skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This might sound really inflammatory, but it's a genuine question that I just haven't ever heard anyone give an answer to. Can someone explain this?

> "African-Americans were dealt a hell of a hand when we were forcibly brought to the American colonies as enslaved laborers."

When I look at the median (and bottom-quartile) African-American vs. African, the former seem to live vastly better lives in almost every conceivable dimension, and I don't know a single one of the former who wishes that they were still living in Africa now. So, why is this a "hell of a hand"?
OTOH an individual parent has to expend a lot more effort to create controls than a government. An individual parent can't mandate technology companies install controls that automatically regulate their child's play; they have to manually monitor+manage it at some cost of time+effort to themselves.

A wonkish trick would be for the government to mandate controls with sensible defaults but allow parents to tune them I guess?
The Wrong Way to Test Yourself for the Coronavirus
Yes, such services exist. What a coincidence that I just posted a relevant comment about it on a different article yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28351754
This covers some points that were discussed on Hacker News in response to my essay "Why are large companies so difficult to rescue (regarding internal technology)".

If this interests you, then this old conversation might also interest you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20260114
UK is considering bringing Afghan special forces from Kabul into British army
But there should be plenty of arterials to get to them.

I’ve definitely toyed with a “massive parking garage + transit hub at the edge of the city” more to improve walkability in cities.
A lot of dead ones on the side of the roads
My parents have vehicles with different levels of road-assist or whatever you want to call it. This is the Midwest. I don't go a day without driving through some kind of construction. It's a constant headache when I borrow a vehicle, but they don't seem to mind. I was driving along a bridge under construction a couple months ago and the damn car tried to pull me into the concrete guard separating the 2 lanes of traffic. Not very safe imo.
Chinese actor Zhao Wei has been deleted from video platforms there
As the kids say, "Always has been"

Greenspan Fed really kicked it into gear.
Correct... Except the process itself is described in the constitution, which every state signed.
Brain Maps Are a Trap
For anyone looking for a timestamp, that part starts around 37:12: https://youtu.be/_VPxEcT_Adc?t=2232

Great interview.
https://web.archive.org/web/20000506214514/http://www.telepo...
From the registrars I've checked, many are passing on a slightly larger price increase (e.g. a nice round number like $1). Granted that's on them as well as Verisign, but as others have noted it's increasing the price of something when the objective costs of operation have decreased.
TCAS isn't built off of ADS-B (it existed long before ADS-B was ever conceived), but it's the same basic idea (mode c / mode s transponders) and probably has the same theoretical security vulnerabilities.

There's a pilot at the controls so that the technology doesn't have to be perfectly secure.

If you want to walk around broadcasting fake ADS-B or Mode C signals, someone will probably find you in hours, and the only effect it will have is maybe reducing the throughput of the busiest airports if the weather happens to be particularly marginal that day.
> would often use my fingers for simple operations

Fingernails worked on my Palm m500, fingers did not.

> resistive screens offer greater precision when used with a stylus

I know but people weren't too happy with them. They need both hands, and easy to loose.

> It was the UI and that would have changed regardless of the introduction of capacitive screens

I have doubts. Resistive touch screens is very old tech, yet before the first iPhone came out they were mostly used by geeks and corporations.

> companies working on the same technology in parallel: Apple, LG and Google

When Apple launched the first iPhone, engineers at google working on Android decided to throw away half of what they already done and start over. They were building stuff like this https://www.androidcentral.com/look-back-google-sooner-first... and being smart people they have realized the product they were building became deprecated, overnight.

> LG even beat Apple to market

HTC did as well, look up "HTC Touch".

Apple is much better at selling their stuff. And I think they had better product too, despite not even a smartphone (app store launched much later). They did have good features like a unique data plan not available on any other phones, web browser which worked with normal web, and iTunes with all the music.
In holdem you can fold or raise. If you fold you are obviously not playing your hand.
I would contend shipping native code on any mobile platform for a calendar app is overkill, personally.
The Secret Codes of Lady Wroth, the First Female English Novelist
I've always gotten a chuckle out of all of Pike's editor work, because of something he once said.

Once upon a time in the early '80s after Pike had left Caltech and went to Bell Labs, some of us undergraduates who had been hired part time to do the system programming and admin stuff Pike had handled were sitting around talking about editors. We mostly used the Toronto version of QED that Pike had worked on when he was there and had brought to Caltech.

As often happens when programmers discuss tools, the conversation soon turned to bragging about how we could obviously write better versions. In this case it was about how we could write a great screen editor.

At some point that afternoon it went beyond just general bragging for Karl Heuer and myself--we were directly claiming we could each write a much better editor that the other and it was time to put up or shut up. We sat down at terminals at opposite sides of the room and started writing.

