skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Maybe I live under a rock, but I feel like command line utilities taking environment variable arguments just isn’t that common of a practice?

Nope, it's quite common. Many standard UNIX cli utilities take some environment variables (including things like LOCALE). Also common in scripts, setting up programming languages paths, etc.

It's also not a bad practice, contrary to what the author says.
> It's our duty as human beings to resist going back to the office as much as possible.

Please don't talk for all of us. If you're miserable in the office that's fine, but it's noones duty to support your preferences. This is why we have this amazing free market - everyone can work at a company that respects their preferences.
Which is super annoying and in many instances damaging to the car (in the long run). Thats the reason why basically everybody that I know turns it off
Once again, hogwash. You are making a non-sequitur argument as there is no developed country with similar population size to compare.

What population got to do with delivering universal healthcare? It is actually opposite of what you are trying to imply. Larger the population better universal healthcare can be provided as cost and services shared across larger number of people. If smaller country like Japan can provide more effective healthcare than US, then US should be able to do 3X better not 1/3rd.
It's like mumble, 1:1
Is long commute something that's normal for "most people"? Most people around here have commutes shorter than 30 minutes one way.
The article is not against env vars per se as the title suggests. Instead it makes a case against undocumented features and improper use of env vars. It also complains about env vars being plain strings but fails to recognize config files are just plain strings without the appropriate parser. What stops anyone from putting JSON arrays in env vars?
I don't know about https://12factor.net either.

But I was assigned a task last year to remove configuration from environment variables (for security reasons). I deployed my work to 'production'.
Everyone, let's have this "secure" service where we put _ALL_ of our sensitive data!! Including export controlled materials? To be honest, it seems like PII including SSN leak regularly. Whatever... freeze your credit and get monitoring. On the other hand, export controlled ITAR/EAR... now that's bad!
Pale Moon – an Open-Source Mozilla-derived web browser
Just to be clear, for most anyone with low-thrust measurement experience, thermal drift had been suspect nr 1 from the moment Eagleworks published their work. Here is a comment I made back at that time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12962579

But then, nobody had Tajmar's perseverance; kudos to his team!
Great Bitter Lake Association, the Sort-of-Micronation Formed in the Suez Canal
I'd imagine it'd be one of the "disabled by default" in `golangci-lint`, for example - helpful for when you're doing an in-depth review of the code but probably not something you want running on every CI invocation.
I don't know if it was clinically RSI, but I had severe cramps in my forearms, shooting pains and tingling sensations from shoulders to hands for about 6 years. Switching from using MacOS laptops back to Gnome 3 (first an XPS 13, currently a Lenovo L14) fixed it in three weeks. I realised in retrospect I had been using Apple laptops for about 6 years. Never going back without a fundamental redesign.
As a native english speaker I consider that valid.

The possible confusion is the fact that “they” could be singular or plural. AKA “singular they” [1].

Your second sentence could be referring to some other group of people who are not Dominique who instead of going to school take the bus.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
Does anyone videoconference via satellite?

What's that like with 600ms+ latency?

I'm wondering whether it will work in my van but don't know anyone who has tried it.
Because tech illiterates + iPhone imaginary elite club (green/blue bubbles effect) + startup money + good PR

The usual 4 things FOSS usually doesn't have
Another awesome post from windytan.com -- I still love the deep dive on dialup modem signals (listed as a "Popular Post" on the sidebar there).

http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured...
This hit home for me, unfortunately. I'm hoping it does for other AWSers as well.

I work for AWS, but do not speak on their behalf.
I think a lot of these names are designed to be confused with real security firms, e.g. "Trend Macro".
I wonder how many people's opinions will change after a longer time. I wrote the exact same type of posts five years ago when I started my first fully remote job. After two years or so I had to look for an office because the isolation is just murderous and it takes a long amount of time to actually start showing its teeth.
It's an important step to fix the observed flaw and then experimentally verify results are now as expected.
Because we have no satisfactory way to measure software output, and thus have no way to measure productivity or consistently size tasks. Exercises like story point estimation are like medieval medicine - occasionally they work, but more often it's just about making the patient feel they're taking control of their illness.
IDM Crack Patch 6.38 Build 17 and Serial Keys Latest (2021)
Hopefully they aren't cloning the lack of Android support.
The solution in the case of risky activities (sport) in New Zealand is the compulsory ACC system which is insurance against accidental injury.

Every business has to pay ACC premiums depending on how risky their business is (in terms of health outcomes). If you are injured, everyone involved is indemnified (you can't sue them) but ACC pays for all your healthcare.
Same. I think most people on Clubhouse just rambles for minutes.

I don't think audience participation in a talk has much value. But when you remove audience participation, Clubhouse is just basically a podcast that is not recorded.
This is the true answer. A lot of people have moved into far away (cheaper) bedroom communities to save money.

