skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's interesting to consider the difference between project and event driven (ops) work.

Engineering project teams doing Scrum struggle when tasks need to be initiated and completed at a faster cadence than their sprint cycle - for instance an engineer doing development work planned monthly gets 3 calls a day asking him to reboot a server.

There are apparently better ways of managing operational work - for kanban (with or without a board), ticket systems and queues and processes and dashboards for managers to spot bottlenecks live and re-alocate workers to solve them.

I know (from TV docs) that ERs here generally have a "morning meeting" where the manager briefs people and talks through throughput statistics and demand estimates.

I don't know how to manage an ER department, but I'd understand a lot of work has been done in that area. What I could say is that it isn't project work you could plan on a monthly sprint cadence.

Burger bar workers will also generally be executing operational work according to a clear process that involves tickets and ownership of a problems (tables). I've also seen IT help desks run like this.

What I'm saying is, Scrum is one possible way of running things, but it isn't one size fits all for all kinds of work. But just people are not doing Scrum does not mean they are not working within a detailed process where they may potentially be micromanaged to the same degree.
It takes quite a lot of energy to come to a full stop then accelerate again with a bicycle. Motorists don't have that problem.

Combine that with sudden stops often meaning that you have to start from a higher gear and you end up with potentially dangerous situations where it can take quite some time to get up to speed again. Even slowing down to a snail's pace is safer than stopping completely.

That's part of the reason why cyclists can treat stop signs as yield signs in some states[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_stop
A good thing about it is that when a tool doesn‘t support a certain feature, it‘s usually graceful, because most syntax is designed to be usable as plain text, so just fall back too that.
Cyclists want cycle paths to be built, but (especially in London) how much would this cost? How much would this cost per person-mile ridden on the new routes? Is this proportionate or not? Would cyclists be able or willing to fund the construction?
I don't get this captcha tbh. Shouldn't it be trivial to create minor variations based off of a real human slide?
The 40% Rule: The Simple Secret to Success
As I wrote above, we'll include this news in our next customer newsletter, which is due out soon. --Katie
An amazing amount was free and usable. Usenet was used for the stuff that is now broken among Facebook (non private use), Twitter, stackexchange, etc. free/libre software did exist, and though limited in scope, where it existed it was often better. Gcc wasn’t as good a compiler as some vendors, but was better than some in code generation, and better than all in standard compliance, error messages and general UI. emacs and vi were the better editors around.

NCSA Mosaic and Server (that started the web) were free. The web was free and a huge percentage of it informative / labor of love free from commercial interest.

There was a lot of free/gratis but not free/libre software as well.

But also, you had to pay for a lot more things than you do today. WYSIWYG Word processors and spell checkers, for example, were expensive, and there was no free alternative (TeX was, it was superior in quality but with abysmal UI)

I would gladly return the net, and possibly the software world, back to that state. A lot of people assume that without ads the net cannot exist - but it did, it was informative, and useful.
Same, but with Qt. KDE has done a remarkable job at making GTK applications look native too though.
Google: "Don't be evil"

Wat?
But I don't understand how we can't make a program that has a bit of randomness.
I was curious about Disasterpeace's music, but had trouble finding it because you used the original spelling of the word instead of the artist's wordplay (I don't blame you, it's definitely hard to remember). Thought I'd comment in case anyone else is curious.
I remember interviewing for Airbnb and how every interviewer made it a point to say user experience & design is in their core. In my head I was thinking slow page load time, dark user patterns, it takes several clicks to get to search results, home page feed is pretty much static.
Well, a film can probably reach a wider audience than HN. It seems like he wants society to reconsider itself, in its many millions, rather than for just our relatively small group on this forum to reconsider society.
Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crap.

Corollary: 95th percentile is only (approximately) 50th percentile of non-crap.
> It's not realism to believe the EU can't exist within or facilitate your idealised frame of reference (assuming it makes sense and is something people should want), it's just negativity.

As a citizen of the EU, I am arguing for the debureaucratization of institutions, for capital unlocking in proper ventures, nuclear energy, and the appropriate handling of countries from which human capital is departing faster than some war-torn ones. Frankly, I don't give a damn that some people might perceive this as 'negativity' on a forum when I have (hopefully) an entire life to live under this construct.

> Quite frankly nationalistic resurgence is the #1 indicator for "euro realism", so this is a very reasonable stance to take.

Quite frankly, if you're going to shove me, against evidence, in the nationalist insurgence "euro realism" and then claim it as a reasonable stance to take. I'm not sure where that leaves me in this debate. Argue with your constructed image of me all you want.
Amen - I tried I convince a group of people I'd been contracting with to set up a partnership model along these lines, specifically so we could carve out that kind of control. No such luck, people were happy because day rates in the UK were (and are) ludicrously high.
Breaking and entering is not particularly difficult, in fact it's probably easier than a lot of CAPTCHAs. The reason people inclined to do illegal / immoral things don't do it is the likelihood of getting caught and the consequences therein.

