skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is it better to generalise or specialise as a developer?
I’m a freelancer, and very much a generalist. I’ll often say I can do something I haven’t done before (which has proven to be true) as an excuse to learn something new.

I find different kinds of projects keep me interested. One month web dev, next month apps, the next month microcontrollers, next automation, etc.

I often hear it’s good to find a niche. Wondering if anyone can speak to the benefits of doing so?

Thanks!
It's called YouTube, not BetterThanYouTube
Show HN: C# IP Country Lookup In under 500kB
Also, published to NuGet: https://www.nuget.org/packages/IP3Country/
I'm curious, do you mean actually show the time, or be able to respond to a voice query? I know newer Pixels for example run local-assistant and can answer a decent percent of queries locally, including telling time. I assume older Nest Devices don't yet have the local capability of processing your voice query locally, other than the hotword.
This is really positive news! Thank you.
Don’t forget about the problems you’re likely to have accessing this support if they ever decided to cancel/lock/terminate your Google account (and any linked/associated accounts they feel like).

Even the few paid support channels they do have are fragile. Support is an afterthought, Google supports GSuite to both attract and retain customers now the product is stable… if they decide your business is not wanted then your S.O.L.
Tech Report of Fund.krita.org
Yes but their contract with Stripe let's them give you lower rates. The catch is that Shopify's API can't be used like Stripe's API to handle payments, you're locked into Shopify's checkout page. If you get Shopify Plus ($2000+/month), you can use Shopify's API akin to Stripe's API and accept payments without using the Shopify checkout page.
Never tell someone to not do things like this. If it increases the audience all the better. It's the way people learn things. When you declare things as taboo it only hurts liberty.
Only an (unbounded) finite number of them.
There used to be a great Electronics Open Air Marked in Poland. Over 100 tents and permanent shops open every weekend.

http://www.wolumen.com.pl/index.php?page=infogielda

Nowadays there are probably 20 electronics shops remaining, the rest is occupied by grocery/meat/fresh produce suppliers.

You can see how it evolved in Street View switching camera between 2009-2017 footage.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Wolumen+53,+01-912+Warszaw...
If they can’t make a Facebook App Store in Android with its more open platform, how much more for iOS?
> Am I the only one who thinks CSS + JS on top of HTML broke the conceptual model beyond hope?

no. developers everywhere (but nowhere near "all developers") are forgetting the fundamental advantages of hypertext and are often commanding high salaries despite their staggering ignorance about how to build user interfaces.

we should be trending toward mostly perfect UI paradigms in certain use cases, yet every few months, for no reason at all, user interface designers make huge changes and wreck everything. only rarely do user interfaces get better with such changes.

where is the UI which made large, sensible changes early in its life, favoring smaller and smaller changes as the perfect interface for a particular set of data and actions makes itself obvious? I can't remember the last time I saw one. some games, probably.

I maintain that games probably produce the most usable UIs today, in many ways. they are usually very well thought out, each page usually has a single purpose, and each screen provides all information needed to make a decision or change on a single page, whenever possible. and game UIs are FAST.

I'd love to see a motivated game designer have a go at Service Now or any other contemporary enterprise software, really.

it's very much like web designers are learning less as the study of electronic user interfaces matures. if you judge this by web or mobile user interfaces, you have likely lost all hope that a single semi-sensible design will ever emerge.

designers are very good at making things look good, don't misinterpret me. usability does not seem to be getting better, though.

I welcome counter-examples.
ID is Ada Countess of Lovelace. What's yours.
While that might happen (and probably cause a method redefinition), there is an important convention that helps preventing it: your package must either own the function or at least one of the types used for arguments, otherwise you're practicing type piracy [1]. I've seen an automated scripts that can detect type piracy, so hopefully it could be part of a linting toolset eventually since not everyone might be aware, but at the very least popular packages shouldn't have them - or at least not in a way that may cause bugs (and if any package has it unintentionally it's probably worth creating an issue).

[1] https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/style-guide/#Avoid-t...
Well a colorized photo will only be more deceptive since it's just a guess. B&W aren't deceptive, they just are.
Well, as I said, it's a throwaway account, i.e., created for a single comment tree.

I won't be using it again (because it's a throwaway account) but not because I want to protect Peter Bannon.

Also, I disagree that it's unethical. Obviously you can't infer who's talking simply from the name of a Hacker News account. For example, if my account name was ElonMusk123, it would be naive to assume I was Elon Musk.
That's about as good as lotteries which I also find cringe-worthy.
I'm kind of unclear what module signatures would be since Julia lets code define modules at runtime, so I don't think this could be meaningfully defined for Julia.
Only a countable subset of such potential proofs exist, which more the enough to answer every question of that type that can ever be asked.

