skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TIL is actually a foundation of my knowledge, although I have a different approach - I keep Markdown files categorized by subject (e.g. `git`, `ruby`), essentially, notebooks.

The ultimate goal is both to memorize and to keep references to useful snippets or quirks I may need in the future - I actually use them very frequently (it's a format that tends not to be useful to the general public, though).

In the long term, some subjects become small books. Amusingly, by far, the largest notebook is Rust - around 15k words, and I am still an advanced beginner (!).

I really miss a program that is very good for both editing and viewing Markdown! I currently use an always-open VSC; reading Markdown is ok, but not super convenient.
It really does make you wonder that “the paper of record” deals in such immoral actions what else they are willing to compromise on. I seem to remember Pg being completely misrepresented by the same paper [1]. Maybe they are just really unethical people with a good brand.

[1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1236975851255857152
Well, if she's a mother of three, we already know her life goal is obviously planetary destruction, so what's a few avocados grown by Big Ag? ;-)
Embracing activism isn't necessarily a shooting oneself in the foot, it can be a way of trying to ensure greater profitability. A case in point is The Guardian which took a huge turn in the last decade ago from traditional British working-class themes to trans issues and the specific kind of race debates originating from the US. By doing so, the newspaper could, firstly, win the allegiance of self-identified "woke" readers (who are often affluent and thus a target for advertisers). But even for other readers, culture-war-related reporting can get people all fired up and thus generate views and ad impressions.
Sounds cheaper than a SF license + consultant tbh.
When it's using Math.random(), it kinda is.
Aside from improvements with organization and environment separation when you separate the configuration from the code (and also not having to roll your own solution), one of the security risks is that you accidentally mix up binaries. You will think that will never happen until it happens.

A bigger security threat, I think, is that you have the private key both on your server and on your computer. It adds another location where you could mix up, hackers now have 2 possible attack targets, and it's more likely that your PC gets infected than your server. Either way, now, if your PC gets infected or your server gets hacked they will have the private key, while if you only have it on your server they won't necessarily have it when your PC gets infected.

The safest solution if you don't want to store the private key unencrypted is to generate an encrypted private key with openssl. You would however need to provide the encryption key every time you start the server. You will still have the unencrypted private key in RAM, but that's inevitable and also the case with your current method. The private key (even encrypted) should never leave the server.
Yeah, Tesla are acting like clowns. I was just wondering if the statement really meant anything as formulated, because it is qualified with 'at present'.

If some other company succeeds next week, it wasn't wrong, because the statement is about right now. And so on for any time in the future.
I'm conflicted on Salesforce.

As a user I am firmly in the camp that believes it is garbage to use and overpriced.

As a developer and contractor it paid for my first home.
Maybe you mean this (which was about Max Howell and Google, not Apple):

https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en
I doubt you ever see 100% if only because there will always be factors outside of a vehicle's control that maybe a newer version could mitigate better. But certainly the bar is very high (and should be).
I don't know about the US but in Europe small farmers are often passionate, and you have to be because you are a business owner earning little money while having a lot to handle and nearly no holiday and leaving far away from everything. Many of them care deeply about their products and try to do things properly and sustainably even if it means less profit. The big farmers are more like regular business owner employing cheap labour and trying to maximize profit while caring much less about the impact. Note that small farmer can be very small indeed, many of them don't even have separate employees.

It is not an exact rule of course. There are many irresponsible small farmers who just inherited a small farm and run it poorly, and there's some big farms that do things very properly.
Software companies have high gross margins because the measure excludes the cost of developing and maintaining the software.

So Autodesk's gross margins are 90%, Adobe's are 86%, etc. When you see numbers like that, it should tell you that you are not capturing the expenses of the company in that metric, rather than concluding the company is earning fantatiscally high profits.

With Apple, the investment is in the platform, which includes everything from designing their own chips to writing their own OS and exposing and maintaining APIs for third party apps to use, as well the development costs of the infrastructure behind the app-store itself. None of those costs appear in a gross margin calculation.

Not saying that Apple should or should not fall under anti-monopoly laws or that we shouldn't change our monopoly laws away from the current consumer harm focus towards more of an innovation-harm focus, but discussions of gross margin are highly misleading when assessing the expenses paid by software companies -- as is the cited article.
I bought one for my key, and am very happy.
The FTC should create a set of guidelines named for example "Good Software Design Practices" (either directly or through an industry standards body) which developers can follow voluntarily. Companies or bodies should then be able to rate software objectively based on the GSDP using a lay-public friendly star rating. The rating could be further broken up into sub-ratings for specific design sub-topics.

