skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How are you writing documentation? What tools do you use?
This was last asked 5 years ago, but the ecosystem has changed somewhat since then, so I figured it was worth asking again.

We've long struggled with documentation. Both structured documentation and Q&A. We've kept our structured documentation in a github repo in the past, but it's been a challenge to get people to write it and keep it up to date consistently. And people often forget it's there when they have a question they need answered.

Q&A just happens in a slack channel right now, but that makes it ephemeral for all practical purposes. Slack search just wasn't built for this, and no one wants to wade through a slack back and forth to try to find the answer to their question.

We have Guru that we use for policy documentation, HR, sales/marketing, etc. But it's never felt like a good fit for technical documentation. We're considering trying it anyway.

We're also looking at Stackoverflow Teams for its Q&A functionality, and possibly using Articles for structured. But Articles seems pretty weak.

What else is out there? This is purely internal documentation for us, so we'd like it authentication protected and we're not keen to build our own system using something like Markdown Docs or Sphinx. And we're wary of wikis due to their tendency to decay towards choas - we're already struggling a bit to keep our documentation well organized in Github and Guru. Hence, we've avoided Confluence.

What is everyone else using? What other tools are out there? Does anyone feel like they've really solved the documentation problem? If so, how?
But, you will never have a literal clone of production. Even if the structure is the same, you will need different configurations.

Something like an encryption key isn't a meaningful difference, since it's essentially sampled randomness.

However, keys to integrations need to vary outside of production. I don't want to literally be charging credit card or sending emails or a bunch of other things. This results in an environment that is different, no matter how much they resemble each other.
React's hooks (and some JSX style things in general) are quite pernicious there because they essentially break JS: you can't use them inside an `if` or a `for` or a `while`, or even within another function. You're no longer writing Javascript, you're writing a restricted subset to avoid undefined behaviour.

That alone is a concern, because any junior programmer getting an introduction through React is going to get a twisted understanding of the language itself.
Learned something useful right away in the cheatsheet. Use table tests all the time, but never thought of the param struct for multiple function params.

Awesome work!
The problem with those clones is they weren't made with pure intentions. Most of them are "the original site except we hate their admins" or "the original site except you can do crimes on this one". This isn't the kind of mindset you need to have a good mod team.
look at any objective statistical trends worldwide and you'd likely come to the same conclusions I've come to.

violence trends down

life expectancy trends up

poverty and hunger trends down

child labor is in decline

leisure time is increasing

nuclear weaponry is on the decline

migration is trending up

I'm not sure which objective metrics I could look at would imply anything other than what I've concluded.
Indirect elections imply that the members who could vote are elected by the people.
In HK, the people who could "vote" are appointed by the CCP. This isn't indirect election. This's indirect appointment.
China hasn't been communist for a long time, though it is still ruled by a party that calls itself communist. Under communism the state owns the means of production and distribution, there aren't private citizen billionaires in charge of major sectors. The current system is closer to fascism than communism, where a single party and its corporate cronies run the show.
| Lrlourpresident

That's what I looked for. You should have better evidence than a highly active user in a restricted access subreddit before making an assertion like that. Especially considering how wildly popular AOC is, I don't see any evidence of manipulation.
A code comment saying “Here’s a potential pitfall we could discuss addressing” is often more valuable than a solution. Every software project has more problems than it has people-hours available. Every team has the engineer who spends a week fixing an edge case in their ticket that no customer cares about. Demonstrating awareness of this makes you an attractive candidate.
Shipping efficiency generally:
Boats > trains > trucks > planes

Aircraft are only used in time-sensitive situations.
The standardized cargo container improved shipping efficiency, but in its absence boats are still the best method of transportation.

The fact that they're waiting for the cargo containers means that it's costing them less to wait than other options. I imagine if they were desperate they could hire out some cruise liners and stuff them with coffee. They'd have to be loaded and unloaded by dockworkers though, not sure if any port would support that anymore...
I know I'm contributing to the problem here by replying to you, but the guidelines also say:

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.

So please, just flag and move on next time.
> Clearly this is a nothingburger.

Hrm, I don't think so. It's probably more a matter of people that are accustomed to Gnome having accepted and/or habituated to the fact that it doesn't display thumbnails in the file manager. The same folks may have devised clever work arounds (opening the filesystem in a browser for example) or otherwise solved the problem in a way that it's not an impediment.

The problem with this line of thinking is that it ignores a huge cohort of potential adopters that would be stopped dead in their tracks at this issue. I think about scenarios where I might introduce an older family member to a Linux desktop for all the benefits it would bring (low cost, stable, secure, etc), and then how it would feel having to explain that they can't easily preview a photo when navigating the filesystem (like I was making excuses for a platform with a gaping hole).

