic on the topic simply because I haven't done enough personal research, but the devout belief that many people have in human-caused global climate change is really off putting, primarily because it's hubristic in so many ways: that our presence and actions are harming a 4.5 billion year planet in the span of a few decades; that our models are that good; that our data is that good; that our analysis and conclusions are undoubtedly true, etc. My inner skeptic just freaks out.
Does not necessarily work on the microphone though.
This is not a valid Show HN. Please read the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. Also, booster comments and promotional voting are against the rules of this site!

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
I went from vim to emacs for development in go and python. I Went with doom emacs, which is a configuration distribution already prebuilt which is friendly to vimm users (ie, evil mode). It was rough at first, required writing lots of cheat sheets and also changing workflows a little. I feel much more productive in emacs than vim. IMHO, its more straightforward to google "How to do X in emacs" than "how to do X in vim" and actually end up with a productive configuration change.
Plastic card distribution can be extremely frustrating, because the only time you need it to happen is when you don't actually want it to be needed (fruad, loss, damage, new account, whatever). You just want to fucking buy things, not deal with shipping incompetence, you know?

This reminds me of a time I was traveling and had to cancel a lost credit card. I told the card company that I was not at home,was definitely outside of the country, not going to be home, definitely staying at an address that was not the home address listed on the account, wanted the card to be sent to _me_ and not my _home_, gave them my foreign delivery address 5 times over as many weeks, got 5 separate promises that the card was definitely going to reach me at my outside-of-the-country-and-not-at-home location in just a few business days, and the card never showed up. So I just gave up. And then, when I finally went home there were 5 goddamn cards in my mail slot.

Honestly this reason alone makes Apple's purely digital credit card my favorite. Need a new card number? Just push a button. No incompetent shipping divisions with 5 hops and as many business days between you and your ability to buy things when your card number is breached.
>> boring, shitty work

I envy you. Everybody (who has a boss) endures at least a little boring, shitty work. If it gets to be too much, the antidote is to start seriously looking for another job. Or write some automation scripts and chill out.

Fuck you money is reserved (or should be) for much more egregious offenses: Pettiness. Hypocrisy. Withholding compensation from you for made-up reasons. Not upholding promises. Instituting new rules arbitrarily to suppress you. Negating excellent performance with irrelevant attributes on a "performance evaluation."

These are the types of things that seriously throw off your economic planning, both in wasted time and missing dollars. This is what you save the f-u fund for, so you can avoid the above at all costs.
> With 15 American states having now legalized marijuana, they argue, the crop has become a relatively small part of the Mexican drug trafficking business, with cartels focusing on more profitable products like fentanyl and methamphetamines.

That explains why this move isn't a sign that the cartels have lost control of the state. I wonder if they accept the minor loss in profits or see it as more of a gateway to their other products.
Synth Playground
When I was at the FSF, Google mailed a coupon for free adwords to a bunch of websites, including several thousand coupons to the FSF... we figured it out it was all Joomla websites with a copy of the GPL linked in the footer.
Fascinating use case. As I understand it (and I don’t understand much in this space) this would require an “Oracle” to provide someones state (dead or alive) thereby triggering the contract that releases whatever payload. Curious to see how this system will ensure the Oracle is reporting that correctly.
I'm willing to bet that adding a bump to a laptop would be viewed as acceptable by the market if it means we get good cameras.

Heck, if Apple's the first to do it, it'll be seen as a feature.
Do you actually want to introduce young kids to programming or programming robotics?

The two things are different.

Scratch has proven to be a wonderful programming introduction for young kids. You can even control physical robots with it:

https://en.scratch-wiki.info/wiki/Hardware_that_can_Connect_...

There are also numerous Scratch tutorials online where you program a virtual robot on the screen (eg. moveLeft(1),moveDown(2), and so on.

