skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Setting diversity/inclusion targets and then enforcing them via publicly stated policy is the opposite of "performative nonsense". They're putting their words into action. You can argue against the targets (or the effectiveness of the policy) but don't be ridiculous.
Would be interesting to try to use it as is but in a lossy way
Ask HN: What should the future of web/UI testing frameworks be like?
I've been working with web testing frameworks (Selenium and its wrappers / Cypress / Puppeteer / Playwright / others) for the last few years, but I asked myself what "frameworks of the future" should look like. I found myself not wanting things too wild or different from what we have today - just incremental improvements. Is that objectively true? What, if anything, is the next leap forward? Or are we close to them being "good enough" for the most part?

My top "problems", in some shape or form, from existing products:

- Be faster to complete builds

- Have fewer false positives (or do accurate self-healing magic)

- Be easier to get started with (or be optionally codeless like Selenium IDE)

- Don't be a walled garden (what if I want to run the same logical 'test' across Playwright and Cypress)

- Help me write better tests (or be difficult to write bad tests within)

- Emulate mobile devices better than just viewport modification

What do the HN folks think?
Is there a reason you're not using a standard like Zigbee? It has the same use case, non-wifi stable local connectivity to control lights or other devices. And it's a standard so you can buy components from many vendors.
And if you get it right, people just say “That software is so simple, I could have written it in a weekend!” :-)
> In a very theoretical situation

I've had this exact ticket in the past: A customer built a complex Java client for our public API which assumed no surplus fields in the responses, and as we added a new field, their entire application broke down, causing huge losses for the customer. I wasted so much time on explaining how our stability promise does not extend to added fields!
> Apple could ignore doing that to iMessage simce nobody uses it in Europe

I use it.
> And then you get the exact opposite problem of macOS people trying to force macOS rendering onto other platforms because they prefer it.

This is not a matter of preference but of measurable quality. Fonts on macOS look super smooth, and most Windows laptops these days still ship with 1920x1080 displays which even with Cleartype enabled just looks like shit.

Linux is even worse, compared to a Mac a Linux desktop just looks like straight from the 90s (which is when most stuff regarding rendering seems to have frozen in time).

People using Macs generally value aesthetics, optical polish, UI consistency and elegance, a factor that is sadly lacking in the Windows world (there are ... five different ways of creating UI applications at least, six different applications to look for basic system configuration, ...) and completely absent in the Linux world (as a result of everything relating to Desktop Linux being underfunded and done by volunteer developers without UX design people).
It's an open standard started and maintained by Microsoft.

I think that's a bit different from just being a "Microsoft offering".
It would still be a stretch. Most of the bible was written in Hebrew or Greek, but for literalism to make any sense, you'd have to be a native speaker, not just of modern Hebrew or Greek, but of their ancient versions. Otherwise, it's like a modern English speaker trying to take Shakespeare literally. It's just not going to make a lot of sense unless you're fully immersed in the language and culture at the time.
This is how most home automation brands ought to work but it seems that in practice very few do.

Most of them want to proxy all attempts to turn on a light switch via AWS. Which is madness.
Over the past half dozen years I've found the developer fairly responsive, but we're in a catch-22 situation.

My interest (I want to delete the several hundreds of 'pages' of previous tab details in my history before I'd consider this something I'd pay for) and the developers interest (this is too hard to do for a non-paying customer) have been at odds.
Yes, also store the DPI.

In general, allow arbitrary key-value pairs to be stored.
Hey, I'm the author of this. Ask me anything!
If this is "the page that the title links to", it literally just gave me a headache. I am not sure why, something with how things moved in unexpected ways to me trying to scroll, I think.

If that is Great UX, I think I prefer bad UX.
Touching on the part about the Alexa: it has become so ridiculously over-talkative lately even with “brief mode” enabled that I’m apprehensive to even ask it to do anything.

If you are part of the Amazon team: Just Because it Can Talk Does Not Mean it Needs To Talk. Especially related to shoving the “suggestions” down your throat. You ask to play a song, and the “by the way…” covers up the song! I empathize you’ve built a new feature and no one uses it but forcing them to learn via interruptions is not the way.
Paradoxes of Life
The funding agency explicitly stated the reason for denial, no? They specifically said he is not meeting the diversity initiative.

If he’s hard to deal with as the true reason, then did this funding agency cook some bullshit reason up to reject him? In that case I support this hard to deal with asshole.

Lastly, when did we get to a point where cutting edge laser-research requires ‘easy to deal with people’? He’s a fucking professor at a research university, that’s pretty good in my book for achieving culture-fit (the workplace analogy).

Repeat after me - we do not need the guy building us cutting edge laser technology to be easy to deal with, we do not need him to be a people person. We need lasers.