Countability is not just a limit on our ability, it's also a limit on our needs.
It would be really interesting if someone could benchmark the performance before and after the transition.
> You are just saying that interacting systems have phase transitions.

Right.

> I think this is a far cry from "emergent numbers".

Because it was just a clarification remark on everything else I said before that, which did connect it to numbers.

> Maybe self organizing matter that lives on a phase transition boundary benefits from being aware of the boundary? Thats the only analogy I could think of that could logically connect.

That's also what I initially said, but think about it a little more broadly. Whether you "live on a boundary", or you live in a system that experiences such boundaries, or your own system internally has such boundaries, or the INTERACTION between you and your environment creates these boundaries, it doesn't matter. You benefit from being aware of them.

And here's the thing. You will experience such boundaries, because it takes infinitely more "resistance" to change, in order to survive a changing environment without changing yourself, than it takes energy to adapt to a changing environment so you resist less, and it resists you less (you become more compatible).

When leaves drop in winter it doesn't matter there's a specific day and hour and second we switch from summer to winter, but trees do benefit from recognizing the overall "shift" over time and adapting to it through its own shift. I'm deliberately using "non-thinking" adaptations to show that categories are precursors to how thinking works, rather than thinking inventing the idea of categories for no fundamental reason.

Our recognition of objects and entities are the same phenomenon. We recognize a boundary (inside and outside the entity/object) where there's a shift of overall behavior in that local timespace, compared to its surroundings. We benefit tremendously from recognizing that a field of grass looks and acts more like a hungry lion in a specific region of it. Technically objects/entities are not a perfectly defined thing. A lion is in consistant exchange and interaction with its environment, it's not a closed system. And anyway I don't feel like repeating the rest of this again.

TLDR; There be phases/categories in N dimensions/parameters. There be instances of them (repetition of patterns). There be adaptation by recognizing the phases/categories and their repetition and counting and measuring them, in order to optimize our predictions quality.
> If you told this to an Apple Engineer, he'd look at you in the eye and tell you that the iPhone isn't for you and to buy an Android. You have that choice. The iPhone doesn't fit your use case and Apple isn't interested in making it fit your use case.

See top comment
Myocarditis After Covid Vaccine? Chicago's Top Doc Breaks Down Reports
Now do one microsecond before.
I remember a not-so-long time ago that people were worried chrome would drop the extension system as a whole and therefore drop the ability of users to customise how they view web pages.

Now extensions are a "security threat". Here we go...
Just to add to stats (which really, how useful is it with the variables of audio setup and subjective preference): 5/6 with Mobvoi TicPods using aptX HD. My wrong answer is the Jay-Z one and I picked 320kbps.

I listened to the samples multiple times for each test. As I went through, I kind of used a strategy to skip to and compare the busiest parts of the songs for "muddiness". Still, it was always very tough to tell between 320kbps and WAV. Most of them were decided on a subjective "it just sounds slightly clearer and fuller". I think I had the easiest time with the vocals only track; can attribute that to being a vocally-focused listener.

Side note on that last point: Only recently have I noticed how little I heard of drums in my music listening. Picked up edrums recently and realized how lost I was at drum beats "ideas". For melodies I feel like I have a large library of ideas to draw from. On the flipside, now I notice drums a lot more. Hopeful that others can relate to this too?
Well stop. You're the one encouraging this bad behavior.
We can win the battles but we can't win the War. Keeping the enemy out of Kuwait was the biggest win we've had since WW2. If you want to win the war these days it takes total war like in Japan/Europe. You have to break the enemy or they will keep coming back and the modern world doesn't have the stomach for it.
I cannot even parse this. What is going on here?
I respect your idea of trying to make dates valid for 10x the duration of 4 digit dates; however prefix with a leading zero also often implies octal parsing. Current date formats ignore that for fields of fixed with, and make various assumptions in cases of dynamic width.

There doesn't appear to be a notation similar to the C style prefixes 0x and 0 (hex and octal), nor like the mentioned assembly language post-fixes.

It would greatly aid clarity if there were a clear way of denoting these were dates. Visually, my language parsing center is optimized to assume years are 4 or 2 digits in length. Five is confusing.

https://superuser.com/questions/885624/proper-way-to-denote-...
> Darwinist

I think you have some odd definitions.
It is an abstract proof of a generator for concrete proofs of specific assignments to variables. The potential is uncountable, but only a countable subset will ever be invoked.
Yes, I've heard about engineered timber - https://blog.i1machines.com/four-reasons-why-engineered-timb... - I'm no expert, but it sounds like one of the better alternatives to reinforced concrete. Among its many benefits, it theoretically has a much longer lifespan than reinforced concrete.

