skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: I'm an Imposter
First off, I'm no hacker, in any sense of the word. I work a warehouse job at a university bookstore and pack boxes all day. And I literally can't code anything, period. At home, my "tech set up" is a $250 Chromebook, a $30 Bluetooth speaker, and an old budget Android phone. But maybe we can look past the tech stuff.

Perhaps more relevant (and more problematic), is that I can't actually keep up with most of the discussions on here. 99% of the links on HN, I have no idea what it's talking about. And of the comments posted, I can maybe make sense of only a fraction, and I certainly don't understand enough to participate in any meaningful way.

Heck, I don't even browse the web anymore. Which means I have no links to submit, either.

So what am I left with? Asking a crapload of generic Ask-HNs. One to two a day for the past month, in fact.

So, why am I here?

Because in real life, I'm surrounded by people who are boring and uncritical. And even if the individuals themselves are not, the social norm certainly is (in my world, at least).

It's easy to go along to get along with everyone: I can be one of the friendliest people! While having no friends.

I'm admittedly not a "naturally smart/intelligent" person (trust me on this one), but I am a very curious soul, and I love to learn, love to think.

But the more I embrace my intellectual self, the more disconnected I feel from the rest of the world. The more my mind grows, the more it dies from loneliness.

So why am I here, posting all these Ask HNs? Obviously, to surround myself with like-minds (or more accurately, smarter minds), to fill the void that was becoming increasingly unbearable.

And I'm so glad I'm here. I've never felt this happy, this alive. To be seen, to be taken seriously. But in the back of my mind, I know I'm overly excited, maybe even obsessed. All the while realizing that I'm most likely making a fool out of myself, my naive, childish, attention-seeking self.

Do I belong here? Am I welcomed here? Maybe I can ask that on Ask HN? And what, die of embarrassment? Or, more likely, I'll just get pity points and sympathy reassurance. But how will I know what you all really think?

...

I think it's time for a break. Most likely won't be posting any more Ask HNs for a while. But I'll probably still poke around and lurk a bit. And I'm definitely still open to emails and hanging out on Discord. Feel free to reach out as usual.

Thank you all so so much for having me. Thank you for all your advice and wisdom. Thank you for being honest and constructive. Thank you for the generosity and support. It's been a blast. :))

Much love,
Sam
What makes the IKEA haunted? I’ve been there a few times, but haven’t heard anything
Years ago (> 10) I used me+hertz.com@mydomain.com registering for Hertz.

I started getting spam on it. Tried contacting them to let them know someone was selling customer email addresses and of course they just responded that obviously I had a virus or something.

Mostly unrelated, but just before I responded I was modifying a custom milter to filter messages based on the byte string "Copyrights =C2=A9 Xsolo All Rights Reserved" because this particular spammer likes to copyright his gmail spam. Weird but convenient.
There's a <starwind> in Australia so occasionally I get stuff for <starwind>@gmail.com. I got his golf club membership info sent to my email address. I've gotten his dinner reservation info sent to my email address. For like 2 months I got his paystub sent to my email address.

I really wish I could get his phone bill sent to my email address so I could call and tell him he could have gotten a larger raise
No, states either have the right to set their own laws or they don't, you don't get to pick and choose some categories of laws on ideological grounds. State level abortion laws and school textbook laws are okay to override federal regulations but not telecom laws?

Fact is there's a certain set of individuals right now spending a lot of time, money and effort to set new state laws based on conservative religious ideology. Conveniently enough, many of them also happen to be big fans of Ajit Pai and the people working to overturn net neutrality laws.

But then again, American politics and hypocrisy is nothing new, so it's not like I'm surprised in the slightest.
Argonne National leaned heavily on Tcl relatively recently for a petascale super-computer project of theirs[0] (I was introduced to it by Justin Wozniak of Argonne at a Tcl conference in Manassas).