—————

My take is he’s hiring mostly Indians. It might be worthwhile to sit him down and say ‘look, you are literally only hiring Indians’ lol. Not giving either side a pass here, but devolving the argument down to semantics always leads us to the war of semantic attrition. The funding body should clearly say ‘you cannot literally just hire only Indians, please be reasonable’, and then have the dipshit explain how ‘only Indians understand and care about lasers and no one else’. Then all of the cards will be face up.
It is worth reading the FAQs...
https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/mathfwfaqs.asp

A few examples...(highlights mine)

>Does the draft Mathematics Framework eliminate middle school mathematics acceleration programs?

>No. The draft Mathematics Framework does not eliminate middle school mathematics acceleration programs (including programs that offer Integrated Math 1 or Algebra 1 courses to grade eight students). The draft Mathematics Framework emphasizes the importance of following the sequenced progression of topics laid out in the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) and considers the latest research on the impact of skipping grades or undermining the sequences progression. Additionally, the CA CCSSM are significantly more rigorous than those from previous grade eight content standards. They address the foundations of algebra and geometry by including content that was previously part of the Algebra I course, including but not limited to a more in-depth study of linear relationships and equations, a more formal treatment of functions, and the exploration of irrational numbers.

>Does the draft Mathematics Framework remove high school calculus?

>No. The draft Mathematics Framework includes calculus in the possible high school pathways, while also presenting research that the “rush to calculus” without the depth of understanding is not helpful to students’ long-term mathematics preparation. Data shows that about one-half of all high school students who take calculus repeat the course in college or take pre-calculus in college.

In summary: everyone is looking counting how many math courses students manage to get through and presuming that taking a course = mastery which it does not. The basis of this, frankly, is similar to the common core argument - different assumptions about evidence. Parents want to see their kids taking algebra and calculus because that is (to be frank) the best evidence they have of their learning while educational researchers (not teachers, researchers) are looking at meaningful assessment data.

I teach college course to engineering students at a highly ranked research university in the US. Frankly, the majority of my students have taken more math classes by the time they get to me in their junior year than I did by the end of my masters degree. The problem is they understand very little of it. Sure, sometimes, they can execute procedures. But they do not have mastery, they do not have teh ability to apply math to meaningful situations, and they absolutely do not have the ability to use math to evaluate technical problems. They are calculators not users of math - that is the problem this seeks to address
I mean, broadly speaking, I agree, but do you really think that "state-sponsored hacking group that provides the ability to break into people's phones to the worst regimes the world has to offer" is the use case you want to be enabling here...?

If I'm understanding correctly, this wasn't a case of "they agreed to the iCloud EULA because you have to have iCloud to use an iPhone". You don't, in fact. Yes, some services will be unavailable, and...it might occasionally bug you about it? (Not sure about the last, as I do have iCloud) No; they agreed to the iCloud EULA because they were trying to take advantage of unpatched iMessage bugs to break into other people's phones.

I fully agree that the scope of EULAs today is terribly overbroad, but I do not believe that making a legally-binding agreement not to abuse the service to harm other people or steal their data is an inappropriate use of them.
I hope you’re right. I’ve been driving wagons for years, but the US market for them has been shrinking consistently since crossovers became a thing. Europeans seemingly have oodles of options, but God forbid automakers allow Americans a sporty AWD wagon with a manual transmission…
Yeah, not much green space on nuclear subs which also have the oxygen issue.
Late reply, but you make a good point. Perhaps I am thinking five years ago, and back then the specs seemed more impressive.

Also, I hadn't twigged that “logical” cores are distinct from physical cores, which made the core count seem more impressive.
This is why the study of ancient languages used in religious texts are important. Many churches still conduct some activities in dead languages. For example, the Roman Catholic Church still publishes texts in Latin and trains people in Latin. Other churches study Koine Greek even today. Scholars of theology sometimes study Biblical Hebrew and even Aramaic. The good scholars often use their grasp of history, politics, philosophy etc. while performing their exegesis.
I had reliability issues with Philips due to memory limits of their hub. It becomes slow and less reliable above about 50 devices. That sounds like a lot, but every light switch and motion sensor is also a device. So in a medium sized house you exceed that limit.

The hardware however is very good. Replacing the hub with zigbee2mqtt and a good USB Zigbee transmitter solves the issues.
From the link:

> The PDP-11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers

It’s a class of computers in the 1960’s that was distinct from mainframes because they were so much smaller and cheaper, even though today all 60’s computers feel equally huge.
Digital practice lets people get better faster. A lot faster
Windows classic themes have been a thing until the end of Windows 7. You could easily use whichever colours you wanted with these.
I think any software engineer with some industry experience will absolutely NOT install a device in his home that receives automatic updates over the internet and is critical for performing some task or using some basic functionality of the house; especially one that has a well known, highly stable and ergonomic traditional mode of interaction - controlling the lights and water, opening the windows and shades etc.