This could then become a default way for companies to self-appraise their software on distribution platforms. Anyone including distribution platforms should be able to validate such ratings based on certain objective criteria.
Hello! Neat articles on the rest of your site too. As a Home Assistant addict, you have given me plenty to read.
> we had to say no through a bunch of sales pitches

Just repeat the phrase "I want to cancel my subscription" to any question they ask. They'll get the message pretty quickly.
Wait 5 years.
check out Open Location Code (https://github.com/google/open-location-code) (aka PlusCodes)
Get a new bank. If the bank is a part of a significant problem for your life you should just swap it out for a bank that will let you access your accounts through a browser as needed. Toss your smart phone and only use the dumb phone.
Because they are one of the few internet companies that I find actually useful. If you live in a rural area, there's really no other way. A new PC, a floor jack, large book store, decent boots, are all 60 miles away. Of course, Amazon caused part of the retail desert, although I'd mostly blame box stores (and the Sears catalog before that).

With the sites I named, I think my life would trundle on pretty much unchanged. Maybe Usenet could be added to the list for the odd bit of online socializing.

While I'm designing my personal minimal internet, I'd add that all the interfaces were text based. Potentially a person could bolt on a low/no vision voice-based front-end.
Hacker News was full of people somehow assuming progress there would advance linearly, and plainly telling so ("look how much progress we've made in the last 5 years"). Or comparing the problem of autonomous self driving to much, much more solvable problems (plane autopilots: mostly flying straight lines in a featureless void).

Though to be fair, there were also always people in the comments who realized the immense complexity of the problem, suspecting that fully autonomous driving might need either massive infrastructure changes (bringing those cars closer to something akin of an autonomous train), or generalized AI.
pluscodes are also known as "Open Location Code" and the github repo is: https://github.com/google/open-location-code
You’re absolutely right, I did misunderstand :/

Colour me a bit surprised, and corrected.
>Cancers are very patient-specific, and the main threat with immunotherapy is that the targeted cancer adapts quickly enough to escape the immune system again.

(I'm just an interested party and don't have any formal training on the subject.) I'm sure there are technical terms for it, but from what I've read the lack of regulatory features in the replication process of cancer cells tends to accumulate more mutations and genetic damage through each generation. PARP-inhibitors, for example, help fight cancer by suppressing DNA repair enzymes and letting the cancer cells get into non-viable states more often than healthy tissue.

In general though, this genetic entropy/volatility creates a scenario where adaptations can happen quite quickly.
I agree it doesn't make business sense, but it does make moral sense. And yes, this hypothetical service probably wouldn't be free.
Emacs allows you to open multiple windows that share the same local server / process and essentially work as one editor.

You can open the same or different files in the different views, use one of the views for debugging, shells, remotely running tests, while you use the other views for other stuff (showing different files side-by-side, etc.).

I often see vim and vs code users doing a lot of shuffling around when working with multiple open files to switch back and forth between files or across tabs, but with emacs none of this is really necessary.
Actual title: How Tech Loses Out [..]

What a difference those three letters make. But do read the article, it's a worthwhile read.
I can almost guarantee you that recycling cadavers into protein shakes will be one of the "next big things" proposed. To save the planet, of course.
This is one of the few things that actually makes me happy with the closed ecosystem of the App Store on iOS. There's virtually no risk with subscriptions in there- they can all be canceled in a few clicks in the Subscriptions section of your Apple ID. And if something's straight up a scam or an accidental (but unconsumed) purchase, you can request a refund from Apple with rather little friction.

First-party trials annoy me since cancelation is instant, unlike trials from third-party apps (those cancel after the trial period if you cancel during). Fortunately, you can go to Report A Problem and just say you didn't mean to have the subscription charged and they'll refund it as long as it's a few days from the charge date.
Very neat hack!
an improved version who ensures sound proof walls
This article is relatively popular here (considering the topic). Two previous discussions about it:

From 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9040266.

From 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14405665.

A more recent approach to visualizing high-dimensional data is the t-SNE algorithm, which I normally use together with PCA when exploring big data sets. If you're interested in the differences between both methods, here's a really good answer: https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/249520.
1password security white paper [pdf]
A common one is fake consent popups for system notifications.

Websites need to ask for consent before sending system notifications via the Notifications API. If a user declines, that website is blocked from asking again (for obvious reasons)

But many websites cheat this by showing a fake consent popup designed to mimic what the browser would show. If a user clicks "Decline" on the fake popup, the website won't show the real one to avoid being blocked. So the next time you visit the site, they'll be able to show you that popup again as many times as they want.

If a user finally clicks "Accept" on the fake popup (out of frustration probably) then they'll show the real popup. To most people, seeing two popups might seem like a glitch, and will just mindlessly click "Accept" twice.