[0] https://www.mcs.anl.gov/~wozniak/papers/Swift_Tcl_2015.pdf
There's a difference between putting on your own seatbelt and the car forcefully tying you into the chair every time you sit.
GitHub is essentially a "freemium" business; a lot of businesses use it and pay for it. This is quite different from SourceForge which never really had such a model, and AFAIK relied 100% on ads. At its peak SourceForge had about $23m in revenue, and GitHub has ~$300m currently. While both serve the same purpose, they're very different as a business. GitLab and BitBucket have similar business models (with some differences).

I can't predict the future, but I see no reason why GitHub should "become the next SourceForge". The SourceForge exodus to GitHub was already well underway (and, at the time, also Google Code, BitBucket, Launchpad) because they offered vastly superior products than SourceForge, which was always a mess. People seem to have a lot of rose-coloured glasses about SourceForge, but their UI was clunky (even for the time), slow, chaotic with all the ease of use as your tax form, stuff often didn't work, etc.

The whole adware fiasco was the death rattle of an already declining business that couldn't build a vaguely decent product.
A Jellyfish and a Mainframe
Do you find yourself completely baffled when you're advocating for something as simple and mundane as interoperability with desktop computers and USB drives in 2022 and people are arguing against it?
The secret they don't want you to know is that fossil fuels are actually renewable
Avoiding classes has a couple of benefits:

1. It reduces the overhead to use your interface. Your users don't have to import your struct classes, and can just pass in bare dictionaries. If Python's typing was more effective, these dictionaries would also be type checked to make sure you're calling the library's APIs correctly.

2. It deliberately closes off the option of adding state or initialization logic. Classes let you do way more than just encode a struct, and as a codebase grows they have a tendency to become more complex just because they can (like a gas filling its container). This makes APIs harder to maintain and work with. Sometimes, all you need is "raw structs".
Seems a lot more performant to generate single color images programatically rather than sending it over the wire?

Assuming this level of optimization is actually warranted
Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!
A useful way to interpret this blog post is “I had weird health issues that were resistant to treatment, but dramatically changing my diet helped”.

This blog post does not contain useful advice for most people, but is a) vaguely interesting to see how someone managed to control rare health issues, and b) may be helpful for folk who have been trying and failing to deal with major health issues similar to the author.
and here I am, wondering if it's safe to eat stuff grown in my yard because there was a fire at a nuclear weapons production facility 30 miles from here, 50 years ago.
I played along with one of these out of curiosity. I got the call while I was browsing the SF Costco by the Selecttech 552 dumbbells. The memory is vivid af. They claimed that money had been transferred out of my Coinbase account. I had a sum of money similar to what they claimed in USD in there in ETH so I was curious if they knew details about my account.

In the end, there was nothing clever about it. They just talked about how to reverse the payment etc. etc. and then wanted to send me a link to share screen or point my phone at my Coinbase screen or something. So if the link didn't download malware, there must be some sort of sequence of things they would have me do that would compromise me. Perhaps they'd got my password and they'd ask me to type in my 2 FA code and they'd just type it in first as it was visible? Anyway, at that point, the number of possibilities amplified and I wasn't prepared to play the game any more and besides I was at Costco and really didn't have my laptop, so I said "Okay, I'll just go do this at the website" and hung up over their protestations.

Honestly, it was pretty obviously scammy because they were trying to apply pressure tactics. I've never had anyone who serves me use pressure tactics on me.
In your example I'd say you have the following entities:

* ISP = Government
* Client = Driver
* Netflix = Ford
* Shows = Truck
* Bandwidth = Roads

The Government (ISP) taxes the Driver (Client) when they buy a Truck (watch shows) because that act puts stress on the Roads (Bandwidth). They do not put a special tax on Ford (Netflix) for simply offering a Truck (show) for sale.

So if the ISP wants to get extra revenue from this they need to charge the client more as they use more bandwidth.
Don't forget e.g. the M/D-21. Or Orbital Pegasus, or... air launched cruise missiles, or...

This is an idea we flirt with, to varying success, over and over and over again.
Yeah, my wife has a memory to be able to reel them off for 20 minutes. I can barely recall one when I want it.

