skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's such a godawful book. In my view it epitomizes everything that is wrong with design today. And the worst part is that comments like these make it come off as the go-to reference to actually solving these problems.

The reasons it's the worst design guidance out there is that it teaches:
1) that engineers should NOT be entrusted/involved with user design.
2) to conceptualize users as blissful idiots.
3) that obscuring errors in a system is actually a good thing.

All of these are things that I see the lasting effects of in products I use in every day. Don't get me wrong, I bought this with the best of intentions. It was the highest rated design book on Amazon on the topic. Reading through was an extremely painful exercise in essentially coming to realize that everything I see broken in the engineering teams I work with and products I use is actually codified in words.

Take this excerpt as an example -- p. 65:
"Eliminate all error messages from electronic and computer systems. Instead, provide help and insight."

Are you f'ing kidding me? You cannot seriously think this is right. For the longest of time I wondered why I hated using Apple products. It turns out Norman was schooled at Apple and they absolutely practice this teaching. I bought an early-day iPod touch circa 2007 and proceeded on to loading all my music on it. A few upgrades later, some albums disappeared without any error. I searched and searched and searched, trying to describe my problem in a number of different ways on Google to see what I could find. And all I could find were semi-answers. But you know what? If it had actually displayed "error 0xFHJAD1234" when failing during the upgrade, I could've actually google that. And I'll spare you the story of what I had to do when the family Mac's HDD failed ...

So this is what we actually get, devices that SILENTLY fail, designed for people who are assumed not to know what they're doing and who likely do NOT have any technically-literate person around them that could assist them if they could in fact identify the problem.

Worse, this philosophy probably hints at a level of intellectual ignorance/arrogance that is quite fascinating. You see, in my line of work I have to be able to walk engineers I work with from the gate-level silicon all the way up to cloud and AI. Without any false modesty, I think I have a fairly good idea of how modern computer architecture works. Yet, I will be the first to tell you that I have no idea how any of these systems work in full. In fact, no one does. Not the best of kernel developers nor the best of chip designers. To claim that you can somehow inventory every possible problem in a computerized system and then provide a graceful exit from that or useful info is either ignorant or arrogant or both. But since you've eliminated engineers from the design loop (see #1 above), no one will tell you you're full of it.

So yeah, no. Do read Norman's book. But look at it as everything you should NOT be doing.
Columbia University Awarded $185M for Patent Infringement by NortonLifeLock Inc
Then he should name specific countries, not just the region.
About fifteen years ago, my car broke down in the driveway of a Catholic Church before mass. I’d just pulled into the first driveway I could as my engine was overheating. Something like 40 cars rubbernecked past me under the hood of my car trying to add coolant, and not one stopped to ask if I needed help.

Since then I have realized I think very few people actually care about strangers beyond conspicuously appearing to for selfish reasons.
I think it depends on when we are speaking. 56k became increasingly miserable as higher speeds became the norm.
While I was less than impressed by what I saw, I think calling it “a PR disaster” overstates the impact. I observed people reading into both parties what I already know they wanted to believe about each of Musk and the UN.
Perhaps we need government labels like we have on food - little boxes for common things like “battery: removable” or “on/off”.
I disagree. Measurements are funny things depending on the level of detail you need; analog versions of measurements are very clunky when you need precision. (now this is a bit much for bathroom scales and kitchen scales, but it was the calipers that interested me). When I need under .01 precision, my analog calipers just do not do the job as well as my electronic calipers. I can read them, but the last couple of thousandths are always sort of a guess. If I'm working on a project with tolerances of .01 or less, that's just not an option.

I guess a fun middle ground - I have a set of mechanical calipers with a readout in actual numbers on the side like electronics would, but all mechanical, like clockwork or whatever it is in there, going to .001. They're infuriating to use, because the numbers are so small on the side, and at that level of detail, stupidly sensitive.

edited the decimals because it's early and my brain shut off.
The problem I see with this plan is that the state of the art in CS moves profoundly faster than the pace of careers, certifications, curriculum development, &c.

Imagine, if you will, the practices that would have been taught to the "By the book" computer engineers who graduated in 2000. Would you think it happy to have those practices dominant, by regulation, today? Would you want to have the task of lobbying the professional standards committees to update the curriculum so that a decade from now the thing you think is important would be accepted practice?