The only way to circumvent this is to click "Accept" on the fake popup, and then click "Decline" on the real one. 99% of people aren't going to know how to do that.

...I'd post this myself as a comment, but I don't like that it's asking for so much personal information (full name, email, state, city, phone, etc)
I only use it to lookup professional contacts and stay in touch.

I found the feed super distracting so I installed an extension to block it.
Forming eye contact is important in dog–human communication
Yes.

At our company, we do a lot of kernel development. Most devs are issued Macs, some Thinkpads with Windows. Very few run Linux locally, as IT doesn't like it.

We have Linux shell servers for development. They compile much faster than laptops anyway. The actual test systems are separate as well. You don't want to test on the machine you develop on generally (it'd be extremely annoying to not be able to edit code while waiting for the reboot to get the new kernel, and to loose your open windows for every iteration. Also what if it oopses?), and in our case that wouldn't work anyway (special HW).

Most use vim in screen, and VS Code with it's native SSH remote host support is also very nice.

If it works for dozens of our engineers, it can work for you if you're willing.
I mean, to be honest, I didn't pay a lot of my original one (non-CAT) but it's on Android 8.0.1 forever... which isn't exactly a bad version.

I wish Android would decouple the device drivers from the kernel space kinda like a desktop OS so your manufacturer could just supply their drivers and you could upgrade the OS at will... a man can dream.
NY Magazine too. After renewing my subscription at 2x the original rate I paid, they made it incredibly difficult to cancel. When I called their customer support, they told me I had purchased my subscription through a third party so they couldn’t cancel it for me and I’d have to contact the third party.

Me: what’s their contact info? Agent: inquiries@nymag.com
Me: This is a third party but they have an NY Mag email address?
Agent: Yes.
Me: ... How are they a third party then?
Agent: One second, I’m transferring you to my supervisor.

Nothing turns me off a brand I like and want to support more than 1) autorenewals at 2x your intro price and 2) making cancellations both arbitrarily difficult and insulting.
> A slow acting toxin for example

Afflatoxin. Common in food and gives you liver cancer.
A farmer with 20-30 cows tends to have a quite close connection with their animals. They often have a small plot of land they can use as pasture and the barn is not super-optimized to squeeze out the last square centimeter for effiency since there are no scale effects where it would have any noticeable effect. Each animal is a being they have often times have a connection with, and empathy for. Most small farmers I know can describe to me quite vividly the personality of each individual of their animals. They care.

Big dairy industry looks different. A big farm with 1000 milking cows is hyper-optimized for maximum profit. There is not enough pasture to go round, so depending on regulations of the country, the animals may never go outside ever. If you can save 1% on buying in cheaper food, even if it comes from half a continent away, you do it since that's easily a six-figure savings. If you can increase stocking density withing law limits, you do it. If you need to use less sand or can get away with cleaning their water bins less often, you do it. Each animal is a number that turns food expenses into milk profits, that's it.
If liquid in your brain boils, wouldn't you also just turn blind (since the eyeball gets damaged by heat)
Now I want to mark this site (in Google, say) with a "high quality" measure.

Then I want my search results to prefer this page, and other pages marked high for quality by people who [some algorithm] to this page.

Then Google would be far more useful to me than it is now, when screeds of blogspam always seem to occupy the top organic results for any "how to" tech questions.

In turn I would be a happier and more loyal Google customer (not a high bar).
If it happens next week I'll be happy to retract it. If it happens in the next decade I'll be amazed. If it happens in the next century I'd still call it a very impressive accomplishment (only I won't be around to do so).
Because it is enough to provide sufficient accuracy.
They sound "different", but not "unconditionally better", and it's not something you can't replicate in the signal path...
"I was actually thinking of underwater welders when I wrote that. Not all oil industry jobs pay well but that one really can, and it carries the cachet to boot. It's definitely manual labor royalty - dangerous, highly skilled and pays up to $300k."

A lot of the "well paying", low-status jobs mentioned in this thread are dangrous... long-haul truckers, construction workers, underwater welders, even electricians are jobs where you have to risk your life to do them, and many of them are statistically dangerous as well.

So whether the people who have such jobs are "well compensated" for risking their lives like that is debatable.

Certainly an IT manager job that paid the same as a trucker would be far more preferable in terms of safety, and would therefore be far better compensated when the danger of being a trucker is taken in to account.

Of course, low-paid delivery jobs are even worse when you consider that those low-paid delivery drivers have to risk their lives on the road to deliver your packages.
Start by telling people to take more zinc.
This article makes a bunch of invalid (sometimes implicit) assumptions or claims:

*A 20 yro language's design decisions don't make sense today because of the hardware perf situation change.*

1. Most languages were not designed for optimal utilization of the specific hardware situation during their conception.

2. Even languages designed with performance in mind somehow are still incredibly general and flexible things.

3. The article itself shows that CPU hardware has been changing along a mostly predictable path for decades. Everyone knew Dennard scaling would end, even if you couldn't predict it to within the single year. Everyone saw CPU latency was decreasing much much faster than memory latency, already in the 1980s.