I work right next to a seven-storey office building in Sydney, that's built almost entirely with engineered timber - https://architectureau.com/articles/australias-first-commerc... - ever bigger and taller such buildings are going up, bit by bit, around the world.
Yeah, the Racket/Scheme mindset is generally very different from the mindset of most CL users I’ve come across: despite the superficial similarities, scheme users seem to be less interested in interactive “repl-driven” workflows than most CLers
When I was a child, I remember my parents suggesting that instead of whatever war was in the news at the time killing thousands, the leaders of the respective countries should have a duel.

Assassinations aren't quite that, but perhaps the world would be better if that, rather than warfare was how countries that couldn't resolve their differences escalated. Leaders would have a more personal stake in resolving conflict diplomatically, and fewer people would die when they failed.

I should note this is only half-serious before somebody writes up a reply about a scenario where more extreme leaders take their place and there's a worse war as a result, or some such.
It doesn’t have to be rude. Seeing it as rude is an imposition on those of us who don’t see it as rude.

I’m pretty antisocial, personally, and love it when my workmates get to the point and focus on the actual “drone”-tasks. Why? Because that is why I do software. I don’t do software because I love people. I don’t do software because I love the paycheck. I do software because I love software and every second away from focusing on the concerns of producing quality software just seems like a genuine waste of time. Even here on HN, it’s mostly an opportunity to safely experiment with “politics” in a way that isn’t totally exhausting.

I get that everyone is not like me, and I’m okay with that. I don’t expect everyone to have my preferences.

I’d personally prefer to be treated as a respected “drone” (now THAT seems rude) and I don’t really want to spend time on banter, unless it’s being used as a metaphor that can improve our collective output.

This is “fun.” This is why I “work” (it’s not work to me). Discussing requirements and problem solving solutions is great; it’s fun. Happy hour is “work” to me. Please don’t act like I’m rude just because I don’t share your preferences.
I only recently read it and I was surprised how he predicted social media and it's consequences (although certainly was speaking of existing things but wow so dead on in many ways). He could have published a book and not needed to bomb anyone.
This is a cliche understanding. Wars can and have been won since warfare started. However, the actual people doing the fighting aren't winning, they're just dying and mostly (unless defending their own country) giving up their most valuable asset (life) so that rich men can play Axis and Allies.
As imperfect measures as they are, statistical significance measures like the p-value are more epistemologically sound than any arbitrary rule of thumb-threshold on the size of the effect.
So much this. Every extension is an attack vector. They have post-decryption access to all of your web content and largely make the entire benefit of HTTPS moot if you have a bunch of them.

Every extension you install should be carefully vetted and only enabled as long as absolutely necessary. It's the top malware vector I see today.
I'm not the one claiming

> It doesn’t matter that the definition of inappropriate behavior or speech is subjective. Each party will determine for themselves what they think is reasonable. As long as they aren’t infringing on any other rights or breaking other laws in the process, this is totally fine.
>If a survey comes out that contradicts that, I'd have to review my stance, but for now, I'm skeptical.

Right on. That's all I was getting at. :)
European now living in Vietnam. One thing I learned pretty quickly about the Vietnam war... it was two wars:the French War and the American war.
I wonder at what point the photo would be colorized correctly. The golden gate bridge is almost certainly in the training data if it's random photos. Maybe it knows to color completed things?
Totally agree. I still don’t get the appeal of “smart” whatevers.

> No machine learning needed

Now this reminded me of the windows 10 update announcement proudly declaring that they were going to start using ‘machine learning’ to figure out if you were using your computer to minimise the disruption from their automatic updating. I’m still baffled by it. Why not solve the actual problem at hand - updates being really slow, risky/buggy, settings altering, and very disruptive even when scheduled, and users not having enough control over updating? I’m pretty sure ‘machine learning’ isn’t needed to determine whether a computer is being used.
Quite a coincidence. My dad was an HM3 on the USS Frontier from 1964 to 1967. He also passed in 2016. He never talked much about his service though. I only remember one story he told where US soldiers were issued bullet proof vests for the first time, and they chose to try them out by shooting each other with M16s. The result wasn't pretty.
> My father even asked me if it was possible to choose specific colours in articles of clothing, since it got those wrong.

Did you figure out a way to achieve this other than repeat attempts or recoloring in post?

Is there a setup that retrains with user input such as by inputting an image with an object manually colored the model will then recognize it in later input and color similarly?

It seems like this could also help with persistence of colors in videos, training with the previously completed frame step before producing the next.
Singapore sits basically on the equator and the lowest recorded temperature ever was 66F, so if we somehow make it below freezing then something catastrophic has happened to the earth and plumbing would be the least of our problems.
If there are that many needles it sounds like more needle disposal receptacle are needed
NFTs are the sole value they encode, ala cryptokitties. NFTs that people pretend are related to real-world objects are basically Moon or Florida[1] real estate.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swampland_in_Florida
> How many wars did the US win (as in "achieved the political goals") since WWII?

