skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Remote / Async work without chat?
My team uses Slack quite a bit, but I don't feel it's actually working well for us. Too many decisions and task requests are made in chat, and then there isn't really a permanent record of them. We're not a very big team, but we already have too much reliance on humans plus meetings to share context and make sure everyone is on the same page.

My gut says we'd be better off without chat, but I think that if I just turned off our Slack instance we'd end up falling back to SMS and Email for quick pings, rather than really improving the situation. I would like to build a culture of thoughtful async discussion where people organize their ideas in writing, but I've never been part of an org where that was prominent, so I'm not very confident how to establish that from scratch on my own team.

I'd love to know if any of you have experience working in a distributed engineering org that doesn't use chat, and if so, what tools and processes do you use for discussions and keeping shared context? How well does it work, and would you recommend it for another team?
10% is a lot healthier than Oregon's 3%.
Gemini systems are currently experiencing outages
My friend mentions off-hand that "we talk all the time".

We exchange a number of texts over Signal, most days but at least a couple times a week. That's enough to make him think "we talk all the time", but I am feeling super disconnected.

I think tech makes some people not even try to reach out socialize in any beyond-digital way.
It used to be that information was rare. So to find it you had to use tricks like knowing what person in the village had some books or knew how to do that thing you heard about.

Now information is abundant, so abundant in fact that it's clearly impossible to fit even 1% of it into your head in one human lifetime.

So the meta-skill is figuring out which of the finite number of things you actually want to learn. I suggest going upstream as much as possible. Are there any topics where your interests converge before they split off to many disciplines? Read books about that. The more you can get upstream of stuff the eaiser it is to tell where real novelty and interesting information is (in my experience).
Everything really. As my career grows I understand the appeal to go off grid because society in general is more and more fragile that anyone thinks and the solutions to fix them are worse .
The term cui bono may not be known, but follow the money is.

I know nothing about Hegelian dialectic but from reading Wikipedia it sounds like the opposite of a good faith argument.
Automate it!
This is NOT a good way of treating presbyopia! There absolutely are side effects from administering drugs that dilate or constrict the pupil - this is NOT a safe thing to do. There are general autonomic nerve effects that can have long-term harm. This is medicine 101.
> "So when you're searching for reliable sources of information, the ones with the most retractions are generally the most trustworthy."

you imply a gradient of trustworthiness that correlates directly with the number of retractions, but that's highly unlikely given the large number of other variables affecting trustworthiness and retractions (confounders). also, such perspectives promote deceit, giving papers an incentive to increase retractions to enhance perceptions of trustworthiness without actually doing the hard work of being trustworthy.

see how easy it is to misinform?
Which is fascinating to watch. As it is quite uncommon in today's world.
For something like a command line tool, you can package a dedicated python runtime with external dependencies preinstalled and treat it as a virtualenv. Maybe not the most elegant solution, but it works. iTerm2 does this for its Python scripting API.

Another option is to just include the required libraries in your package and have the executable add the paths via sys.addsitedir. Pipenv installed via Homebrew does this.
I'd rather pay more at every possible instance than interact with Oracle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog
Use cases and expectations have changed somewhat in the last few decades.
pipx is a solution without a problem. pip worked well. setuptools was fine. pypa is breaking packaging by making it more complex and less usable IMO.

pip + setuptools using setup.cfg works very well.

It seems to me the Python packaging community is chasing the nodejs community for very little value and a lot more added complexity and very little regard to the community and package maintainers in general.
Can we change the link to this article - it's fulsome with more details and great images.
Oops...it turns out I didn't quite get the early history right.

The first edition was in fact called "Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing". The book I have, "The Science of Computing" is the trade edition [1] of that, published one year later.

The trade edition has "carefully modified to reflect the slightly less technical background of a typical reader". The structure and much of the text remained the same but some passages were rewritten and "several of the starred subsections that appeared in small font in the original edition have been eliminated". Those often contained proofs and other more mathematical things.

[1] an edition of a book intended for general distribution, as opposed to a text edition which is an edition of a book prepared for use especially in schools and colleges.
Or a subset of people that are like-minded, whose votes you value more than the general youtube population en mass.
Well that's just false. As of 2020 US reduced its emissions by over 20% below 2005 levels which was mostly due to fracking natural gas instead of coal.

Not saying that's all rainbows either but you're suggesting there can't possibly be any improvement here. Sounds like a bad bet.
That's an understatement. JetBrains has a strong continual growth.
> ...people have kids and need larger vehicles, demand for transportation is inflexible, and people will take out loans to get it regardless of the rate.