Of course most people aren't spammers or burglars so in most cases it doesn't matter.
>It was easy enough to make a website that anyone could. There were services to build a page (Geocities, Angelfire), and if you wanted a bit more control you could host something on a shared server as simply as FTP'ing some HTML files to a remote directory.

Just for what it's worth, this web still exists! Free hosting sites are still around, as is (S)FTP and plain ol' HTML.

Just a couple of weeks ago, I wrote a python script that generates + uploads webpages to help my wife with her work using nothing more than print() statements and an SFTP command.
That still sounds completely wrong. I might give you 75th percentile but certainly not 95th.
> I would gladly pay money to a trustworthy company to sanitize my traffic blocking every bit except what I really need to be there.

$0/month -> duckduckgo -> browser-level protection and email aliases

$1/month -> Mozilla -> browser-level protection and email aliases (relay.firefox.com)

$2/month -> NextDNS -> DNS-over-HTTPS with blocklists and tracking protection

$1/month -> Apple -> browser-level protection, Private Relay & Hide My Email

Blocking "every bit" is a hard problem.
Northvolt rolls out Europe’s first ‘gigafactory-era’ car battery
Agreed, I see junior devs in their first job every semester. Some people with CS backgrounds, other with engineering backgrounds.

Software development sucks so much, folks waste ungodly amounts of time with trivial stuff like setting up their programming language correctly* or figuring out how to use undocumented libs.

I'm confident AI and investiment in dev tools will make programming much more accessible.

However, senior devs are another story. They are generally paid to make architectural decisions and solve weird problems. I don't see their salary bring affected to much by said technologies.

* Using dev containers made that A LOT better
Show HN: The NFT Price Is Right
I don't understand the grandfather bit. Wasn't he right? Makes sense to me that a shared bathroom would decrease the cost, and I've lived in an apartment like that and it was fine.
I find this article to be sort of ridiculous. Sure, some of the critiques about the various flavors of Markdown might be valid (but I would posit that for the non-technical users the author claims to be so concerned about, the chances of them regularly having to interact with more than one flavor (and no, Slack and Reddit don’t count), is extremely low), but the whole piece seems to be an advertisement for the author's company's JSON-based rich text specification, which couldn’t be further away from the point of Markdown if it tried.

Markdown is for writers. The fact that it has been adapted and forked and flavored into something that many developers like is wonderful. But it is fundamentally for writers. And I’ve taught dozens, if not hundredS, of “normies” to use Markdown when writing for the web over the last 15 years. Some of them have hated it — which is totally fine - but many more have appreciated being able to write readable content for the web without having to do it in the CMS, which is always, always, always, a flat-out terrible idea. Or the other alternative, which is write in Google Docs or Word or Notion or whatever and then paste it into the CMS for the hell that will ensue.

There is a certain irony in the author claiming to want to make a better authoring system for users, but only in a way that adds complexity, requires developers to build UIs around its spec, and has benefits that really only appeal to the people building the CMS or trying to sell people on why their version of TinyMCE is best (oh, but you have to build the TinyMCE UI yourself…this is just another overly-complicated JSON spec that really is provably only suited by whatever it is Sanity is trying to hawk).

Markdown isn’t perfect. And it doesn’t claim to be. But in terms of being a readable and easily usable way to write content for the web, it’s pretty damn great.
> I think what you're missing is that instead of providing the convenience behavior you're looking for, a more powerful primitive is available.

That's great, but I still want the convenience behavior.

> Give it a chance.

I tried. I kept getting papercuts, and things that were easy on PopOS were annoying on NixOS. That wouldn't deter me if I needed to use Nix, but as it is PopOS works perfectly for me and I have no reason to switch. I might still try out of curiosity, but I'm honestly not feeling that enthusiastic.

(I actually documented my experience here, if you're curious: https://poignardazur.github.io/2021/09/08/nixos-post-mortem/)

But that kind of response that boils down to "you just think that way because you haven't tried it" or "the reason the UX is so incredibly obtuse is because of the underlying model" seriously annoy me.