We wrote all night, only stopping for trips to the soda machine and the candy machine, and only speaking when it was to boast of some milestone, or to top the other's boast. "I've got string searcing working!" "So? I had that 30 minutes ago...now I've got pattern searching".

Sometime around maybe 3 AM or so we confident enough to be using our editors to edit their own source code.

When Normal Wilson, another one of the undergraduates doing the system programming there, got in and found what we had been doing he mentioned it in an email to Pike.

Pike's response? I don't remember the exact words, but the gist of it was:

> Everybody writes a screen editor. It's easy to do and makes them feel important. Tell them to work on something useful.
I'll reiterate my comment from a few parents up: This is currently happening, and no, the copyright holders either don't even know, don't care, or are truly gone (even as far as being deceased.)
I truly believe some people have more brain faculty for language acquisition than others. You could reply they just try harder, but I believe there is an innate language ability, and there is an innate maths ability, and abstract reasoning, and things like music and colour and smell and vision, but its simply not true that we develop all of these things, equally, as individuals.

Mother language aside, some of us have to work harder to acquire passing fluency in another tongue.
Knowing Dropbox is like 10M lines of code now always teaches me the importance of not pretending things can in fact be built in a weekend.
The vast vast majority of citizens in either country do not play a part in legislation.

The USA has lobbying, which is seen by the rest of the OECD countries as a legalized form of bribery. This allows regulated industries to corrupt and otherwise influence the regulation of their own industry. The USA might very well have similar restrictions to China on say prize boxes in video games if not for the outsized effect of industries on legislators.

The US also has a history of actual disenfranchisement and state legislators gerrymandering away the influence of a large minority of votes for Congress.

The effect is that the US actually has a complicated system of perverting the democratic system, whereas the Chinese system doesn’t even try to appear democratic, thereby appearing at least more honest about what it is.
> Any tips for brushing up on my college French?

Find a local meetup and practice.

I started with Duolingo, Harry Potter, Coffee Break French, etc., and within a year, I felt comfortable enough to go to a meetup. Even when I was just quietly listening, I improved so much, to the point that after only one year of practicing in-person (plus the year solo), I could get by in rural France.

I'm guessing that no matter how rusty your college French is, you'll improve by leaps and bounds when you're with people.
Do you feel the same way about when Americans claim baseball is the national pastime or say "As American as apple pie".
I'm a huge baroque music fan, but I've never heard of Primephonic. What do (or did) they bring to the table?
Org mode does a lot of different things, but one use case I find interesting is to be able to mix prose and program output in a technical document in a way that keeps things consistent when things change. I made a video[0] a year or so ago that explores Org's literate programming features that I think does a pretty good job of illustrating the power of Org.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g9BcZvQbXU
I do truly hope that this is a case where multiple starting points ultimately end going to the same place, largely. There are multiple entry points and what was a good entry point when we were young is not the best way anymore.

For one thing, now there are fairly easily reprogrammable boards that can do things like power motors for which you need to learn real programming just to start, even if you're using an example.

I am worried that a level of comfort with computers that we may have due to being there during the evolution will be gone, I certainly learned to type over 120 words per minute by playing a MUD, far more important than my actual honest-to-god typing class. I think-type, which is a result of endless text conversations and emails.

Are those fundamentally important skills? Why? At some level if they are skills which are needed there will be a reason to learn them.
I might be speaking out of turn here, but I think techbear actually makes money from Artemis, and it's kind of his job, so this is unlikely. Me (Space Nerds in Space author) and Daid (Empty Epsilon author) just have our projects as hobbies and I can't speak for Daid, but I make between $15 and $20 per month from SNIS from a handful of wonderful patrons. I'd be surprised if Daid makes a lot more than that (but even more surprised if he makes less, as EE is much more popular than SNIS). Open source games just don't seem to work very well as a reasonable source of income, and it's generally a mistake to treat them as income sources. Nobody needs them, and nobody feels an obligation to pay for them (they're free software after all -- why would anyone pay for them? Isn't a part of the point of free software that you don't have to pay for them? Arguably a bigger point is freedom to modify, but the not paying part is nice too, and realistically, more people are "not paying" than are "modifying".) Is there any open source game that makes its author a living? I'm not aware of one. It's hard to make money from any open source project, but open source games are especially difficult in that regard, in my experience.

And to be clear, I actually value the "modifying" part more then the "paying" part. If someone sends me a patch, it definitely makes my day.
Windows Pro is already expensive enough. Switching to a non-nag, no Candy Crush mode should just be an option.
> They tend to work for really big companies that can afford to have lots of unproductive people with really advanced degrees that don’t contribute to the bottom line.

Is is the really big company that makes you die inside or the people themselves?