In any system, it's heard to measure losses from things you don't have. A business might get that feedback from prospects that don't close, etc ("you don't have widget X, so we won't sign"), but it's harder to measure those feedback loops in the FOSS word. In short, I think not having this is a big deal, and folks that won't admit to that probably aren't considering a bunch of adoption that can't/won't happen until the issue is fixed.
At least this article doesn’t make the absurd claim a recent Guardian article did. That reproduction could go to zero.
Since you are a long term nomad, I'm wondering what your solution is for Government documents (IRS, Driver License, Car Registration, Jury Duty notification, absentee voting, etc), bank statements (KYC regulations), and other things that need a real address, and not an personal mailbox service? I've had issues with using PO Boxes even with Street Addressing, but I'm not sure a UPS store box would fix those issues.

Services like EarthClassMail sound like it would fit the bill, but I'm wondering if whatever API's these SaaS services use to validate "true residential address" will eventually blocklist these services addresses.

Thanks!
What's interesting in the context of the post is that apparently I qualify for MENSA on the basis of several test yet have had not the slightest inkling to even figure that out, nor absolutely any interest in joining now that I know.

Maybe MENSA is a representative sample of smart people, but I have a lot of friends and colleagues I consider much smarter then me and none of us are in MENSA, so I'm skeptical.
It seems everything old is new again. Wikipedia on Kremlinology[1]:

During the Cold War, lack of reliable information about the country forced Western analysts to "read between the lines" and to use the tiniest tidbits, such as the removal of portraits, the rearranging of chairs, positions at the reviewing stand for parades in Red Square, the choice of capital or small initial letters in phrases such as "First Secretary", the arrangement of articles on the pages of the party newspaper Pravda and other indirect signs to try to understand what was happening in internal Soviet politics.

[...]

In the German language, such attempts acquired the somewhat derisive name "Kreml-Astrologie" (Kremlin Astrology), hinting at the fact that its results were often vague and inconclusive, if not outright wrong.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kremlinology#Techniques
I think not. The standard tools read the token from ~/.pypirc (or the console if absent). Inadvertent commits of the token probably only happens if you have a custom script with a hardcoded token.
Hurr durr JavaScript Bad!

Lots of people like writing JavaScript, and it's perfectly capable of lots of tasks both large and small.

> More seriously, I'll admit I'm not a competent Node dev but the worst part for me is how convoluted you have to write large parts of code that don't need to be asynchronous or non-blocking in the first place

Perhaps your reticence to actually learn the language is the source of your difficulty?
> Many test scores (e.g. ACT) are heavily IQ/g-predictive.

Is there evidence of that? Many university recruiters at some of the most prestigious schools believe otherwise.
I feel the same way with coffee. As far as caffeinated beverages go, coffee is probably the least worrisome.
"Switch workspaces faster than ever with the handy new Super + Alt + Scroll shortcut." that's going to suck for left-handed mouse users as "super" tends to not be accessible with the non-mouse hand on most compact keyboards.
Perhaps England had some form of free speech but it certainly was not the 'American standard'. There has always been limits - and fairly extensive when it comes to topics posing a threat to the establishment, such as Ireland and the colonies.
Whenever I encounter any book on go , the first thing I do is to read the installation page . This is the best I’ve seen of any book . You made the whole “PATH” thing that drives new go users mad and gave a thorough reason of why it’s needed .
From what I've heard from some young women who were involved with Mensa early, it has aspects of a grooming club as well =(
Semi tangent: I would really recommend watching "Is Success Luck or Hard Work?" By Veritasium

https://youtu.be/3LopI4YeC4I
Your platform hasn't been granted a monopoly on anything and has no moat, so why would it ever be a problem?

daringfireball.net is a blog with no comments and at some point someone wrote a browser extension that just adds a comment section the owner of the site has no control over. Bit mean but that could always happen to you.
>They just copied Adam Smith and left out the free speech and it worked fine for them.

Seems to be a tried and true formula.
They do, but it would fall under "unintentional radiators", and the measurements are made at some distance from the device. Something like this language:

Except for Class A digital devices, the field strength of radiated emissions from unintentional radiators at a distance of 3 meters shall not exceed the following values:

Frequency of emission(MHz) Field strength (microvolts/meter)
30-88 100
88-216 150
216-960 200
Above 960 500
In case people were looking for research like I was, here's one study that seems to support this: https://www.wtsp.com/article/tech/science/harvard-study-thin...
I don't understand, did she double down that her dad was innocent/what he did was ok?

All I am aware of is that she says she did not know it was happening. And frankly if she was only 15 or something at the time, I would likely believe her. I would also leave open the possibility the she was being abused too, and feared retribution.
It's worth expanding on that observation a bit.