Also Google themselves would have a huge issue justifying their own real estate if people aren't in it "post covid". They are a publicly traded company so they would be forced to sell it off to appease investors.

All in all I think Google has shown it's true colors here. They don't have a damn about their employees. This reeks of boomer micromanaging 101.

I think that to fight this stockholders should push Alphabet to sell of their properties now. Should do the same with Amazon as well.
Global 1s and 0s Shortage to Hit Legal Tech Sector
We Launched LessWrong.SubStack
All privacy concerns aside --- this seems like a very valuable addition to the map service.

Concerning indoor navigation: My minor concern is that I will take minor deviations eg. in an Airport, to pass by a potent Google add customer instead taking the shortest path.
This post seems to ramble without much substance.

The best argument, perhaps only valid argument, is lack of an array type. Easy to work around. The rest seems misguided or ridiculous.

>There is no way to know which one of these is the correct form

What? Of course there is.

The author is also calling it mutable global state, and seems to reference an application becoming confused when ENV isn't set. This reads to me, perhaps incorrectly, that the author doesn't understand that envvars aren't and don't behave like shared global variables. That is, changing one won't affect running applications.
Zero-Commission Individual Investors,High Frequency Traders,& Stock Mrkt Quality
You've likely seen a news interview done via satellite. 600 ms is a pretty big gap to talk over each other.
How to Revolutionize Your Ecommerce Business Using AI
I am a professional writer and this is exactly my experience.
Plausible developer here.

Interesting you say that. There's no reason Plausible could not be used like AWStats. Parsing logs is just a different ingestion mechanism and we already provide self-hosting via Docker. On principle it wouldn't be too difficult to drain your logs into a Plausible instance or just run it on the same host along your web server.

We ran a test last summer and found the stats from our JS-based tracker much much much more usable: https://plausible.io/blog/server-log-analysis

So this is why we haven't put too much effort in log analysis. The stats we got from AWStats were mostly bot traffic with no good way to get rid of them.

Have you run AWStats and Plausible side-by-side? Do you not have ~90% bots in your logs?
Examples I've used in the past few days, from memory - along the lines of:

LC_ALL=C foo

PAGER=cat man ls

TZ=UTC date
They measured video quality subjectively. I don't think you can just take the researchers at their word that it "looked good enough". Any rigorous video quality test would use at least some kind of objective numeric measurement.
The early part of my life was lived without the internet and I managed fine so I would revert back to that lifestyle once again.

Back then, I was more productive than I am now, the chances are that I would be so again.
In the US, its more like a mafia racket; Your money or your life.
One of my favorite things about Thailand was that the hospital lobby had these pamphlets with actual prices for procedures.

The US healthcare industry is filled with criminals. They have blood on their hands and are raking in cash at a massive cost to US society.
Lol at the lone reply you received. You called it and that's what you got. I hope we can learn to look at all points from more perspectives in the future.
Setting Up a Command Structure: Discover How Metal Executes Commands on a GPU
Wezterm can use separate fonts for each style like italic and bold
If there is anything thoroughly Snake Oil in modern currency, it's Tokamak Fusion.

"Give us enough billions, we'll have one working in 2050. Or 2060, or someday. It won't produce any power, oh no, of course not. But give us ten times more money after 2050 (or 2060) and by 2100, or 2140, or anyway someday maybe, we will have a prototype power station for you.

"Sure, it will cost a hundred times as much for each kW-hr as whatever you will be using by then—and the plant will destroy itself after only two years—but it will be fusion power. And that will be so cool!"

Tokamak fusion is mainly a jobs program for hot-neutron physicists, to maintain a population ready to draw on for weapons work, but is also a massive boondoggle providing a steady flow of corruption money to well-connected pockets. (Hot-neutron physicists are not getting the $billions.) Every cent spent on Tokamak fusion is stolen from actually practical work.

So don't talk to me about snake-oil until after you kill Tokamak.
Easy fix (if it's the shared, mutable state which bugs you):

* Create one class responsible for ingesting env vars at startup.

* Call it from main, and abort early with nice messages if it fails to read something.

* Now you have a nice (preferably immutable) class which guarantees the config is in a 'good state', and is self-documenting because it lists all the keys it uses to lookup env vars with.
I mostly agree but I think it's important to have perspective that things like historicity or the quality of a neighborhood can be a public good. And a democratic population might choose to invest in such a public good. Obviously it would be better though if the coat of these public goods were being paid more directly by the public and not externalized onto those living most precariously.
Isn't your post about Google offices being terrible for productivity exactly the same amount of speculative? And likely just your personal bias towards your preferences?
Come a few hundred clicks north to Saskatchewan where wood shacks and manifestos are something of a local past-time.
No, it was a not very good attempt at humour. The early detection thing is really different.
George Floyd, the Derek Chauvin Murder – By, Evon Latrail
Because switching to a different chemical composition (not carbon based) is more likely that way.