But I am the one who sees an opportunity and improvises on the spot more successfully.
Far too much complexity and risk for the 1% of customers who might care. and for no benefit -- banks don't care about scammers.
C,Pascal, even C# and C++ need type annotations mostly to actually make the program work. The type systems in Typescript and F# are more about helping the developer than helping the compiler.

Python type hints are slightly different because there are type hints as a syntax feature and then there is type checking, which can be static like mypy or during runtime like Beartype. Every type checker comes with its own type system, though they are hopefully somewhat similar...
Thank you for your feedback. It's a work in progress. Being the only developer, an engineering student and a part-time freelance dev at the same time, it's hard to keep up with the maintenance of the algorithms and keeping the platform working perfectly. 3.5 months was the time i developed full-time. Some of the algorithms have been running since aug 2020
tiny feedback: might be worthwhile NOT having massive image sizes[0][1][2] on your main page

[0] https://paylinkz.app/static/media/3iPhones.3a0445f546dbd7d60...

[1] https://paylinkz.app/static/media/paypalCards.80722bbc2c1187...

[2] https://paylinkz.app/static/media/right.ae9d22eaded5ba6c6b70...
Careful there... IBD isn't just discomfort, even if that is the immediate effect - long term gut lining inflammation can lead to cellular damage greatly increasing your risks of certain kinds of intestinal/colon cancers.

Have you considered the possibility that you're merely sensitive to certain types of food, which would be easier to cut out than doing large scale diet readjustments?
Unsupervised learning often needs labelled data as well, for testing and verification, though admittedly not as much.
"expert" as in random blogger.
Guess I should've put up some demo instead of a drama

>take a photo

yes but there is no preview, if configured right when you take pictures, you are looking at her/him or the button that fetch his/her posted photo

>send it

it is sent (actually post) the moment you press "take photo", they are coupled, you get a thumbnail preview after you take it and a mild haptic notification after uploaded.

>swipe it

You can take a screenshot if you want, but in the app, you swipe, the record is removed from the one and only database
With some dirty hacks, I got it down to 83 bytes:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/286612533757083648/96...

00 89 50 4e 47 0d 0a 1a 0a 00 00 00 0d 49 48 44 52 |.PNG........IHDR|
10 00 00 01 00 00 00 01 00 01 03 00 00 00 66 bc 3a |.............f�:|
20 25 00 00 00 03 50 4c 54 45 b5 d0 d0 63 04 16 ea |%....PLTE���c..�|
30 00 00 00 1b 49 44 41 54 68 81 ec c1 01 0d 00 00 |....IDATh.��....|
40 00 c2 a0 f7 4f 6d 0f 07 14 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |. �Om..........|
50 c0 b9 01 |��.|

Although technically invalid, it still renders fine in Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.

Edit: 87 -> 83 bytes

Edit2: Maybe in a couple of years time, we can use JPEG-XL instead (only 22 bytes, without any hacks!):

data:image/jxl;base64,/wp/QCQIBgEALABLOEmIDIPCakgSBg==
Christo's Oil Barrel Mastabas
Since this has been a thing since the 1800s, wouldn't it be paying out pennies per ton at this point? There has been a lot of inflation in the last 150 years.
If file size is your worry and accuracy not, maybe use a lossy format for tiles like JPG or JP2 rather than PNG?

Worth noting DEMs are moving away from tiled formats recently. Mainly to COG (Cloud Optimised Geotiff) which isn't the most efficient but is a simple tweak to a file format already broadly adopted. There's a few others out there aiming for efficency at scale too - ESRI has CRF and MRF for instance, but nothing has become industry standard other than COG yet.
Also. I don't think that generating alpha is necessarily the only motivation behind building an investment strategy. There are endless possibilities of financial products that could be built on top of a platform like this.

Basically, im looking for help to build the best possible platform.
What about the replication crisis? It's possible to use rigorously sound statistics to lie (or at least unknowingly spread falsehoods). I can't tell you how many times I've seen headlines or abstracts of studies that seem to contradict ones I've seen previously, and back and forth! Particularly in the social sciences.