I think that the difficulty we have updating e.g. language versions or crypto practices is a good model for how well our field responds when we do things more formally. Imagine how long python 2 would be around if it had been the basis for professional credentials for decades!
Wristwatch?
Very true, the left-pad incident from 2016 may have seemed like a one off occurrence but we see protestware revived this year.

1. colors/faker followed the Log4j debacle and was more about corporations using open source heavily but not giving back enough to support the developers so the dev threw in the towel. Applications using 'colors' began freezing (entered a DoS condition) due to an infinite loop introduced by the developer in the code.

2. But with node-ipc, the self-sabotage turned destructive with the package actively deleting files on detecting a Russian/Belarusian host IP

3. event-source-polyfill, styled-components, etc. have adopted more a more "peaceful protest" approach by expressing the maintainer's views condemning the Russian war, but without engaging in outright destructive activity.

Thus far the trends have been about open source and the ongoing war.

But developers have discovered a new avenue of their creative expression (open source) which no longer limits them to simply coding the intended application functionality. And so, the questions that arise are, what will the next protest be about and if we are prepared for it?
This is miles from a temporary oversight. In the Netherlands unchecked citizen surveillance is the norm, and that has nothing to do with being a democracy. The same way the US "still" is a democracy but unchecked surveillance is pervasive.

"Dutch civil servants used social media to spy on citizens, says study"

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2021/05/19/dutch-civil-se...

"Dutch secret service 'also has access to information from PRISM'":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5860215

"The Netherlands, a surveillance state?" (2017):

https://www.ictrecht.nl/en/blog/the-netherlands-a-surveillan...

"Sweeping surveillance powers planned by Dutch government" - "The Netherlands is already the most heavily phone-tapped country in the world" (2016)

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/sweeping-survei...

"With a population of 17 million, the Netherlands is already the most heavily phone-tapped country in the world – with about 26,000 taps granted to the police and other agencies, excluding the security services, every year, according to figures from the Department of Justice."

The author of the article just made himself part of this list...
If the human customer service provides an off-ramp from being banned, then the fraudsters will use that too. So the question still boils down to the exact same thing in the end: how do you reliably tell the difference between the fraudsters and the legitimate customers?
Emotional Modulation of Somatosensory Potentials to Interpersonal Touch
The reason the "engineers" at that conference couldn't give you straight answers is because blockchain doesn't have good answers.
> Is Heroku Currently Down?

I'm not seeing any issues logging in or otherwise.
off means off!
>I'm pro-GMO just in principle

One doesn't have to be a shill though - they can genuinely believe and spread what they read from shills and their "expert" "independent" arguments.

Wouldn't innocently reading and accepting as genuine science Monsanto's astroturfing and Monsanto-ghost-written "scientific" papers, "independent" experts defense, etc. play quite a role in making many people pro-GMO "in principle"?
The specifics of administrative staff at a place like Harvard are doubtless different from your typical comparable company (What does a Dean of $X do???) but probably pretty similar in principle. Maybe less directly influenced by market pressures but you just can't operate a large organization in the same way you organize a small one.
I find absolute US and EU (FIN) prices to be quite on par in categories like groceries, restaurant, alcohol etc.

Of course US has something like triple salary in tech at least, making their purchase power generally much better.
Don't know about 'all' - centralisation of content for me is the most depressing part of the modern web.
I don’t think many people who run universities are the same who think it’s okay to send kids into war. The people making the laws and starting the wars which necessitate giving 18 year olds machine guns are not actually interacting with or involved in the lives and development of those same 18 year olds.

Why would I spend so much time educating these kids if I thought its okay that we blow that all up literally?

I think the point is not that people don’t rise to challenges, but that the ones who do graduate quickly thereafter. I can turn an 18 year old into a competent roboticist in 4 years, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t completely lost and making very costly mistakes for a good portion of that time.
Hi please email ( link in profile ) I probably have several books that fit your description- Collected because I love books and collecting things :)
Though not so old, I have my 1939 Grimm's fairy tails sitting next to me. It is in very sad shape, but still magical to me. It was barely 30 years old when I nabbed it from a church rummage sale.
Ask HN: Can You Sell Software Licenses or SaaS Solutions to Iran?
I just had a customer reach out to me from Iran and I use a US corporation for my business and I know that the US has sanctions against doing business in Iran so I was wondering can you sell software to Iran or people or businesses in Iran?