I think it must be possible to create equvivalent functionality from more durable materials.

This certainly is scify, but imagine changing all your cells one by one to cells which can withstand wider temperature ranges, and corrode (rot?) half as easily.
could this affect..maybe... Dust+static electricity... Storms.. Cool air... Low pressure.. Chain reaction? I really hope they have thought this through
Same here in some ways. Salmon farms screwing up esturarine water, lots of super-fertilized "run off" in the waste, Prawn farms which went wrong with asian white spot disease from illegally acquired prawn meat as food (for prawns god help us) fishmeal.. now in the cycle so we're no longer disease free.

Fish farming does have good promise but nothing is perfect. Farmed Tuna is a mixed bag too. Have to catch 'em wild I believe, can't yet do the full life cycle in the net. (could be wrong about that)

I'm not a vegan reductionist. I like eating meat, including fishmeat. But I can't pretend it has no downsides, wild caught or farmed, its got issues.
Considering what my 35mbit upload looks like with screensharing I guess they like seeing pixels flip every few seconds and seeing people's faces not move in conference calls. No word about quality or what is considered acceptable and I guess it was avoided because it will be abysmal. There is a big difference between "it works" and "it's workable".
These are good examples but I think these fit under my “global argument” umbrella. Imagine if every Linux command had a different argument name for the pager?
Microsoft has told staff that they will have the option of working from home permanently with manager approval.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54482245
Predict A/B test results using ancient Indian astrology
I just recenly added cover art to the main window of my Tiny Player for Mac application. It was one of the most requested features. Seems like people like looking at covers while listening. While it is not edge to edge in my case, I’m considering it.

https://www.catnapgames.com/tiny-player-for-mac/
The inconsistency here is that Leah Rowe stopped the initial boycotting campaign before that campaign was able to make any change, it was pretty clear that the original intention was to refuse cooperation unless the FSF acknowledges and solves the problem in a satisfactory manner. But it never happened, AFAIK, to this day, that ex-employee in question is still highly critical of the FSF on its alleged mishandling of the issue.
It also erodes real salaries, which is a useful way to adjust salaries in a world with sticky prices (where nominal contracts are not easily adjusted).
Apr 1 truly is the worst day of the year.
> is that India has amended its constitution 104 times since 1951. So from my perspective, anything can happen.

This is unfortunately very true. India's states derive power from the Union, and not the other way round. And the dominance of a single political party at the federal and state level during certain phases has made it relatively easy to subvert and amend democratic safeguards in the constitution.

For those curious, India's first amendment to the constitution allowed legislators to make "reasonable" restrictions on free speech after some sections of the media started criticising the newly elected government of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_of_the_Constit...
Moving from tokenising files to end vars was one of the best choices I ever made. Life is sooooo much easier using env vars
This is a one size fits all "solution" designed at the top. That's all I am saying.
To say the least. https://www.indiewire.com/2021/01/intercept-laura-poitras-fi...
I enjoy working from home. If reopening offices means going back to the office and having to sit in a mask for eight hours a day, no thank you.
It was certainly valuable, especially in C++ which includes a lot of internal standards and libraries, although at times I felt like a lot of these conventions can be enforced by a smarter linter, but I am writing better C++ code after this process despite having years of experience pre-Google.

I didn't feel the same for Python though.
Yeah, this stuff is hard. The approach used in wezterm is to use unicode graphemes for cells, and use the unicode width of the grapheme to decide whether a given cell is double-width.

Ligatures are handled at rendering time, partly because the terminal emulation and model layer doesn't know about fonts (it can run "headless" in a multiplexer where there are no fonts), and partly because the shaper library doesn't output information about cells but rather about which glyphs to render in which positions--that information doesn't easily map to the terminal cell model.

For extra pain, some font designers have ligatured sequences that map to a single glyph that may be several cells wide, while others use alternative glyph fragments for each component of the ligature, and others may emit two blank glyphs, followed by a triple wide glyph with a negative x offset of almost two blank glyphs in width. It's difficult to map this information to cells.
"Argentina is a stable democracy, far from being “a failed state,”† but if you want to send US$500 abroad via non-Bitcoin means it’s basically impossible...."

So about that:
https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2018/06/134729-transferwise...

I believe in fact one of the core aspects of this critique is that cryptocurrency is often presented as the only solution to problems that are either already solved or that have obvious conventional alternatives.
Changing a variable of an existing container without recreating or re-running the docker run command is tricky, though. With a configuration file mapped to an external folder it's "just" modifying the file and docker restart, with environment variables it's somewhat more convoluted. I don't think it is as clear-cut as the title suggest, each kind of configuration has its place.
Out of curiosity, what was the first product?
Ask HN: When to decide to evolve my design pattern?
Hi all,

When I start developing my applications mostly I prefer to start with MVC pattern.

