skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes, I'd say that's a big aspect of what the tools developed in this paper enable.
It's sign that your VPN works:) Unfortunately that's the price to pay for anonymity today. Go to another website? DDG instead of google.
Whenever my boss asks for estimates (which thankfully is very seldom), I always give ranges, and I always make sure to highlight the ones I feel confident in and especially the ones I feel less sure about in.

Last time I broke it down into about four pieces, two of which I had a firm grasp on and could give a fairly solid estimate, "about half a day", and one part which I said "this might take a day, it may take a week, I'll know once I've worked on it for a bit".

I'll state what my assumptions are for the estimate so he can red flag things if the customer changes their mind, and I might offer some alternative estimates for different scenarios if I sense the goal is not entirely set in stone.

This gives my boss what he needs, which is a rough idea on the scope of the project and whether it's a slam dunk or "here be dragons".
Bring Back Our Knobs: Analog vs. Digital (2009)
> How mediaeval :-)

Sir, this is HN. We are not amused.
My favorite recent discovery is calling a js function with too many or too few parameters. It'll just go ahead and do it.
I recently left a company that had settled on using monte carlo estimation - ignore the ticket sizes and monitor the spread of ticket estimates in order to provide a % estimate to management about when something could be expected.

It was pretty crushing to have to constantly explain that my tickets were bigger than the average to a guy who obviously only cared about getting his KPIs down. I left.
To be honest it seems like writing a capnproto rpc around the functionality you want to sandbox, and running it as a low privilege microservice, would be better than SAPI.

capnproto supports passing callacks/interfaces back via its capabilities mechanism.
Ford Motor announces a partnership to assure a steady flow of U.S.-made chips
Building go on the target architecture defaults on a dependency on libpthreads for DNS resolutions.
Passing either CGO_ENABLED=0 or -tags netgo fix this.

It's unclear to me how and when spawning a thread per resolution is preferrable to the netgo behavoir.
I think I know my requirements are so fluid and badly defined that the estimate will never be anything other than 100-1000% contingency * ???
What do you think pays for welfare, healthcare, food? The Grenadier Guard?
Well, you'd better not check what happened to all those Rails apps when those companies grew.

There are soooo many blogs about migrating away from Ruby, adopting Go, Scala, whatever statically typed thing.

There's a reason even Ruby is getting a proper static type system.
Can a Machine Learn Morality?
SUVs have not been around for 50 years …
It’s a nightmare. I only buy older, mostly analog cars for myself, but if you go back too far the other safety features aren’t there. Early 2000s is about the limit.

See this I just posted - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29276466
These XP/2003 devices should be isolated behind a million firewalls and perferably not connected to the internet at all. If these devices can't route to some portion of the net which they shouldn't have been connected to in the first place, that's hardly a loss.

* Personally I think 240/4 is very reasonable since it was always reserved, 0/8 is doable but would require effort enough people might not want to do, and 127/8 is hardcoded in too many places and isn't doable. IPv6 is the future, but it isn't justified to make things now worse to make deployment faster (it won't be). IPv6 will win by default anyway.
As I look around at a pile of RFPs with companies running some core functionality on Windows Server 2003, RHEL 5, MYSQL 4 etc....I'll take that bet.
Volume is very cheap on board aircraft, so volumetric energy density doesn't matter. What costs is weight. On weight, LH2 clobbers everything, by a very long way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29206505
It really is constructive, sharing how others have solved a particular problem.

You didn't actually address the point of taking it as a negative being an artifact of insecurity, so let me add a second opinion to the same effect. It would be respectful of you to provide a meaningful (non-sarcastic) response.
Luis Soriano Had a Dream, Two Donkeys, and a Lot of Books
Fair 'nuff. I was taught to write as many tests as possible up front. Start with failing tests, then make them work.

We may not be able to write them all, up front, because of the "implementation not ready" thing, but we still need to have a plan for that point.

Also, keep the tests forever. In my experience, it was a fairly rigid (and rightly so) process.

I like the idea behind TDD. I desperately want software, in general, to have drastically higher quality.

Might want to take a gander at [4], above. I take Quality very seriously.
> 12" AOC monochrome VGA monitor

That brings a huge grin to my face. I had one of those, precisely of that vintage, which was my first VGA monitor of any type. The only thing different would be that it was 120V/60 Hz.

It lingered on as a console monitor for many years, and still worked when I finally took it to the recycler a few years ago. In its final years, it didn't get along with some graphics cards or BIOSes since it was purely 640x480 VGA and nothing else, and DDC didn't exist when it was built.
I Have Delivered Value but at What Cost? [video]
Rich, Broke or Dead?
> There's nothing preventing you from using their compiler with other people's chips right now.

Using an other ISA than x86 is something that prevents this compiler from being used for other chips.
The intermediate representation on which these optimizations are made is probably not related to x86.