We know from experience that a nebulous interface that can change without notice and provides no clear contract is a asking for trouble and will break your house "build", so to speak, or worse, it will bork at the worst possible moment, when you have "clients" over.

In the early years of home electricity, there was a much higher chance of getting electrocuted or burning to a crisp, outlets had no grounding, insulation and conductors were of a bad quality etc. Similarly, the whole field of home automation is in its infancy, in a few decades most major mistakes will be made and early adopters will work out the kinks out of the technology (and find out why it's a bad idea to have an internet connected microphone listening in your home at all times).
The "super simple code" at both ends of the graph aren't equivalent. The latter is more "simplest code possible".

Overly simple, hacky, narrowly spec'd code produces the same tech debt as overengineering. Anybody who's worked in a move-fast-break-things type startup will know how much engineering resources are wasted on rewrites/bugfixes due to this.

Ultimately, as with many things in life, you need to find the right balance.
Polylith
When you sign in to a website from your phone using a saved password and use that same phone for 2fa, it's pretty much the same thing.

The whole meme that saving the 2fa seed to password managers is a bad idea needs to die. Most of the advantages of 2fa are still present when using a password manager.
Why is it that tech people see the villain in sci-fi films and think "it would be great to have that in my home"?
What's wrong with just closing the putty window?
Interestingly, dang (HN mod) once mentioned in a feature request comment that he has a mental model of a complexity budget. This very closely fits my own perception: You can only add so much complexity to a system before it starts to break down under the load. Estimating that budget, and how much new features will consume, makes a good engineer in my opinion.
How about a "standard" light switch that is also controllable via Z-wave, which doesn't require Internet access or Wi-Fi or anything like that? Which is what most of the switches in my house are, and really what a proper smart home should be using.
Being ins a similar role myself, how do I ensure that engineers stay happy working on the project that we're working on? I'm finding myself actually doing the opposite of the CTO you mentioned and pushing them towards adopting more off-the-shelf components instead of maintaining homegrown stuff but I think I'm causing a degree of upheaval by doing this. Their justifications for push back however, often smell of sunken cost fallacy to me.
Is the stratification by social class an example of correlation or causation?
> 1. If Covid-19 jumped from an animal species to humans, possibly through another animal, then why hasn't it been found in the wild? For example, SARS was relatively quickly found in the wild. To date there's been no equivalent discovery of the lineage of human-transmissible Covid-19. An alternative theory, that Covid-19 spread to humans at a wet market, would strongly suggest that Covid-19 would be found in the wild;

It took about 13 years to discover the source of SARS:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9
> Giving the same hue to names that look like each other.

Emacs' 'Rainbow Identifiers' does that. I like it.

https://github.com/Fanael/rainbow-identifiers
When is the last time anyone ever saw a project that was “under-engineered”?

And aren’t those projects easier to fix…because they are so simple?
OWASP WrongSecrets: Examples with how to not use secrets
What does it say about these bits?

I'm currently tinkering around with mp3s and wondered how many "useless" bits are in each frame.

I wonder if they are ever used to trace distributors of pirated music, similar to yellow dots in printers.
> I have yet to hear, or especially see, these devices make anybody’s life easier than doing the task manually.

Let's fix that, shall we? I have a Philips Hue system and also a physical switch[0] that I can move around. In my hallway and my kitchen (high traffic rooms) lights turn on via motion detection, making it absolutely unnecessary to ever turn touch a physical plug (with my wet hands after washing the dishes for example). I'm also not blinded by the lights when going to the toilet in the middle of the night. I sync them to my TV (and two LED strips on its sides) while watching a movie for a more immersive experience. And I also gradually dim the lights and shut them down in the evenings if tomorrow is a work day, giving me a visual cue that I should go to bed. And it works via local network, flaky Internet doesn't affect a thing. I've never plugged a mic/speaker to it and I still absolutely love it.

Don't get me wrong, I've been definitely burned by other types of IoT appliances, but smart lights are awesome. More expensive investment than non-smart ones for sure and whether that price is justified is up to you, but in my 3-4 years of using them I have yet to change a single bulb or a battery in a motion detector / switch.

https://www.philips-hue.com/en-us/p/hue-dimmer-switch--lates...
Einstein general relativity manuscript sells for €11M
Android 12 Review: The Flagship Brand Loved by All
I suppose it depends on your definitions, but most constructive proofs construct an entire solution -- that is, leaving no variables free unless the solution applies to any value of them. This only solves for J assuming the others can be solved for.
I partially agree. Bitcoin is a failure and it's pretty sad that so much energy is being spent mining it. I wouldn't mind that same amount of energy being spent on Monero though.