What makes encryption "perfect"? This is not obvious, so I'll just skip ahead to the conclusion: encryption is perfect when it's impossible to distinguish which candidate plaintext led to a specific ciphertext without knowing the entire key.

It's easy to see that a one-time pad qualifies here. Even knowing all but one character of the plaintext doesn't give you any cryptographic way to determine what the last character is. The list of possible keys associating the known plaintext with the current ciphertext allows for every single character in the unknown position. This isn't a matter of computational power, it's an information-theoretic limit. You just don't have enough information (from the cryptography, anyway) to prefer any choice over another.

You can apply a pigeonhole principle argument here and see that this requires the key to have the same size as the message. (Something along the lines of each key specifying a permutation between messages of the same length, and you need the key size to be big enough to specify every possible permutation for that message length.)

That argument can then be used to demonstrate the information-theory quality of the encryption is related to the ratio between the lengths of the message and the key.

When you look at modern cryptography, you can see that we're not depending on information-theoretic security at all. If you had all but one characters of the plaintext and all the ciphertext, it's quite likely there'd only be one key that matches the known permutation. We've gone in a different direction: computational security. It should require an implausible amount of computation to derive what the key is, even when you know matching plaintext and ciphertext.

It's certainly more convenient than moving terabytes of key around, and computational limits are actually pretty compelling, as long as flaws aren't found in the construction.

But it lacks the satisfaction of provably unbreakable.
I guess, yes.

But then an interesting question is how transitive copyright violations apply (because this is what a GPL violation legally is, you use the license to use it, nothing more and nothing less).

The reason I'm wondering about this is because the situation here is similar to a producer of e.g. cars buying a lets say seat to be put into the car and inside the seat they seat producer used some e.g. screws which violate copyright.

Would it be possible that the car manufacturer is hold
responsible for the copyright violation enacted by the seat producer? Unlikely I guess?

Would it still have some consequences? Surely, but likely negligible:

Violating GPL doesn't make any code become GPL (a common misconception) and copyright infringement laws are often based on monetary damage done by the infringement. And lets be honest how much damage is done in case the product is not sold, only given away for free and has competition which is also given away for free with even less constraints?
Even people who are pro-CCP care as the protest affects them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_RAFTER another sneaky one (highly recommend the book spycatcher, really unique perspective in that the author was a proper engineer on the frontline in the cold war)
People curious about Mensa should check out Jamie Loftus's podcast My Year In Mensa[1]. She is a writer/journalist/comedian who wanted to investigate the organization. She passed the test, joined Mensa, and was immediately ostracized once she began reporting on her experience. I'll just charitably summarize it to say that there are a variety of reasons why people join Mensa and many join for reasons outside what we might consider traditional "intellectual pursuits". I don't think their members are truly representative of people with high IQs or I at least hope not.

[1] - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-year-in-mensa/id149...
He should have said he was "hiking the Appalachian Trail"
To me, as an outsider, I don't see the immediate purpose of the club. I imagine most clubs are about activities or a mission.

I used to go social dancing and the purpose of that group of people was to dance, and they would have various events all about dancing or improving your dancing. If you join a social justice or politically minded group, I imagine your purpose is to engage in activities to further your ideals. But to join a club where there are other smart people... your goal is to what? Share interesting puzzles with each other? :D Try to make other people smarter?
Not exactly by the looks of things. Kangax says 71% compliant. We tried Hermes at work and had to turn it off again because our app was crashing. That was before they implemented Proxy support, but I'm a little loathe to try it again.

https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/#hermes0_7_0
I wish the article would actually go into _what_ is causing the container shortage

Are they not manufacturing them? Prioritizing them elsewhere? Is it political?

Anyone know what’s going on?
High IQ: Your brain perceive and process much more data than people with less IQ. If you don't filter and process them adequately you're prone to disorders.
Ask HN: What is your definition of learning?
Do you find it difficult to define?
That may be visually simpler, but if onMount were to start passing a parameter to its callback in a future version (for whatever reason) then that will be passed to listenForAuthChanges. Using the anonymous function means that wouldn't happen.
Show HN: Python Dependency Security Tool
We've just launched a tool called Ochrona that scans dependencies used in python projects and alerts you when you're using a vulnerable package. It consists of a web portal that gives you a centralized view of dependencies in your projects and various API clients:
- a plug-in with VS-Code
- a command line tool that allows you to run ad-hoc scans or hook into CI/CD tools
- a post deployment monitoring component that allows you to monitor once your projects are deployed to production

For more info on the API clients:
https://github.com/ochronasec

You can sign up to get an API token and try it out at https://signup.ochrona.dev (click "select" > "signup")
I don't think it's inconsistency that bothers me in this case - I don't really care if an app isn't using the same kind of widget design as long it's functional (I spend most of my days in apps that are entirely non-native and I'm fine with them).