Also, such compilers usually use models of machine resources and latencies to perform better scheduling.
But latency and resource models are micro-architecture dependent, so using it on a chip with the same architecture but different micro-architecture would produce non-optimal scheduling
> Having types not line up at various boundaries (DB/API/reading from a file) is already a pain

That's not really accurate - Postgres (for instance) types ARE mapped to Ruby types whenever you read something from the database, just like they are being mapped to Java types or any other language.
I guess you mean you can have inadvertent type coercion where a Ruby string is saved into a PG numeric column or something?

Anyway for super sensitive code (let's say payments/prices) you can work with DRY types or Sorbet or any other solution. As a rule it's quite rare that I actually see these problems. Can they occur? Sure. Do they happen so often I wish I was using C++? No. In fact I can't even say it happens more than once a year that I see this type of bug.
It's not divisive, our friends in Europe are on team human, same as our friends around the globe, and they're sharing info on how to do a particular thing well
Ask HN: What's a good transactional email service for small projects?
Hi there,

I've build a bunch of smaller projects trying to give people alternatives to social media (e.g. https://potato.horse) and noticed that a lot of people actually decided to subscribe to the content through email. The problem is that I didn't expect any significant traffic, so ended up sending emails personally (I'm THAT lean).

Although this is great from marketing perspective (people like speaking with real people, who would've guessed), this scales very poorly.

I've used Mailchim/Mailgun in the past, but I was wondering if anything changed in the past few years in that domain.

Here's what's important to me (in order of priority):

- a good API client, well documented API (I want to spend max 1 day of setting it up and plugging into 2-3 projects)

- custom domain support

- no privacy-dubious practices (ideally, I'd just call the API with a list of messages and store the contact list on my side)

- good record with spam blockers (I'm aware that this depends mainly on my domain)

- ideally less than 10$ per month for ca 3000 emails (I don't think I'll exceed that too quickly)

What I _don't_ care about:

- any marketing related features, I just want to automate email delivery

Most of my sites are on Vercel or Cloudfront, but I'd rather avoid spending too much time with AWS and go for something really simple. I don't want to spend too much time on infra.

I'm happy with any "mainstream" language, but I'd rather use node + Typescript since I use it on a daily basis at the moment.

Got any tips? Should I use a SaaS platform for that? Or should I just set up a DO Droplet with a service and use that instead?
Moodle is actually great, IMO. You can customize the UI to your liking and integrate it with bigbluebutton for a complete solution that includes remote learning classrooms instances as need arises, with full recording of lectures.
I think it’s because of perpetual instability of the tools we use. There are always new libraries and apis to learn. I think a lot of it is self-inflicted. If we built stuff the way we built it 10 years ago, we would still get the same product finished but having done the same thing in the same way, estimates would be more reliable.

But boy did we succeed at allocating a heap of VC cash into devs pockets.
I doubt all architects knew all the details. They would look into how to defend the attacks they expected, and the ones they had given to others.

It is entirely possible that the trope is true, but only for a small minority of castles where they expected such fighting, and in the vast majority it is false because they didn't expect it.

If it is true, you would expect other evidence that in the design that they expected the walls to be breached and thus have to fight in such a way, and also that it wasn't a hopeless idea to fight on. This does seem unlikely based on what I know of historical war, but I'll freely admit what I know is minimal. Any real historians care to comment?
You’re right. Software development has devolved into a popularity game.
I'd suggest trying some sort of heuristic search (e.g. hill climbing, simulated annealing) with a quadgram-statistics-based fitness function to score the English-ness of each iteration. http://practicalcryptography.com/cryptanalysis/text-characte...
> I’ll forget about the trial period and begin being billed then go through hell to get out of it

OK, this is probably a stupid question...but when signing up for a trial of product/service X, why not put a "decide on X" item on your calendar for sometime near the end of the trial?
> because most people don't find their problems interesting so they need to pay more just to get people in the door,

That's true when we're talking about a difference between 8$/h and 20$/h. If we're talking 50$/h vs 100$/h, or 100$/h vs 200$/h, I'm willing to take the bet that higher-paying job is going to be challenging enough. But indeed, it's also up to the person - in one job you may fix code, in another you may set up processes for entire teams, and if you just want to be left alone to code stuff that you like, what I said is absolutely not true (the opposite is - at some point you start to have to code less). Some other commenter nailed it - higher paid jobs tend to be more impactful. Whether "interesting" or not, that's subjective.
Should You Use HTTPS or SSH for Git?
The paucity of open source LMS likely reflects the uneasy relation of the public sector with open source more broadly. You'd think its a marriage made in heaven: public funds, procurement etc leveraged optimally for common good infrastucture - where that makes sense. But in practice this mode seems entirely marginal. It may be corporate capture, lack of savvy people among decision makers or other factors.