I think this is true but only to a certain extent. People can make sacrifices to reduce transportation demand. Making a single trip, getting a smaller vehicle, or carpooling are options. The issue is that we've lived in a luxury transportation world for a long time, and people may be unwilling to make those sacrifices.
Hosting primary sources isn't really journalism, in and of itself, as that term is commonly used.
I'd like to remind everyone about Uber's experience: no EC2-like functionality until at least 2018, probably even now. Teams would negotiate with CTO for more machines. Uber's container-based solution didn't support persistent volumes for years. Uber's distributed database was based on friendfeed's design and was notoriously harder to use than DynamoDB or Cassandra. Uber's engineers couldn't provision Cassandra instances via API. They had to fill in a 10-pager to justify their use cases. Uber's on-rack router broke back in 2017 and the networking team didn't know about it because their dashboard was not properly set up. Uber tried but failed to build anything even closer to S3. Uber's HDFS cluster was grossly inefficient and expensive. That is, Uber's productivity sucked because they didn't have the out-of-box flexibility offered by cloud.

Now, how many people think they can do better than Uber?
I was really impressed with Terrence Mann's eye brow makeup (eye brow wigs, probably?) that were a really understated "special effect" to make Brother Dusk feel so related to Lee Pace. It took me episodes to realize that that must have been the one weird trick, but once I'd realized it seemed kind of obvious. His eyebrows look nothing like that in real life or other films/shows. (He was the bad guy in Sense8!)

> The series was great at times and then completely flat for long strips in-between.

Yeah, I'm still not entirely sure why they paced some of the show the way they did. That said they did cover several hundred years, so weird pacing was pretty much the nature/challenge the books gave them to try to adapt to.

It's possibly the sign of a good show that most people I've talked to disagree on which exactly were the flat bits. I love a good, long fly through shot of space scenery and/or "cool planets". I know lots of people that disagree. I thought there weren't enough scenes of Terminus "in action" doing what it was supposed to be (collecting/writing the Encyclopedia Galactica; which I don't think was even properly named anywhere in the first season?). The very few scenes they did include I know dragged for some people, because there is only so much most people can take of arguments about what to include in an Encyclopedia, but I wanted way more of such scenes because instead of showing them the show just kept instead telling you that Terminus was a planet of scientists and knowledge workers and needed protecting rather than showing you what Terminus' part of the plan was and what they were supposed to be doing, and why that was a great work driving them as a community.

Relatedly, I know a lot of people that loved the strange religious in-fighting and monologuing of that "The Mother" religion, and the Emperor trying to take advantage of it to delay the Fall (and likely making the Fall worse in the process) and oof did that drag for me. None of that stuff comes directly from the books. (Isaac Asimov was an atheist for much of his life and waxing poetic about a made up religion even just for worldbuilding purposes was outside of his wheelhouse/comfort zone and he knew it. Given some of showrunner Goyer's other stuff, I think such long monologues are also outside of his wheelhouse, but yet he doesn't seem to know or acknowledge it and just keeps writing them, but that's just my hot take.) Isaac Asimov did invent a fake religion for the books, but (spoilers for stuff to come) more in the way of the Foundation itself using religion as a coarse, gross controlling tool.
In my experience the “one-off items” are far more common, simply because every one thing I do reuse will typically have several child elements. Why am I naming the styles that represent the title of a contact card if I never use it outside of the contact card—which itself is probably included by referencing a file called “ContactCard.html” or whathaveyou.

Of course, there’s no right or wrong answer here, and I suspect it very much depends on what type of web systems you are building. I feel the entire debate is basically a special case of the question “do you make websites or web apps”.
Because migration is difficult, unpleasant, and usually illegal.
This never, ever bit me in the Pascal days. I suspect this was primarily because the stack I was using was either "provided by the Borland Pascal standard library" pieces, or it was my own Pascal or assembler code.

I had a limited number of calls into a library and a need to do a few things that escape me with regard to interacting with -- I think -- an 16550 UART[0] and its driver, but I don't recall them being particularly nasty to deal with. I mean, all things relative -- I was expecting these to be nasty to deal with because they often involved inline assembler, so the problem of "making it behave with the string" wasn't quite as pressing as "what the hell am I actually doing here?" :)

[0] My huge project was a bulletin board system in the 90s.
This is only a problem when comparing _disposable_ income PPP, because disposable income has taxes deducted.

Disposable income data is harder to collect, and is therefore less common. This article uses average income (GDP per capita), which compares pre-tax money. The $10/day value that a US citizen gains from the roads was paid for out of that average income.
I found mathematics much more approachable after being convinced it was not important to understand “why” - that I would spend all my time trying to understand that which is not necessarily understandable.

its like wondering how a hammer works instead of just using the hammer
Imagine that the Imagination Quotient is a number between 0 and 1, with 0 being the inability to imagine even what you're looking at, and 1 representing the ability to imagine a real thing unseen in full detail. The Imagination Quotient required to imagine that someone's utility is 80 is would be an proper imaginary number.
Ubiquitous networking, and the lack of a suitable operating system to match it.