I recall one study that said all white people are committing environmental racism against all non-white people. I dove in and read the whole thing wondering what method could have yielded scientific confidence in such a broad result. Turns out the model used was a semi-black box that required a request for access and a supercomputer to run. But it was in a Peer Reviewed Scientific Journal and had lots of Graduate Level Statistics so I guess it seemed trustworthy.
UX Feedback Desired for a SaaS
we're creating interactive images and maps to improve website user experiences.

sign up for our basic plan, it's literally free and we'd love to hear feedback. esp from real estate and ecommerce businesses looking to digitally engage customers better
> - EFI system partition is the FAT file system, which is an FS that is even older than the legacy BIOS. Many gory details. Legacy from Microsoft.

I've always wondered why it was required that my EFI partition be FAT. I've had systems where that partition has gotten messed up and required an fsck from a recovery boot, and it seemed like it should be possible to either do that automatically in some way, but being able to use a filesystem that self-corrects would be nice too (although maybe overkill for the 1 GB or whatever I give it). I guess maybe it would only be possible to perform the fsck if I booted from a different partition, which then could develop the same issue. This does make me wonder how silly it would be to have a duplicate boot partition on each of my machines that I only mount to sync over changes to the real one so I could avoid needing to grab my flash drive when stuff like this happens...
They immediately reached a conclusion about something upon reading about it and now as they learned more, they understand that there might be more nuance to it
I'd say this is pretty clear cut.
Ranking the Best Passive Income Investments
1. You gotta start somewhere. Keep laughing at noobs though.

2. It says this person is new, and doesn’t have connections or inroads to get capital from “a big multi-manager”.

3. Sounds about right, but I disagree that the only way to go out on your own is by starting at an established shop. That doesn’t pass the sniff test.

Very likely won’t make a profit. Sure. Will it get him a job offer, connections, or experience. Absolutely.
This article was written by someone who doesn’t read or write much Python, obviously. Why is it on HN?
As a novice on DK, it seems to me that, for DK to be 'suprising' (in the parlance of the OP), four phenomena must hold:

1) an incompetent person is poorer than average at self assessment of their skill

2) as a person's competence increases at a skill, their ability to self-assess improves, until they become 'expert' which is defined by underappreciating their own skill (or overappreciating the skill of others)

3) DK is surprising (interesting) only when some incompetent persons who suffer from DK cannot improve their performance, presumably because their poor self-assessment prevents their learning from experience or from others.

4) Worse yet, some persons suffering from DK cannot improve their performance in numerous skill areas, presumably because their poor self-assessment is caused by a broad cognitive deficit (e.g. political bias), preventing them from improving on multiple fronts (which are probably related in some thematic way).

If DK is selective to include only one or two skill areas, as in case 3, that is not especially surprising, since most of us have skill deficits that we never surmount (e.g. bad at math, bad at drawing, etc). DK becomes surprising only in case 4, when we claim there is a select group of persons who have broad learning deficits, presumably rooted in poor assessment of self AND others — to wit, they cannot recognize the difference between good performance and bad, in themselves or others. Presumably they prefer delusion (possibly rooted in politics or gangsterism) to their acknowledgement of enumerable and measurable characteristics that separate superior from inferior performance, and that reflect hard work leading to the mastery of subtle technique.

If case 4 is what makes DK surprising, then DK certainly is not described well by the label 'autocorrelation' — which seems only to describe the growth process of a caterpillar as it matures into a butterfly.
Thanks for the detailed response, looking forward to the VLDB paper when it happens! Your vision sounds cool. I wonder if you could get most of the way there by exposing the workload (across different pipeline stages) to a materialized view recommender.