You can have plumbing and a porcelain. Nix currently is lacking on the porcelain side. The idea that you have to study the entire programming model of an OS (not just vaguely understand it, which I do, but study it) to use it, and if you think it's not worth the effort, it's because you haven't tried it yet, is inane.
> especially [a code base] as shit as Kubernetes

I completely agree that Kubernetes is best understood through the lens of Google's corporate interests. But 1. resorting to language like "shit" makes me question the writer's credentials and reliability and 2. the code base may not be exemplary but its quality is far from belonging to the poorer end of the known spectrum.
What I learned running a SaaS for a year
With a shared medium trusting customer premise equipment to do proper, compatible media access control is pretty much inevitable. A device could just as easily transmit noise all day long, ruining service for everyone on the same cable segment. The only way to make that impossible would require rewiring everything as a switched network, which would generally mean running a fiber to every home.
>> Software used to not hide all the options to "protect me from myself".
I agree this is not for for us power users. However - ten years ago I was the free pc support for extended family and distant friends. Constantly removing 5 toolbars from IE and all sorts of adware, spyware, pre-installed crap ...
Now it's years ago I had to resolve anything. So at least this "protecting people from themselves" is really working out great.
> Yes it does. You were arguing that Apple can prevent competition from ever arising. This isn't the case, clearly.

Ok, fine, it can only reduce the effectiveness of competition by a large amount. See the last point in this reply.

> All of this profit is Apple's return on the initial investment of developing the iPhone and App Store. This was an existentially risky thing for them to do, and we should not hinder the profits brought about by its success, lest we discourage others from attempting the same.

Why? Do we not want to discourage others from attempting to build rent-seeking platforms?

(a) "I want to design and sell a great device: a new kind of smartphone, with radically improved UX and capabilities"

(b) "I have a great device that everybody wants. Instead of directly raising its price, I want to make money by getting a 30% cut of all business ever done on this device, forever"

(a) is a perfectly fine business plan, and it doesn't hamper anyone else's competitive efforts. The follow-up (b) however _only_ works as a monopolistic plan. If the device isn't very successful, the rent-seeking will further drive away app developers. But if the device becomes incredibly popular, app developers will have to suck up the extortionate price because I've locked down the market.

Peter Thiel said "Competition is for suckers", and this is a good example of it. The benefits of the free market come from competition, but companies will naturally strive hard to avoid competition. Therefore, the rules should make it hard for them to do so, and easy for competition to arise.

> It's not at all clear that these regulations will create a more innovation-oriented market. It could well be that they will hinder innovation. Do you have any ideas on how we can tell for sure? I think we should be pretty confident before using regulation, don't you?

On the one side: hundreds and hundreds of promising startups whose products only ended up raising the existing giants' moat even higher, when not cancelled outright.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

On the other side: gosh, what if someone in the future had the next iPhone-level innovation in hand, but the idea of having to turn it into a semi-open platforms after a paltry fifteen years of obscene profits turned them off the idea?

I'm not so much saying that the benefits will be massive, as much as I'm saying the 'deterrent' risk is hilariously negligible.
Miscarriage may be linked to changes in vaginal bacteria
Why can't Google and apple solve the 'are you a human?' check at operating system level. As a user on mobile phone they are already tracking our clicks and should be easy to communicate that to the apps and browsers.
>* Getting information and help was difficult. At best there was c.l.c and such if you had a modem, but there was so much gatekeeping going on that it was hard to get a straight answer on anything.

Just to clarify, by c.l.c, you mean comp.lang.c on Usenet, right?
How do I get to play with this?

I want to know if I would be filtered out
> which is worded very clearly

Hard disagree. I've been racking my brain as of late trying to decide if default apache access logs violate the GDPR, and stackexchange searches on the topic seem to confirm the confusion.

If the legality of data collection hinges on what is considered necessary for service maintenance in the eye of a judge, the law is not clear.
Conversational Styles
> Whatever the ruby markdown library did ...

FYI John Gruber's original Markdown.PL is written in Perl [1] not Ruby.

> ... things like [...] HTML [...] even have IETF or W3C specifications nowadays.

HTML was originally designed as an SGML vocabulary [2], and had SGML DTDs by IETF and W3C for the longest time [3] (albeit somewhat defective from the beginning, and grew a number of warts over time).

The beauty of Markdown IMO is that it's specified as a short syntax for HTML, with the option to include inline HTML where the fragment covered by Markdown is insufficient. That's exactly the model supported by SGML's SHORTREF feature which lets you define context-dependent tokens SGML will replace into canonical angle-bracket markup. So if you're looking for a document preparation system that lets you write casual text a la Markdown (or your own customized or novel syntax), then can translate that syntax into predictable markup and goes all the way to support complex document integrations with established XML tool chains, etc. etc. and can also import/produce HTML, then there's always SGML, based on an ISO standard even.