In any case, given the huge upfront investment required for a quality platform this doesn't seem like something an edtech startup can bootstrap. An education platform is not a CMS and its not a social media platform. I think especially now with the pandemic experience it has become very clear how rich, complicated and demanding the educational process actually is. The "archaic UI and features" comment hints maybe at too narrow and technical view. It may be a very relevant aspect (eg if young students puke at the UX it is not of much help). But from an education perspective what matters are not smooth appearances and gimmicks but "educational outcomes".

If you dive into the Dougiamas/Moodle team's thinking you'd see what permeates the design/architecture is to be able to translate the huge body of educator experience and infuse it into software. Somehow we need to move to the next chapter of the book they started writing.
Simple - either metadata or part of the validator
> substantial minority of newels which turn anti-clockwise

Missed an opportunity to use 'widdershins'.
SerenityOS is licenced under BSD-2-Clause License while SkyOS was entirely proprietary (and therefore disappeared when its development stalled), so the comparison seems irrelevant (your point would be more relevant if you were mentioning Syllable instead, which was quited advanced and open-source, yet somewhat seems to have disappeared... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllable_Desktop . But since source-code is available anyone could restart it :)

I also hope that SerenityOS has a long and successful lifespan, as it seems promising !)
Exactly. One of the fundamental tenets of science is reporting estimates with appropriate precision, e.g. significant digits. If the probabilistic interquartile range spans multiple months, why would I report the mean of the estimate in "hours of effort"?

What's frustrating is I've articulated these thoughts clearly to managers in the past. They nod their head and agree and then ask for the hourly estimate again and we all collectively share our disappointment when our estimate is inaccurate after the fact.

Nothing like running head first into a wall and expecting a different result.

My management suggestion? Frequently identify and advocate for simplifications, and modulate the degree of simplification based on progress to date. If people enjoy their work, they will work hard regardless of timeline hawking. So the variable factor is really the volume and complexity of work, not worker intensity or motivation.
Have a look at a Honda Clarity. 40 miles on a charge then 50 MPG on a 7 gallon tank.
This was dev work - and generally when something goes over by that amount it's because my understanding of the requirements and the client's understanding of the requirements were very very different.
>Just waiting on that for an EV that I can keep for 20+ years without it costing a fortune over that time in battery repair/replacement.

You will live a long life for sure. :)
The poisson distribution is quite-light tailed. With a poisson distribution, the probability of completing the task per unit time is constant.

Real world tasks are likely to take longer if they have already gone on for longer; maybe a Pareto distribution would be more appropriate.
Researchers Use Quantum Entanglement to Achieve “Ultrabroadband”
That would be cool.

Another option would be just forcing long warranties (like 20 years) on most non-consumable products.
Answer: wisdom is its own wealth.
You might want to reconsider Moodle as an option. There's a new version (4.0) coming up early 2022 with a major UI overhaul. It looks like a big improvement, with the UX design at least ten times better than the current version (though admittedly the bar as set by the current version is not very high).

That said, end users (students / learners) need not be bothered by the sad state of the current backend: you can configure Moodle so they'll only get to see the easy parts (I've seen Moodle used in primary education on two different occasions).

As for your requirements, it looks as though Moodle's got them all covered (depending on the details of course). Except maybe for the live classes, which will probably require a 3rd party plugin.

Other things to consider:

- Cost of customization: Moodle developers are harder find than, say, WordPress developers. Putting something together based on WordPress might also get you there, for less money.

- Edtech standards: Moodle supports H5P, SCORM & LTI out of the box (WordPress has limited support for SCORM & LTI, full support for H5P). This means you can integrate your Moodle based platform with a lot of other systems, offering your courses to customers on their own platforms, when they might otherwise not be willing to do business with you.

- Community support: Moodle's the largest open source LMS out there, and it has excellent support forums. There's also commercial support available through Moodle partners (and, shameless plug, parties such as myself, who offer Moodle customization services).

- Shopping cart / payment features: you can put individual courses behind a paywall, but overall Moodle does not really support e-commerce features (except through integrations such as Edwiser Bridge).

- Installation & deployment: since you're looking for an open source solution, I'm going to assume you want to host the platform yourself. In that case, you might want to look for a system that's easy to install and maintain. WordPress & Moodle have got you covered there, since they're based on LAMP, for which a lot of documentation and external expertise is available.

- Enterprise features: do you require features like advanced customizable reporting, integrations with HR systems, and certification programs? Then you might want to look into Totara. I wouldn't call it open source, though you can host and customize the source code yourself once you buy their per seat licensing (still cheaper than most enterprise LMS solutions out there). Totara's based on a Moodle fork, although they're slowly moving away from the Moodle core code base.