It would also be nice if we could use the heat generated by computers for something instead of dissipating it all into the air. That way the energy wouldn't actually be wasted.
I don't believe that necessarily follows. How much of what we are is a product of what we've built up? Take all that away and revert humanity to its pre-civilization state. To an outside observer, would we obviously be capable of one day going to the moon?
Posts arguing against over-engineering are catnip for the HN crowd! In other news, kittens and puppies are adorable.
Thank you so very much. This just landed in my bookmark list of great bug reports that made my day.

I really like the way the community dealt with this.

(Disclaimer: My SO and me are also a foster home for cats. The cat behavior described is relatively normal esp. for one cat model currently "in use" here.)
NYC is not the right choice though. Ridiculously expensive office space and wages compared to pretty much everywhere else in the US except California. The coasts are beautiful, but the idea of living there…eww. Midwest for life. Good luck.
The "Z-wave" function would never be used in my house so it would just be adding cost. Considerable cost at that - a plain white plastic light switch is £1.99, and the "Z-wave" ones I can see on Amazon are all around £20-£40!
An approach to A/B Testing for mobile apps that doesn't require app releases
Open Source Software – Vercel
A minimal Bitcoin implementation
>with the definition provided by moeris

I think I agree with you that the definition provided by moeris is basically on track, and it accords with everything in the links you shared. I would also recommend you review the term as it exists in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

So that's all good. However, you said something along the lines of "doesn't even require that there be consciousness" and merely "more than automatic" which struck me as not being quite right, and that is the idea that I wanted to challenge. I think all the links you shared make some reference or another to consciousness, which to me makes them different from "not requiring consciousness." So I'm not sure how you are looking at those links and seeing something that comports with "not requiring consciousness" and I'm also not seeing how your version of sentience comports either with those or what moeris said. I'm surprised you would look up and post all those links without noticing this, especially in a conversation where that's exactly the thing at issue.

At best, I think you could say, the heartland, normal, well established definition makes reference to some amount of conscious experience, and it is certain fringe definitions could maybe be read as not requiring that. And I think even that would be an exceptionally generous interpretation of the thing you are spuriously claiming is a "well established definition."

>That last one makes some big assumptions

I really don't think it does. It's not making any assumptions about brains, it's taking a position on what sentience means. Maybe brains do a lot of stuff, some of which falls within our idea of sentience, and some of which doesn't. Again, all the definitions you link to are about sensation against the backdrop of consciousness. Meanwhile, only the last of the three of your proposed options was clearly suggesting consciousness. So I don't understand what assumption you think I am or am not making about brains. I don't think the other two options agree with the dictionary definitions you linked to, so I'm not really sure you should be in a position of confidently declaring that those are a "well established definition."
Thanks for the advice!

I have actually thought about changing my line of work, but whenever I find something interesting about software dev, I just can't see myself doing anything else.

Part of the frustration I feel, I think, has to do with not being able to do something that actually adds value to the business, and in general feeling like my position is just useless, not necessarily the line of work per se.

I've been doing software dev for more than 15 years an I've loved pretty much every minute of it, so even though I'm definitely interested in other things, like cooking, I just don't see myself doing that for a living.

Also, funnily enough, the company I work for has a really interesting mission, it's just that my position in particular feels pointless and directionless, and the management team doesn't seem to care or know how to fix that.
In my experience, high achievers become interested in topics only covered in higher grades sooner or later anyways. And once they do, they pursue them only out of interest and intrinsic motivation, and that tends to boost their motivation. So I don't think this affects high achievers all that much either way.

Almost by definition, school (and everything else) is designed for the top of the bell curve.

Now, maybe school plan design can move the median ability up or down, and I don't have an opinion on if this change here does that, and if so, in what direction. I do think it doesn't affect the high end much either way.
Nobody wanted a smart home. It does not solve any significant need in anybody's life except maybe those with reduced mobility or other impairments. Anything a smart home does beyond a very few things are gimmicks that people quickly tire of. We have been conditioned to think we want a smart home through relentless advertising, bundling smart home items with other purchases, and other tricks. It is madness.
Does passport do something similar?
Hello, one of the maintainers of https://github.com/ory/kratos (the system used in the blog post) here :) We started Ory Kratos because we saw so many developers struggle with OAuth2 and OpenID Connect. If you have any questions around application auth, OAuth2, or Go, open source I'll try to do my best to answer them accurately!
How would they even be able to sign in without clicking "I agree"?
You could also buy just two then wait a while and through some inexplicable magic, you'll gave 64 cores of cat.
It'll be IPv4 -> IPv6 all over again.