I did a bit of research online but I couldn't really make sense of it and I was wondering if people here nkew clearly the answer.
> “It takes a lot of physical infrastructure, checkpoint systems, all those sorts of things. You’d have to hire an army of low-level police to scan people. Even elsewhere in China, I think it would be difficult to implement the system at this scale,”

That sounds like an industry that could be disrupted by some Western entrepreneurs, using AI and 5G.
Are you really suggesting that the first case of COVID was actually documented medically? Or that Dec 17th was the first case that was documented? It seems highly unlikely anyone actually ID'd patient zero.
You can always ask your lawyer for a letter to eBay pretending clarifications and informing them that while it's perfectly legit on their side (at least in my country) banning you you will start investing in advertisement against them telling your history, witch is again another perfectly legit activity and reputational damages count a bit so far...
It can be hard for Linux fans to admit when anything on Windows is better, but Voidtools's Everything is one. I've used (and still use) most file indexing and search tools in Linux, and Everything is just categorically better. Aside from the search being just straight up faster, the UI being faster, and the setup and configuration being absolutely painless, the killer app of Everything is that because of the way NTFS has a service announcing file changes any new/deleted/modify file is instantly re-indexed, across any disk, whereas inotify in Linux has many, many limitations in that regard.

While I've got the conch another thing that Windows does much better than Linux is Remote Desktop access.
Those sequence diagrams are outstandingly useless.
Nowadays browsers intentionally delay painting to load stuff.
Start SIMS but with 0$ and try to escape poverty trap
> The microwave makes a noise while it's operating. When it's finished, it will beep unobtrusively and then continue to make the operating noise. You can stop it from making the operating noise by opening the door.

Check out Chesterton's Fence.
>hours complaining about the depressive current state of the web

That's pretty much most HN content about the web / front end development. I find HN al but useless for that topic now.

I've had this thought in the back of my head that a lot of content / comments are on HN are folks who do a little, not a lot, and are really annoyed that they have to do any front end development, so then we get rants about this and that... they're not fundamentally wrong, but as a web dev I find them a little skewed and completely useless / just negativity.

Like how many "I made this rando personal blog without a framework" and "there's too much javascript" (page includes lots of javascript) and etc that gets boiled down so far that it is pointless?

We're at the point a loading icon gets upvoted on HN to bitch about SPAs ... and I don't know about you but a hell of a lot of pages can sit at a loading icon that aren't SPAs. How disconnected is that?

Front end development discussion a land fertile for bike shedding and just about every topic can dip into it now, movies, music, all media really ... questions about who pays for the news, censorship, etc. Somehow it all gets pulled into the tech discussion as well.

Sometimes I just want to find a place to discuss it where we find neat things to do and less campaigning about every other topic.
I lived in SF for 15 years and would talk to many of the restaurateurs there. What I hear almost all of them say: "I should have never opened a restaurant - I should have just opened a bar." Every. Time. Apparently the margins on food in restaurants is close to zero. However, any money they manage to make is from alcohol sales. So - eventually they realize - just sell alcohol.
Once I discovered fzf a couple of years ago, I instantly knew it was the future of shell. My entire workflow is now driven by fzf. I use it together with bash, vim, cd (and "z" command), even mkdir (autocomplete from "words" file).
`my_number & 1 == 0` works.
I would understand the selective advantage if it made the egg shell more resistant to accidental breaking within the nest. But for birds that nest in tree branches or perches, what advantage is there for an egg resisting a fall without breaking? That egg is lost anyway; for most bird and egg shapes, there's no way to bring it back to the nest.
Those criticisms are all valid. The "juice is sugary and terrible for you" criticism is much less valid, since the premise was to juice vegetables.
This is the secret for lots of these things; if you step slightly above “home use” you can often find industrial/commercial products that will work just fine - though do be aware of the limitations in some.

Or you could go with fully mechanical balance scales.
The EU could start enforcing rules to regulate Big Tech in Spring 2023
> and there’s nothing really that can be done.

This seems to be a really common refrain for a lot of problems these days.
Soft switches are fine if the power is really, really, low. For real.

Like, if the battery is rechargeable, 5-25uA is pretty much zero drain.

If it's disposable, you get about 1-5uA before it's A Problem(Because the only good use for a disposable is on stuff that only gets changed once in multiple years).