I tend to think its the company... its soo hard for me to work and feel productive at a large company. Something just oozes nobody really cares about you or what your doing. Everyone is just trying to do the bare minimum and go home.
I think there is a difference between applying some gamma curve or removing noise or whatever, versus somewhat understanding the image semantics and going after fixing skin tones.
I wonder if there's a way to build a machine that could very cheaply bury power lines in areas that still have above ground grids.
Ask HN: How can I jump from front end to C++ or ML?
I've been doing front end contracting work for a number of years now. My last client was truly epic; wonderful people and revenue in the billions but front end couldn't be more soul crushing anymore for me and no other opportunities there AFAIK.

I'd rather be working with objects, data, architecture and optimization. High performance C++ engine work sounds fun; or training and tuning ML models.

I'm considering going to UCSD for CS or Data Science and finding an internship, but maybe that's overkill.
For better or worse the crontab syntax is the de facto way to match instants of time. And on that count it’s pretty darn good all things considered.
Rates are impossible to normalize.

I calculated the interest on our debt of 28.6 Trillion [1] at a rate of 1.5% to be 429 Billion of interest. This is Approximately what we are paying today [1]. If we normalize to say 5%, which is the historic average [2], paying only the interest on our debt, we would be paying 1.5 trillion each year. Or 50% of the federal budget on interest. We have 3.42 trillion in revenue.

I don't see how we can raise rates, so housing prices could keep going up.

1. https://www.usdebtclock.org
2. http://www.freddiemac.com/pmms/pmms30.html
In Hearts you often get to pass 3 cards to an opponent before play begins.
With a bad enough radio and a high enough baud rate, limiting baud rate _is_ necessary for limiting bandwidth.
The opposite is true, actually. Imagine dealing with thousands of incoming data streams from spies, communication intercepts, and battlefield reports without the aid of computers. You have a classic needle-in-a-haystack data discovery problem.

Being able to communicate to your entire intelligence apparatus "hey send me everything you see about OMAHA or SWORD" might get you hundreds of small pieces of intel that would be too trivial to forward to command alone - but taken together could have laid out the entire battle plan.
Russian cosmonauts find new cracks in ISS module
https://www.space.com/international-space-station-cracks-fou...
Because doing the bare minimum is a reasonable thing to do. You will not be rewarded for more work unless you play the hierarchy game. The Gervais Principle: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Having lived in both ATX and SF, I would say Austin still isn’t a true industry town, and it’s nowhere close to the activity level in the Bay Area. However it does seem like things have changed in the last 2 years such that Austin is now a legitimate outpost for engineering, whereas previously it was really just back-office and support stuff. So, if that trend continues its possible Austin could gain in Seattle and perhaps move into the clear #3 spot for tech cities. Right now it’s still seems behind LA and NYC just because it’s still a relatively small city.
I think it also helps picking up a language when you already know a few (unless the new language is significantly different from the ones from you know). Learning a few languages exposes one to a variety of patterns (bonus points if you know both tonal and non-tonal languages) and that helps in finding commonality with the new language.
Trying to choreograph dozens of lambda functions is one of those solutions that’s more hype than sense. AWS pitched lambda for one-off video transcoding, then overzealous folks took it way way too far.
I've seen this attack with cloudfront and an S3 bucket.

You can verify your domain is going to a cloudfront you own, but it doesn't verify that the origin is a bucket you own.
Ask HN: How to prepare for fatherhood after a decade of startup brinkmanship?
Startup culture is one very wild ride, I took a few moonshots with the assumption that, hey, how many times can I shoot at the moon and miss? Like, 100? 500? 1,000?

I'm not sure if I could have done it a thousand times but whatever the answer is it's more than about 20 anyway. I got as far as term sheets from large investment funds but never really made it to market. I realize this comes with a certain approach and personality, a certain way to manage my time, projects, what I aim for, how I behave, and so forth.

Now I would like to completely change my lifestyle of brinkmanship and taking nothing but moonshots, in order to prepare for being a father. (This is due to having someone new in my life and making a mutual decision together.)

What general tips do you have for how to change my mindset, lifestyle, and approach, to prepare to be a father?
Someone who wants new software to be developed that doesn't exist yet. (Or improvements to existing software that don't exist yet).

Developer/Designer/QA/PM/Whatever time is the thing that actually has meaningful cost here, not the act of sending bits across a wire. So that's the thing that the market should be paying for.

The difference with proprietary software is just that you can get people to pay for those man hours after release time - in OSS you don't have that luxury, and pretending that you do, or that you're actually fundamentally charging for something else is a mistake.
> We on the west do exactly the same thing for things like cigarettes, alcohol and gambling.

At least in the case of alcohol, the guardians of a child are explicitly allowed to "override" that restriction (with some caveats e.g. in some states you have to be in a private residence) - so, at least there, it's pretty clear that the law is there to protect random underage children (something something executive function not completely developed until roughly age 25) from making huge mistakes with dangerous things that are still allowed to be sold.