Depends upon whose interests are answering the question. These aren't so much "wars" as "resource shifting actions marketed as kayfabe [1] wars". This also isn't a new phenomenon. Such "wars" have existed throughout history, and is a side effect of a political sphere's emergent, loosely-defined requirements.

For common people in the path of destruction, a war has an unambiguous win/loss demarcation. For defense contractors if they are being honest with themselves, less so. For politicians with uncanny honesty, even more ambiguous.

With the scales involved today in not just people, speed, and destructive power, but also of information range and depth, I think it is time for a deep re-think of the "war is 'just' a political tool" paradigm.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe
> No, "Keeping methods short" is not a good way to manage complexity

Agreed

> Allowing more complexity in your functions makes them individually harder to understand

I think that that can mostly be avoided, by sometime creating local scopes {..} to avoid too much state inside a function, combined with whitespace and some section "header" comments (instead of what would have been sub function names).

Can be quite readable I think. And nice to not have to jump back and forth between myriads of files and functions
I'd argue it's getting counter-intuitive though, similar to the bystander effect. Yes it is popular but if everybody thinks everyone else is verifying the source, then no one is.

When is the last time you checked out the UBO Git?
> Suddenly 500 years from now all buildings have to be replaced? And what's the cost of this 500 year building? Is it 10 times as much? Or is it 5 times as much?

What a weird argument. It's obvious for multiple reasons that all buildings won't fail at the same time.
A lot, more than you think, of poor people in poor countries also own smartphones whose manufacture is facilitated by Coltan extraction.

So, to you, if you are wealthy, you see it as extreme, but in reality the extreme does not exist for a very large proportion of the population.
Menelik I
I'm not proposing legislation outlawing any particular business model. If someone can make "free" work while respecting customer data ownership, more power to them.

What I am saying that customer data should legally belong to the customer, and if that makes some business models infeasible, so be it.
Conversely, Indian English is not extremely common outside of India
Portability doesn't matter anymore. I don't know why C people press this issue so much. The world runs on x86 and ARM, with a smattering of PowerPC. Rust is already being used in embedded applications quite a bit in many companies as well.

The fact that C works on IBM System 360 doesn't help anyone.
This is pretty deeply sad.
will do for sure
can smartish ones detect when you leave home and turn down the heat until you get back? My nest can. This is great because my schedule is not the same every day.
Digikey also carries a decent selection of Sparkfun and Adafruit parts. Shockingly, it’s generally free overnight shipping cross-border to Canada. Ordering stuff from Aliexpress is cool, but having it on your doorstep in less than 24 hours is incredible.
India has 22 constitutionally recognized languages, and some 440+ all together.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_India
I know you're joking, but "before" the Big Bang doesn't really make sense.
Ask HN: Microsoft Outlook Alternative on BSD
Looking to make a full switch off windows on my laptop and outlook is going to be the hardest part if not the only reason I have not made the switch already.

Thank you in advance for any helpful information!
It is a loose loose situation. You either are so specialized no one will hire you because you don't know enough generally or you know too much about too many things and they feel you will be bored doing one thing all day.

I would suggest you find something you like, find ways to contribute for free in forums and code given away for free so people will look to you as an authority and flip that into finding work.
> YouTube to tune its moderation algorithms to be overly err on the side of demonetizing.

Yeah but this video is of a political prisoner who was tortured and the account is a government account.

The youtubers getting improperly demonetized are often minorities with content that could be offensive to some group of people (eg. gay youtubers talking about their life... is offensive to extremely religious people).

There is a big moderation quality gap between "official government posts torture prisoners" and "random gay 21yo in LA describes college life". I DO expect youtube to be able to get this balance at least right, all of the time.
> According to the research team, in most of the cases they analyzed, the Chrome extensions disabled CSP and other security headers “to introduce additional seemingly benign functionalities on the visited webpage,” and didn’t look to be malicious in nature.

Yes, because Chrome's architecture forces extensions to do this, ironically in the name of security.

Normal extension code can access a page's DOM but it cannot interact with any scripts on the page.

If you want your extensions to interact with the page's JS, the only way is to play man-in-the-middle and inject your own JS as if it was loaded by the page.
It seems to me that two simple steps would go a long way to reducing the effectiveness of this:

1. Require a CAPTCHA when attempting to redeem a gift card's code

2. If someone has tried to redeem an unactivated gift card's code before, the point-of-sale system should refuse to let that gift card ever be activated, instead telling the cashier to throw it away and get the customer a different one