When I started programming, systems with floppy disks that held 360k were the norm. Those disks could be write protected. Diskcopy was a standard DOS command that allowed you to have an exact copy of your data, protected against alteration by the hardware of the machine, and the write-protect tab.

You could directly know what data you were putting into the computer, if it was at risk of modification, and you could even tell if it was being accessed, because it was slow and noisy. Modern Operating Systems have no such provisions for controlling access to data in a obvious and transparent manner.

The hardware was simple enough that there was nowhere for malware to hide. Now that we have systems to boot our systems, that's no longer true. There's no operating system available to provide anywhere near the assurance of MS-DOS on a stand alone twin floppy drive machine.

Because things were inherently secure, shareware was huge. You could freely try out new things, dozens of things in a sitting, sourced from a guy selling floppy disks at a computer club meeting, and know you couldn't possibly mess up your computer or your work.

There is no equivalent operating system security today. The only reasonable approach, in my mind, is that of capability based security. In those systems, you decide what specific resources (files, folders, network access, etc) to make available to a program when you run it. If you didn't include it, your application can't get at it, no matter what. This in direct opposition to the way things are done now, where the program might pull up a file dialog, but then directly accesses the files without oversight, and can do anything you're allowed instead of what you told it.

Couple insecure operating systems with ubiquitous networking, and it's a recipe for disaster.

I figure 5 more years before people wake up to the root cause, and 10 more before it starts getting fixed.
One thing I really liked about Delphi was its strict separation between generated and manually-written code. Delphi had a dedicated text file format that represented the form built in the GUI builder. So, VC would just pick up changes in the form file and save them like anything else.
I was using Cliqz. You can read their announcement from when they closed the service https://cliqz.com/announcement.html

"It became clear to us in the last weeks, that all political initiatives to create an independent European digital infrastructure have been stalled or postponed for years."

If there where no competitors from outside the EU them or others would create a reasonable search engine.
It sounds to me like we have a difference of opinion on how to make change that’s unlikely to be resolved over a hn discussion. That’s okay! My point is just that people who say “both sides are bad” aren’t throwing up their hands in defeat. We’re working on this stuff too, you may just disagree with how effective our work is.
> Shakespeare’s work is full of clichés and his spelling was atrocious. :-)

How could you not be aware that spelling was not standardized at the time? Does this person know nothing about the history of the English language?

/s and :) should be obvious here, but I am including them anyway, just to be safe. I don't want to be accused of old fashioned trolling, and starting a flame war.
As far as I can tell, the political class decided that no cost was too high to avoid being the one left standing when the music stops, after the '08 crash. So we'll just inflate until someone gets unlucky and is the one stuck with the blame for a massive crash rather than 2-3 smaller recessions inconveniencing some other politicians, who are actually the ones to blame for the whole situation. [EDIT] actually, arguably, the '08 crash was already an in-the-works recession delayed and made worse by exactly this kind of thing.

Another possibility is that someone realized something really awful, like that the global economy had shifted such that anything like the "asian contagion" crash (no, nothing to do with COVID[0]) can't be contained next time, so they're desperately trying to keep the plates spinning until they can figure something out, because they expect the next major crash will be a true global depression and don't know how to stop/mitigate it if it's triggered.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Asian_financial_crisis
If you wait a bit, you can get what you want to try.
I used to watch the TempleOS creators channel just because he was so wild. Constantly ranting about how god told him to build the OS and randomly exclaiming the n-word or some racist statement. Living on some form of welfare I believe? What a story. Interesting to see someone continuing the code portion of his work.
tech made my life worse:

sensor-driven sinks in public restrooms: dont turn on when you want, shutoff too soon, forcing me into frustrating, time-consuming, farsical movements to try to get it to magically trigger again or stay on, so I can finish rinsing my hands or face

sensor-driven autoflush toilets in public restrooms: similar issues, except they also tend to flush when you dont want -- at the worst time -- or not flush at all when you really really really need it to

in both cases I "get" the fact theyre trying to save water and/or reduce their utility bills. get it. but it makes our lives worse than they were decades ago, when out in public. I know its a trade-off between evils...

tech made my life better:
modern mobile smartphones. if you could travel back in time to even the 70s and tell someone that within their lifetime they'll have a small personal device that can do the 1000's of things a 2020 era phone can do, you might blow their mind. yes it has introduced a new class of problems too (eg. social media doom scrolling all day long, more distracted driving, etc.) but the amount of new awesome things it allows is totally worth it, imo, and a big net improvement.
They said they were talking about "grocery costs", and later clarified it was groceries only [1], which is very different from restaurant prices.