If the same does not apply to cigarettes or gambling, that's an oversight.

I don't believe the Chinese law under discussion has any sort of exception.

Moreover, the difference in scientific evidence for the harmfulness of cigarettes, alcohol, and gambling is significantly greater than the evidence for the harmfulness of video games.
Interviewing is a numbers game. A large percentage of interviewers are incompetent and/or more interested in showing off than hiring. So keep rolling the dice until the stars align in your favour.
You had to learn about cron and enough about your service manager to make sure the daemon was running. It’s the exact same thing but in ini files and way way more configurable and introspectable.
> 4. No vaccine injury scheme. If you are unlucky and get a rare blood clotting disorder, you have to wear the full treatment cost. And because of #3, you have to see a doctor and sign a waiver to get AstraZeneca. (This has since been relaxed now and does not have to be a doctor consultation. You can just sign the waiver at the point of vaccination)

If I buy a car, there's a warranty on it. Why doesn't the government stand by what it's recommending people inject?
In fact, I do precisely this.

It's worth it.
State of the art, aye, but definitely funny hearing about the job I was at 7 years ago (where things were fully operational, not experimental) being referred to as so new!

When I was there, it was a combination of (1) downwards facing line lasers measuring distance + reflectivity, (which was viewed as a greyscale image, around 4k pixels == width of a lane iirc) and (2) forward facing cameras for tagging assets like signs, plus (3) velodyne lidars for much coarser 3D point cloud (including measuring bridge heights). The scanning worked up to a bit under 70 mph, which was impressive to me, particularly that first part of the sensor package.
There was a time in the late 1990s when Yahoo News seemed to be a top performer in terms of republishing or carrying wire stories. They lost an opportunity to redesign the media landscape, something nobody has still been able to do decades later. Ask a random person where they get their news today. Prepare for some strange looks and answers.
Firstly, regardless of where a person ends up, if they get there by having several generations of their family kidnapped, enslaved, and systematically mistreated, I think it counts as “a hell of a hand”.

Secondly, it sounds like your thinking isn’t too far away from “well, aren’t they better off now?”, but you’re assuming that the development of African nations and societies progressed completely independently from the colonization and enslavement of their populations by Europeans. If you’re going to construct an alternate timeline where nobody was kidnapped, why does it follow that African nations would have developed in the exact same ways as if they were? Didn’t the United States reap massive economic benefit from the labor of those enslaved people, benefit which certainly didn’t make it back to Africa? And isn’t a lot of the quality of life that we in the United States currently enjoy built on the back of that economic benefit?

I’m engaging here because I do think you’re being earnest, but you should probably be aware that many people would find your question quite offensive, and I can see why. I think you’ve anticipated this, but I hope you don’t dismiss that offense as being “overly sensitive”, and instead ask yourself what you might be missing that would cause you to overlook the causes of such a strong emotional reaction.
Language classes should be thought of as dessert rather than the main course. They are useful if you need to answer questions, for example to clarify the difference between two words or an aspect of grammar, but do not help much for the main task of getting words and sentences into your head, as memorisation is a probabilistic process that is unique to the individual and needs to be done individually.
To add: OBS can output to v4l2loop so can feed as virtual camera.

And OBS has lots of neat features - one of which is making my fans loud. Like a crowd cheering it on!
If distractions are the problem, how does full screen mode not fit the bill? It's literally just the window content, nothing else. You can choose to show the menu bar and you can see the Dock by placing your mouse cursor at the edge of the screen.

If you really need Windows' behaviour, use something like Better Snap Tool to add maximise behaviour on right or middle click.

Or if you prefer Aero Snap-style resizing, Tiles can also do it, and it's free.

https://folivora.ai/bettersnaptool

https://freemacsoft.net/tiles/
I did as well. I'm contracting here and there and then the rest of the time just building what I want to build. It's pretty damn nice.
I've had decent results from Hetzner, although ymmv
Not transferring wealth to banks is a good thing. If people are too rich, tax them. If houses are too expensive, build more houses.
Postgres definitely wasn't uncommon in 2012. It wasn't even a weird choice in 2003, when Arbor shipped products on it. Maybe there's subtext I'm missing, like, Postgres was uncommon for sites like The Guardian?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period_hypothesis

There has been and continues to be a lot of research behind that cope. The effortless mastery over e..g. phonology that children emerge with is very difficult to replicate in adulthood, even after decades of speaking.
Of course it's from the computer. It's an electronic message. What a weird and pointless distinction. It's still programmed to do that on behalf of the bank's fraud department, a service done by people at the bank that you engage to protect your money. It's a service.

Not like the Safari notification. It helps you in no way, it's not a service. It's an ad.