The "game-ish" projects you list sound great, but are generally beyond introductory programming for kids level.
Also, your office is full of awake engineers at that time. Which is better than a handful of on-call sleepy engineers and crossing your fingers the rest of the team wakes up when you call them if something goes completely haywire.
Check out Fuji's GFX100S. It's a consumer camera ($6000) that can take 400MP photos.
which competitor
I’m curious to hear from folks who have switched between the two, and have lasted for more than a year on both. If you’ve learned more than the basics and both became muscle memory, which did you end up sticking to?

(Vim user for 23 years, Emacs user of none... but interested because of Lisp)
> GP comment was a particular accusation of collusion with the government versus check on the government. I’d been responding more narrowly to that, rather than the “is the press net harmful” question you’re posing.

I don’t think that changes the sense of what I said.

‘Collusion’ can be a conspiracy of people actually meeting in smoke filled rooms, or it can be simply giving the benefit of the doubt to ones ideological bedfellows.

> Having studied and earned money from journalism, giving me familiarity with the education and the professional newsroom, I’m skeptical of journalism skeptics.
The existence of big journalism (particularly getting paid to investigate and shine a light) seems to bring an important check-and-balance on big religion, big enterprise, and big government

I’ve seen this claim from people who work or have worked in the industry.

> it’s unclear how else to systematically achieve.

That’s a problem. What you are callings journalism skepticism, I consider to be journalism criticism.

It’s reasonable to assume that Journalism is just as susceptible to institutional problems as any of the institutions it purports to be a check-and-balance on.

I’m not anti-journalism, but I’m appalled by the lack of self-awareness and responsibility the industry takes for it negative impacts.

> Zuckerberg’s boosterism aside, it seems The Fifth Estate has not yet shown itself able to achieve the same scope, depth, and truth ratio, of coverage as a well-funded newsroom.

Being ‘better than Facebook’ is at this point, not much different from being better than a cigarette company. I agree without but I’m not why you’re even mentioning this, but it’s not a good thing to compare journalism with.
I listened to a podcast interview with Ray and I loved his philosophy with this project. The part that struck a chord with me was the challenges he personally had to keep features out that he knew would add complexity to using the library. Something about a creator having a vision for their project and staying true to it just brings me joy!
Spaniard user here, with some experience
with LaTeX and Spanish with utf8 settings.

It supports it fine.
A British business suing the EU in an EU court about a contract that explicitly says for EU members? Wouldn't go far.
Yes. The dictionary definition of refactoring is ”restructuring of source code without altering functionality”.
Do you really have a website, if you haven't tested your disaster recovery plan?
That's interesting. You would assume the LUHN digit would be calculated and non-editable. Was it a card with an unusual number of digits or something?
Well the author used Evil mode which is vi emulation for emacs and quite popular. Their last post that was obviously about emacs was late 2019 but they don’t blog much. So I’d guess they still use emacs
This is a great point. Personally, the only reason I would want to switch to Emacs is Org mode but the muscle memory for custom Vim and Tmux keymaps is hard to give up.
Not sure what you have against Sia, Cypress. I, for one, will try to make it to /S\w*ia/.
You can always argue whether something is easy-to-use but having "no fancy interface, no visual helpers, ....." surely makes this simple doesn't it?

And from my personal experience with raylib I can attest that it is easy-to-use.
The opposite. Tailwind pretty much guarantees you’ve got consistent ratios, colors, etc across your product.
I read his description and literal hand waving as saying that for efficiency reasons, in 2011 they were sort of build like how you'd build a camp fire: convective airflow drawn through and out the top.
This is why you don’t keep hitting the submit button...
The text is being optimized for an algorithmic reader, not a human reader. For this essay to make any difference to OP, Google's search engineers would have to read it.
Sorting through the bad deals on Flippa
Did they generate the number by hand or something?
The book mostly focuses on raw generation figures. I see little to no writing on how to handle the intermittency of renewable sources.

Also, the 1,000 year figure for fissile fuel does not consider reprocessing which reclaims over 80% of fuel used.