I have difficulty in deciding when to choose a different pattern and which one. The books that I have read mostly describes how the pattern works. But I couldn't find resource that can help me decide in which scenario I should change my pattern.

Can someone please help me point me in the right direction?

Thanks.
It should be made optional because WFH every day is boring but working from office everyday is hectic and risky now.
Neuro (YC W21) Is Hiring Python Engineers – Bath, UK
this sounds like the startup kibbo https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/20/kibbo-wants-to-remake-the-...
After years of struggling with config file in heterogenous production environments, I'll argue the opposite: environment variables are the BEST option to manage your configuration.
> I'm totally not an introvert: I love being around nice people, I love playing table tennis and having lunch with my colleagues. But wasting 1h-2h daily on commuting to/from work is in absolutely no way worthy of this.

I commute 2x 40-50 minutes plus if I work at the office I have a forced 1h break, so around a little bit less than three hours of life have been given back to me during remote work. I understand your sentiment and I share it completely. I am now able to run errands, exercise, nap, clean the house, play video games, or work in my garage during this found again time.
I often feel shy to admit that the pandemic-induced shift to remote work has given me back a lot. My boss lives a 5 minutes walk away and will never ever understand what it means to have to commute every day.
Hmmm. Sixel graphics support, I see. That’s something I wish was more readily available everywhere.
Mixed feelings about this. I strongly agree with some, but also feel it's missing the point in a lot of places.

Environment vars should of course not be used to configure specific programs. Having an environment variable to specify the args with which to call a program is needless complication. Just pass it as an argument. Use a configuration file to configure the program.

Environment variables should (only) be used to describe the environment. That should primarily be variables that transcend individual programs. Things like proxy settings are perfect for environment variables. (Well, almost; see below.) Perhaps the location of the configuration file, if that can vary per system (which it probably should be able to; hard-coded locations can also be a problem).

But even then, environment variables can fail. I noticed that some Azure/Kubernetes-related commands on my work Macbook need to run with the proxy on, and others with the proxy off, so I created aliases to enable/disable this environment variable, which completely defeats the purpose of the environment variable. Maybe I should be able to configure this proxy per application after all. Or at least configure whether to use or ignore the proxy settings. And then there are applications that ignore the proxy env var for whatever reason, and require me to configure it specifically for that one program, again defeating the purpose of environment variables (I think npm does this).

But when we deploy our application to different environments, our deployment configuration does set specific env vars so the application knows how to behave in that environment. It's what environment variables are for. But they're not a great fit. For example, we're currently in the process of migrating from AWS to Azure, and some things need to be enabled or disabled there. So we set some environment variable to 'false', except that environment variables are always strings, and in javascript, 'false' evaluates to true. Json configuration might actually make more sense here.

So I don't think we can or should do without environment variables, but I think I agree they're overused, and often used badly.
But "refinement" is the correct word to use.

In the vast majority of scenarios, you can keep your conservation of mass separate from your conservation of energy. You only have to pay attention in very specific cases: fusion, fission, and relative velocities that are quite intense.

This refinement, which we see again and again in physics, is "oh, sure, if you do THIS, here's a correction you can apply ... should start showing up three or four sigfigs in."
I stopped using my VR headset more or less 6 months ago (HTC Vive). I put quite a bit of energy into making very simple prototypes of a VR table-top strategy game I had in my mind. I photogrammetrically scanned my room and superimposed it into a VR environment to get an AR feeling. And then a whole bunch of other half-baked projects and experiments. The Unity VR headset developer packages are really quite powerful, and you can build anything you like.

To me, the limitations are very simple - these things should be smaller, the processors running them have to be more powerful, and the interface should rely on precise live hand tracking for UI. The neural interfaces arę awesome R&D-wise but I can’t imagine them stealing the show.

I imagine these companies have forecasts on when this tech will be ready at desirable price points. At the moment I’m liking the rumors on the Apple headset - it would seem they’re shooting for a much more expensive device and to me this makes much more sense, especially considering their existing high-quality wearables etc.
If they have high-speed fiber, it’s a date!
It's also specifically the frequency of the a majority of RFID / NFC cards.
To be fair, "configuration" means a somewhat different thing when we're talking about a user application vs a server. It's easy to forget on HN that some software engineers don't write web servers at all.

Having used the profiling tool TAU (subtle dig), I instantly understood what the author is driving at, and I somewhat agree for many use cases. I shouldn't have to fill my dotfiles with 10 new variables just to use a utility.