The problem is more with GTK design which is crap for 80% of PC applications with dense control layouts, the high padding touch style widgets it offers out of the box work for low density stuff not complex editors).

Even non-native OSX apps integrate into OS in a predictable manner (use toolbar, shortcuts, native file dialogs, etc.)
> Every animal needs to survive and will do anything to get by including scavenging.

Yea, and so do nations. The descriptors they used feel conformable describing both the nation and the mascot. It's not deeply provocative. It is a comparison that is interesting to read, because it describes how nations and animals can act similarly, but on difference scales.
What does file size have to do with anything?

Edit: I forgot the grandparent mentioned them. Ublock Origin implements the parent's proposal,so I mentioned it.

Focussing on file size is a mistake because you can just make the tracking image display something decorative or whatever. I was referring to a solution for not loading third party resources without manual approval, which would need to be more general than just blocking single pixels to be robust (although hueristics might be good enough for some cases)
That hasn't been true for a while.

Within minutes of announcing Raku nearly 21 years ago Larry answered a question about it from the audience[1]:

> Question: Will Raku have specs ...?

> Larry: ... develop the real regression tests into a validation test ... then we actually have a machine-readable spec. And to me that’s actually a lot more important than what the verbiage on the human readable thing says.

It took years before folk caught up with Larry's intent, but the regression test suite has been called "roast" (Repository Of All Specification Tests) for something like 15 years and what you're calling "the 'specification'" was renamed to "the 'speculation'" around the same time.

[1] https://www.perl.com/pub/2000/10/23/soto2000.html
What country?

I've never seen that at Mensa in Germany, Hong Kong, Netherlands, Malaysia, UK, US, or elsewhere, really.

In fact, the matter of IQ has rarely if ever come up at all (except in abstract discussions of testing, factor analysis, operationalisation, objectivity/reliability/validity, etc.).
I think this is an unfair characterization.

Once you understand hooks in general, any specific hook should be quite straightforward so they can collapse into one. Hooks are quite novel, but I don't find them to be overly complicated unless you're dealing with an already complex situation.

Dispatch, actions and reducers can be collapsed into one since they rely on each other. I think this paradigm is not too dissimilar to message passing with something like RabbitMQ. Reducers are a common concept.

Ducks and Actions, Epics and Sagas are just a convention. It's not required to use React or Redux.

If you try to learn everything at once, of course you're going to get overwhelmed. But the same is true for almost any area of Software Engineering.
Others have commented on the Darien Gap, but generally speaking, maritime shipping is roughly 1/3 the cost of overland by rail.

https://www.maritime-executive.com/editorials/comparing-mari...
For speculative fun, what’s the fastest rate such a design could operate at? Are optical equivalent circuits reasonably possible (or some such)?
Yes the strings in it average hoodie have enough pressure in them to keep oxygen flowing anywhere in the universe...
Bees have higher brain cell density than birds – but ants don’t
Show HN: Nyum, a Pandoc-powered static site generator for your recipe collection
Hiya! This tool turns a set of Markdown-formatted recipes into a lightweight, responsive, searchable website for your personal use as a reference while cooking, or for sharing with family and friends. It's not intended as a cooking blog framework: there's no RSS feed, no social sharing buttons, and zero SEO.

Here's a demo instance: https://doersino.github.io/nyum/_site/index.html

Nyum is somewhat opinionated, expecting recipes to be written as a series of steps, each with the relevant ingredients alongside an instruction. I first came across this way of doing it via the cuisine LaTeX package (which I then, many years ago, built a custom LaTeX template around), ending up preferring this structure over the more commonly found all-ingredients-first-then-a-block-of-instructions approach. (In the process of recently graduating from university, I found myself contemporaneously graduating from wanting to use LaTeX for everything, which was part of the impetus for cobbling this thing together.)
>To address your point - from an tech-outside view, there is definitely something like "Cancel-Culture"

I believe this is just called the market. Market participants voluntarily defunding operations that are perceived as harmful is as old as man. Its just that we now have information to track funding sources at our finger tips. Boomers would've 'cancelled' IBM if they knew about the active contracts with the Nazi government during WW2, it wasn't some "unique lost wisdom" that stopped them, just a lack of information.

This is the market acting on more information...and the market was never expected to be efficient, especially in the short-term.
And on Linux/Android ;)

Edit: works pretty well as an app added inside of https://wavebox.io/
My definition of learning is: Increasing the likelihood of success

or in other words, increasing the likelihood of consistently having expectations met.

It is quite different from the one that you can find on Wikipedia.

What do think about it?