In the class project mentioned elsewhere, I found normalizing queries to be pretty slow in practice (naive standardized formatting + query templatization, tried various Python libraries, settled on pglast). I didn't think about trying "skip if fingerprint matches", which may help considerably. Fast normalization is nice! :)
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/10/25/6561928...

https://www.kait8.com/2020/02/21/arkansas-leads-us-meth-use-...
Why waste money? Why does the iPad still ship with a wall wart?
I sent a couple messages to representative Jackie Speier (the IRS id.me shitshow and whatnot) and never got a reply till they started sending campaign advertisements my way. The address doesn't seem to have been sold though.
Fair enough - I've seen it more commonly in smaller machines, but they're also more common in the fleets I've observed (and the ones that are more likely to run close to the edge memory-wise). I have also seen it in systems up to 32GB RAM, so it's by no means a non-issue in systems that are at least somewhat larger. The general observation that oomd/earlyoom + swap is a better solution than no swap still generally applies.
Unit can cover your compliance and KYC responsibilities. Just learned about them. Will get you there significantly faster and cheaper too.
The "print" function will take any Python object and call its "__str__" method. Not sure if it will do it to a string, but the outcome would be the same.

As far as I remember, the "__str__" method is present on all objects in some form, so print will happily take any type.
Stepn is a Web3 lifestyle app with Social-Fi and Game-Fi elements
iPods are still available:

https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-ipod/ipod-touch
In that case, perhaps it is best to merge the top 5-10 tech companies into a single tech behemoth, with no potential domestic competition, making it even more formidable on the world stage.
yea gonna have to call BS on this. there's more NES and SNES emulators around these days than any other systems and their compatibility and accuracy is mind-blowing.
I suspect we live in the same area. I go mountain biking around there often, and I'm a little paranoid when the Santa Ana winds come through and stir up a lot of dust :\
Mypy can be configured to ignore modules based on their names.

Though honestly I think it’s worth it to just bite the bullet and spend a full day or two to go through and fix every single error. After this you will have a much easier time navigating code base. I mean, your “new code” is probably modifications to your old code or calling your old code right? So you want to have at least the boundary between new and old typed. It’s quite satisfying anyway, as you will likely learn and discover tons of bugs on the way.
My mom is very high risk. She's gotten the vaccine, and booster. She's currently considering booster #2, but isn't sure if it's a good idea. She had some issues with her heart after booster #1. Her doctors don't know what to tell her, there's just not enough data yet.

She has been taking every precaution possible, and currently has successfully evaded contracting COVID.

It makes me wonder if she would have been better waiting for a second formulation of the vaccine, given that she's been able to avoid COVID so far.

Would she have been better off waiting for the future vaccine? Isolate while the first generations of the virus burn through people, then get inoculated with a vaccine based on the later ones?

I suppose it's impossible to tell. Couldn't have guaranteed she wouldn't get infected up to this point, but it's something that weighs on me.
I meant Berkshire.

Tesla nor SpaceX would have no reason to buy Twitter, so Musk has to do it himself.

He has Tesla shares, that's kind of a secondary thing.

It's a leveraged buy out - banks and other firms would be going in with him. A bit like you buy a house.
Host Applications on Heroku
You overestimate the average intelligence of a human.
No one has sold me out in the 2 years. I think they know and scan for it before sales.
This title is misleading, the article has a different (updated?) title when you click through.
From the article:

> Physically correct color gradients (as you would get, for example, along an out of focus edge between colors) are equally bright around the midpoint,

So I think there is an argument that using a linear color space is more correct.
> FWIW we have a quite a bit of history of allowing people to protect their privacy

Don't overstate it. Out of all the big social networks, GitHub's handling of user privacy is the worst by far. It took 1 1/2 decades to give a switch to toggle off the default behavior of "provide a public index of my activity across the site to anyone, even though I never asked for this (and was never asked if it was okay, either)". To really spell it out, what this means is that for its entire existence, GitHub has offered even worse privacy controls for what a user chooses to share about themselves than Facebook. For the longest time—until now—the only way to get around this was to regularly delete and then recreate your account (which is still an imperfect solution, not to mention labor intensive) or to disengage completely. Given the way that GitHub has positioned itself, it being even harder to avoid than Facebook has had a hugely deleterious effect on privacy for those who actually care about it.

This should have been table stakes 10 years ago.