--

* The main problem that we have today lies in utilizing the CPUs to their full potential.*

This is _a_ main problem, not _the_ main problem:

* There are other, specialized processing hardware (like GPUs).

* There's computation happening elsewhere on the system, e.g. on disk controllers and NICs.

* And actually, if you look at desktop environments and apps: They really don't need to utilize the CPU to its full potential; they're a mess of entanglement of things which get in each other's way and it's difficult to figure out why your system ends up being sluggish despite your brand-new shiny hardware.

--

*Another problem with the current programming languages is that they didn’t evolve beyond the C-style type of programming. *

* C-style type of programming is just fine for C-style kinds of programming tasks. Every language has strengths and weaknesses. Some pairs of languages have a more obvious "X is an evolved Y" or "X is a better Y" relationship, but not that many.

* Most languages do not evolve or change to exploit specific hardware capabilities. Or at least - few language changes are intended to achieve that.

--

etc.

It's not a junk article though. The data orientation of program design is a useful notion, in many programming languages. It's just that, instead of reading this blog post, which quotes Mike Acton, you can just watch Acton's talk on this principle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc
Why not 4 words and a smaller, less error-prone word list?
brings an odd question, will we have to have artifical exposure to diseases just to ensure our immune system is capable ?
Yeah Elon is a controversial & polarizing figure, personally I try to not pay too much attention. I’m indifferent to him. But regardless of anyone’s personal opinions of Elon, the results speak for themselves.

I think you have the right if it. It’s quite silly of BO & Dynetics to sit here and act mad as if they were ‘wronged’ in this process somehow. They should be mad at themselves for the fact that they can’t even simply launch a satellite into orbit by now. And they want to be taken seriously about landing on the moon?

That’s how SpaceX started. Small. Let’s just get some satellites up, and get some revenue going, while find tuning their tech. Now they are sending people to the space station, & fine tuning Starship. It’s not even a conversation really.
Negative interest: Danske Bank changes threshold for personal customers
Coordinates are also ordered and predictable, given your current position you can intuitively determine in what direction (and approximately how far) where other positions are.
GP’s comment is referring to Scalar Replacement of Aggregates on the one hand. This is an optimization where by the compiler will, for a function with a Struct argument, only pass in a pointer to / copy of the actual element of the struct used inside a function. Hence the name, the compiler is replacing the aggregate struct by one or more of the individual values it contains.

The reference to non-escaping aggregates, describes the compiler optimizing a local only struct by keeping the individual elements in registers during usage, and because the struct as a whole does not leave the local scope, these elements are just discarded when that scope closes.

Both of these transformations/optimizations are performed by all three industrial C and C++ compilers (gcc/llvm/msvc).
Ask HN: How do I keep side projects productive without it getting annoying/dull?
I have been recently working on different small side projects for fun. A project that I recently started is a bit more ambitious and also has the possibility of being profitable.

Lately, I have been lacking the motivation/discipline to work on it, even thou I enjoy the process. So I thought about adopting productivity methods (tracking the time spent working, having tasks etc...), but then I started having doubts that this would help.

This is supposed to be primarily a leisure activity, since I follow the "deep work" practice of not doing any work-related stuff after 5:30pm.

So, yeah, I was wondering how you guys deal with it?
Am I supposed to go all out and not be afraid of burning out?
Should I just allow myself to be apathetic towards the project? (Keep in mind, that the time I'm not spending on this is time wasted on youtube/other mindless stuff)
Once drugs go off-patent, the subscription model is a lot less appealing. Even before then, allowing vaccines to sell for $200 per dose (I'm just making up this number) would encourage vaccine production. But you're right that this is an example of markets not doing the right thing, so it might take government, or even insurance company subsidies on vaccine development.
No CTO was ever fired for choosing Salesforce, Jira, Oracle, ...
Sure and that's why they do it, but it's feels like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

I think the future will mostly be the best writers being directly supported by people interested in their beat.

I'm not sure how generic media orgs will continue on, but I'd expect the quality to continue to degrade.
SaaS Pricing Examples
If you're in the UK, EU, New Zealand, Australia, or Singapore, I found out yesterday that Wise (TransferWise) customers get 3 virtual cards free of charge [1][2].

I'd be interested to hear about any other UK/EU firms offering similar.

[1] https://wise.com/gb/blog/shop-safely-virtually-anywhere

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27006326