[1]: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

[2]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/MarkUp.html

[3]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1866
I don't drive or cycle (just a pedestrian) and definitely don't want to "dehumanize" cyclists, but I do find it scary (at least here in London) how rarely cyclists follow the Highway Code. In particular, it is very common to see cyclists running red lights or cycling the wrong way down one-way streets. I guess since there's no registration, it's very unlikely cyclists would be penalised for this.
We do have another storage option, which is our Hetzner Cloud Volumes. The prices are visible here (https://www.hetzner.com/cloud) when you scroll down and here's some general info about Volumes (https://docs.hetzner.com/cloud/volumes/). All of our cloud products, including Volumes, are also available at our ASH location (Ashburn, Virginia). --Katie
The current policy seems very much aimed at not letting it's citizens decide unless their decision is acceptable to Moscow.
> For example one cannot get a visa to China if one has a stamp from Taiwan

I am quite sure that this is not true.
There is no efficient pub/sub functionality in HTTP.
My experience is that the problem with producing business software is not the lack of programming knowledge. Rather it's a lack of people who understand the business and are capable of abstract thought and formalizing processes. I don't see AI helping with that any time soon.
> Why should we stop? Where I live (NW Europe) this sentiment is almost exclusively echoed by members of the refreshed "neoconservative/nationalistic" right wing parties.

This is the 2nd post ignoring the fact that I have declared I am, in fact, not a member of such a group. Assuming that I'm lying, you'd be correct in holding your stance. Considering I am not lying, you are basically closing in the door to communication and possible expansions of subject matter from someone that's really not an extremist in any sense of the word.
> Solving most of these CAPTCHAs are easy, and you could probably repurpose and retrain existing solutions given enough data.

You are right that you can probably repurpose / retrain solutions fairly quickly, but if the CAPTCHA-creators can create frameworks to create new Captcha-types fast enough (e.g. put a structure in place so it takes 1 person a day to create a new type, and you can have a team of 20 people churning out new ones constantly) then the economics of running a captcha-solving team becomes exponentially harder, and building a captcha-solver involves a lot more work.

i.e. If it is quicker to create a Captcha rather than solve it, and the people who are creating the Captcha's have more resources than the Captcha-crackers, they will stay ahead.

Security through obscurity is a valid strategy to slow down efforts, and will definetly help when you have teams of people working to defeat your security.
It's interesting to see how the rapid advancement of technology has affected the human body over time and how we are trying to combat it with further technology. No bullshit, is there any way to reverse this apparent adaptation the eye undergoes during development? Would stimulating the eye with farther objects and other such corrections re adapt the eyes to normal? I realize there is a lot of pseudoscience and trickery in this subject so I am asking here for actual peer reviewed papers on the subject.
Likewise. Pretty much everywhere I've worked uses standup as a way of bullying people into working more hours, with a couple of unusually relaxed exceptions. It is a far cry from the origins of agile as a means of programmers defending themselves against a hostile organisation, as it was originally. Now agile is the hostile organisation.
>The result is that users reactions to problems have a tendency to range from frustration to panic and rage, rather than an inquisitive curiosity aimed at solving the problem.

To be fair, a lot more people now (many of whom are not tech nerds) are forced to use computers in order to do things that didn't require a computer 30 years ago.

I'm sure the average HN user's reaction would be closer to frustration than inquisitive curiosity if they were forced to navigate a complex and banal social system in order do something like sign up for a phone plan or watch a movie.
It's common to add the year to articles which are not from current year. Sometimes the date in the article is only at the end and you want to know if what's your going to read is from now or from the past.
It's a difference to read an article about palm devices from 2010 or 2022.
> Why would Airbnb be to blame for this?

Because they have pushed back hard on cities’ attempts to regulate and enforce what is happening due to the influence of their service. They have no respect for what is happening in some places and how residents are impacted.

Your argument is similar to saying that Facebook is not to blame for the spread of misinformation. Tech platforms create a new world and then want nothing to do with the consequences of their influence. It is arrogant and irresponsible.
The quality of tech tyrants has definitely declined. Zuckerberg is a
pouty, flouncing fop. Clive Sinclair and Alan Sugar were proper
gangstas.
lol no thanks I'd rather not have an OS based tracking API, even worse for every website out there. Just dont use captchas. "Are you a human" is not something a website should know.
What's so awful about SquareSpace? I've recommended it to a few people who were after a website.
> Markdown is lovely for tech documentation

That’s one of the weakest points of Markdown, because it has no support for any sort of cross-referencing so they have to be maintained by hand or through bespoke extension (often conflicting).
> From my recollection, doctors don't standup each day to report on what they have or have not done and their individual progress, they report on purely on problematic patients that could do with expertise from a different expert, and it's not a daily progress report.

Isn't this what standups should be for developers too? It's not supposed to be a daily status report, but a discussion about blockers and an exchange of knowledge from other devs that might be able to unblock you.
That's true. This only affects those who have visited Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen on or after March 1, 2011, and they're still not disqualified, but I do understand the frustration at the inconvenience (although none of this will affect me since I am a US and EU citizen).