[Edited for layout; added clarification on Totara]
All ToF systems are active.

ToF stands for "time of flight". It works exactly by measuring how long the signal takes to go from camera to object and back [1]

Stereoscopic cameras are another type of 3R camera, they are not ToF and they are not active.

Each has pros and cons.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-of-flight_camera
You should really read the rest of the comments in this thread. People are still asserting masks do "zero" to stop the spread.

Dr. Tam, who is responsible for both gross incompetence AND intentionally misleading the public WRT COVID19, mistakes that literally killed people and, is probably still killing people, remains in her position as Chief Public Health Officer of Canada. This is why I can't let it go.
I didn't know about that - but I suspect (it was a while back) that I did two points - best and worst case.
It will just have one big button to push that will know exactly what you want to do! Then people will hail it as the greatest thing ever because now they no longer have to think or plan what they want to do. They push the button and whatever happens is obviously what they wanted!
He was specifically thinking of food/drink. Coming down would be empty, going up is full. He also said it'd be servants doing this, which is also why the stairs were always so small.
Interesting but still going around the world to get across the street.

In most cases, the ultimate objective is electrical energy. The most efficient way to obtain it remains photovoltaic cells.
For projects with a deadline that matters, I've found that explicitly estimating to "80%" likelihood has helped me hit deadlines much more consistently. I used this to hit a deadline on a 4 month software project only 10 days out, which I think is good for software.

I think implicitly most estimates are the 50/50 case. "I'm 50% sure I can do it in this time". Much of the time I don't think this is very useful, and isn't very well thought through.
How to measure randomness ? Even distribution ? Volatility ? Independence ?
>Have you tried to confirm this hypothesis, by for example looking at studies that examine the crime rate by both socioeconomic status and race?

This isn't a hypothesis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...
Samsung and Tizen OS(that comes with store) is already an alternative for South Korea. Though, so far Samsung has profited from cooperating with Android, as it gained unprecedented share for smartphone market.

iPhone has branded itself as status symbol that people are rich and can pay and maintain lifestyle that includes ipHone - Androids, well - it is replacable and will be eventually.
Lognormal distribution is always a good one.

It's applicable where the randomness has a multiplicative rather than additive effect. For example, the work may double or be halved. Lots of natural processes work this way.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-normal_distribution
I don’t use it when I’m actually driving. Before to set the destination.
This is one of those typical HN “solutions” that seem good on the surface but fail in the real world.

Remember if a driver chooses to challenge a ticket, the state needs to prove proof. Texting and calls are easy to prove. Having a phone in your hand is easy to prove.
For me and dev work it's generally about misunderstanding the requirements.

They ask for X, I think X involves A, B and C, when actually it involves A, D, E, F, G and H.
Don't over-interpret:

It is just way easier the way we are built, kids learn climbing stairs (and other things) way before they can safely walk stairs downwards. The smarter ones go backwards.

Standing on a step and stepping down is just ... complicated ... and requires considerably more body control.

The risk of toppling forwards and falling down the stairs (or the couch) is considerably higher than "stumbling the stairs upwards".
I was looking at some design patterns for JS. I am reading Addy osmani book for that. What i am struggling with is how i am gonna put my learning in to practice. Can someone tell me their approach for learning and implementing advanced JS knowledge outside work?
Depends. Most castles had defense in depth. You could lose a few wings and survive long enough for external defenders to come rescue you.

I don't see why you would fight on the stairs though, as opposed to running to the top where you can close a door behind you, or fight from a flat floor.
Another example: Switzerland forbids in hand mobile phone usage as well.
A company we were consulting for bought a big old country house here in the UK. It was completely empty when my small team moved in. I took the massive library as my office.
If it wasn't, you would have evidence to show that.
If you're consulting, you absolutely need to have estimates -- because that constitutes the bulk of the Statement of Work (SOW), that is, the contract.

And if that estimate isn't within 10-15% (the usual error bars) of the actual project duration/billable hours, there's going to be a problem.

What's more, while the developer(s) involved should have some input into that SOW, they shouldn't be writing that document. Rather, they should be writing code for other projects already estimated and sold.

As for in-house projects, that's a whole different story and is really dependent upon the processes of that particular organization.

All that said, developers should be spending their time developing, and their managers/managing consultants/salespeople should be doing all the other non-development tasks.

Edit: Fixed grammatical errors.
I don't think so. There's "laser-assisted autofocus" which might be slang for an actual ToF sensor, but sometimes that's just a single laser pulse (I.e., no 2D image that we need).
Not gonna defend him, but I was once an atheist and am now Catholic. People do change, and it’s always weird when people pull the “no true Scotsman” card on you. I have plenty of liberal friends who were once conservative.
https://nypost.com/2021/11/12/50-years-of-predictions-that-t...)