For comparison, our household (US) spends ~$200/person/month on groceries (also with very little eating out). Food here in the US is cheaper, and we aren't mostly buying organic, but we are using Instacart. I'm also surprised they are getting such a large number.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29513375
Thus is the way of the Oracle
1) The article is from May 2021

2) When I checked today the free Ampere instance was a 1 core, 6GB of memory, 1 Gbps network bandwidth, and up to 2 virtual NICs.

Edit: I spoke too soon. After selecting it I was able to increase the CPU count to 4 and 24GB of memory. I provisioned with Ubuntu 20.04, logged in and I see 4 CPUs and 24GB of memory. Cool.

The free x86 instance is 1 core, 1GB of memory, 0.48 Gbps network bandwidth, and up to 1 virtual NIC.
Well if you say they're arbitrary, I can't disagree with you. The distinction between all words is obituary, especially when it comes to sociological concepts.

But if in truth there's no reason to condemn “tribalism” and yet extol nationalism, then I think we ought to be proud of the original and most commonly used term "Tribe" and look down upon its usage.
Lots, apparently.

Search r/JustRolledIntoTheShop for "headlights".

Some of the first few matches:

Ford Fusion: https://reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/pw1n0e/t...

Tesla: https://reddit.com/r/Justrolledintotheshop/comments/pvyq3u/y...
I fully expect the US to select a judge for this case that will not give Assange the slightest bit of generosity. I hope you're right, but I'm much more cynical about the impartiality of the judiciary.
> At peak popularity, Borland products where easily available. Borland decided to turn to enterprise and raised the price considerably, so individuals and small companies started looking elsewhere

There is a lot to be said for being easy to get and affordable. I gladly give IntelliJ a couple of hundred dollars a year, because $10-$20 a month for a superior developer experience is worth it to me.

If I was paying their enterprise rate, though ... not a chance.
> I think there is a certain 'magic' in not understanding certain concepts fully. It's probably why I like maths and heavily dislike physics and chemistry.

This doesn't make sense to me. Math are things that humans can understand fully, physics and chemistry are not, at least not yet. Things like "the volume of a sphere is 4/3PIr^3" can be fully understood, there are many ways to derive that formula. Of course you can apply it without understanding it, but the same goes for newtons equations or any of the many other formulas you have in physics and chemistry.
The News Media Alliance, which is doing this lawsuit, is basically another lobbying group from News Corp, Hearst, Sinclair, etc.

Based on just those 3 names alone, you can infer this is not a group of benevolent angels or small-town newspapers. It's companies run by the likes of Rupert Murdoch with previous geographic monopolies and networks of O&O stations that are salty that they don't hold the same stranglehold over information they used to.

Clearly, this is a feigned appeal to get rent-seeking laws in their favor to profit from.
Ellison isn't the salesman, he's the lawnmower.
don't let perfect be the enemy of good. =)
Line the clamshell with velvet or linen.
If you keep posting flamewar comments we will have to ban this account. We've already had to ask you about this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://www.shortform.com/blog/48-laws-of-power-law-40-despi...
Another example is Google heavily censoring search results.... it is spreading everywhere. The top websites all do it.

I do use Yandex and other websites when what I'm looking for is hidden (but the list of websites that aren't censoring (or are censoring different stuff) is shrinking).
Use /r/Conservative then? It’s not like you don’t have options.

I really hope you’re not going to complain “I tried commenting on HN but I got downvoted”
This is a tangent, but the "utility monster" scenario only makes sense if the utility gained from an activity remains the same with how many resources are put into it. This doesn't make sense with how people actually work, almost all goals or resources or pleasures have diminishing returns, or homeostasis. Do negative feedback loops exist in this philosophy? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the point.
I feel number 3 in my bones.
Imagor: A fast, Docker-ready image processing server written in Go
I restrict my definition to investigative reporting and neutral reporting of current affairs. People who write op-eds, or engage in propaganda, or (in this case) are an outlet for strategically timed leaks by foreign governments, coordinated beforehand with said outlet - that's not journalism, whatever else it happens to be.

The evidence of Russian collaboration is detailed in the Mueller indictment, numerous investigative pieces about e.g. the kinds of people who visited Assange in the embassy, the obviously coordinated timing of DNC leaks, etc. etc. A preponderance of available evidence, let's call it.
"So by weight charcoal and anthracite coal have an energy density of about 30 MJ/kg, while poorer kinds of coal range down to half of that." (https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/udjl5/charcoal_...) However, the density of charcoal is much less than that of coal: 200 kg/m^3 vs 1500 kg/m^3 (for solid anthracite).

Producing 1kg of charcoal requires 3-4kg of wood. (Producing the 900°C for the process is an exercise for the reader.) (https://www.fao.org/3/y4450e/y4450e11.htm)