In a lot of cases the switch is the least reliable part, and it makes case design harder, and maybe compromises waterproofing.
The next chapter for Cloudflare Workers: open-source
Show HN: Hackerforms Is Typeform for Hackers
My first programs were in Basic on punch tape sent down an acoustic coupler to Imperial College in 1981. I get that it was the end of an era. But just after leaving school, I ran a Linotype photo-setter in the late 1980's - with different spinning optical discs for different fonts, and Hot wax rollers, and Letraset lines. And after university, I worked on computer magazines in W1, which went from photo-setting to Desktop Publish. So I remember an entire era, from start to finish. Boy, do I feel old.
Beware the Invisible Null
For what it's worth, that trend is accelerating in its digital stage. Newspaper CMSs change so frequently, they approach abandonware territory within years and artifacts are left behind.

If you attend any large news site and search for "test" you will find those scraps as evidence of prior CMSs. Like chicago tribune "joe assembler test 1" or latimes "now testing assembler and p2p" or cnn "this is a developer test"
Have you ever tried to use [name the tool here] form builder and got stuck on simple things like:

- Adding complex logic

- Making requests in the middle of the form

- Doing any complicated math

At the same time, developing a web server that handles multiple states requires you to persist things on a database or handle query strings + validation

For that reason, we developed Hackerforms (https://hackerforms.com). You can just write a python script as you would do with a CLI app and that's it: You have a form-like app online + auth + database (if you wish)

This is great for:

- Scripts that require user input

- Approval workflows

- Customer setup

I'm happy to hear any feedback
There’s a specific Dell laptop reset procedure that requires you to open the case and disconnect the battery so you can then press and hold the power button to get it to discharge all residual power. It’s a pain.
And what are you supposed to use if you're not doing it on android and can therefore use firebase?
Ask HN: What's the fastest way to get good at full stack app development?
I have a technical training (physics and applied math), but spent most of my early career in the military (non-technical roles). I got out of the military and spent the last few years in the startup ecosystem in generalist roles. I've delivered when managing technical projects, can read/understand developer documentation pretty well, and frankly just vibe with developers so I want to make the transition into launching my own software projects. I don't necessarily want to grind in solitude as a junior dev somewhere to slowly develop my skills - I want to just full bore train in my spare time. Is that the wrong approach? If not, got any tips on where to start?
This is what I've found as well. Although Google Takeout is strictly better than pulling your files down via their API, even the metadata in takeouts can be mucked with.

I'd strongly recommend only using Google Photos as what it is: a _lossy_ backup (that gets expensive if you have a big library).

If you care about your originals, use one of the several applications that allow your phone to backup your originals directly to your server (either at home or that you're renting). Here's a list of apps that do this:

https://photostructure.com/faq/how-do-i-safely-store-files/#...

Also, Google Takeout can be persnickety. In doing customer support for PhotoStructure users, I've compiled a list of workarounds if it errors out for you: https://photostructure.com/faq/takeout/#step-1-create-a-new-...
Many of these “auto zero” which is why you have to do the scale dance - tap it with your foot to turn it on, wait for it to say zero, then step on.
Chiming in to thank you. The access to quality information on the web, specifically Ebooks, is what gives me hope for the future.
A Community Group for Web-Interoperable JavaScript Runtimes
Anecdotally I'm 130wpm+ and I make that typo a few times a week.
No I have not, I prefer to go lightweight so good old event listeners are perfectly fine for my purposes. But once you have ubiquitous first class support for async iterables and so on I'm all aboard. I see Rx very much like an experiment that should influence language features and std libs, rather than a standalone framework.
That's a good point, at least for the immediate problems, but I suspect that in the longer term, governments will make their apps check for genuine Windows/macOS installs using remote attestation, like some online games are already doing.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/09/riot-games-anti-cheat...
Don't know, not my area, but like every other business in the US that cost should be born by the business not the consumer. Don't push large groups of people to the thin ice if you don't want laws passed.
Sure you can. Look into 'load testing'.
Why would I use this instead of just using kubernetes for everything?
One of our MySQL instances somehow ended up with two copies of the same index, and any query that tried to use them ended up being a lot slower than it should have been. Dropping the copy restored it to normal speed.
Let's take the bike company example. There are three main ways you could vary our outreach to potential customers: time, topic, and text.

Just think about timing: when is the best time for someone to get a message from you? There are aggregate stats about certain days or time being better for open rates, but customers aren't a monolithic entity. Some times work for some customers, and other times work for others. We've found that timing decisions have huge impact on ROI in industries ranging from gaming to retail to food delivery.

Now look at topic: what kind of bike do you try to interest them in? Do you try to interest them in a bike at all, or do you pitch a helmet, or shorts, or repair services. Personalizing topic is the essence of a recommender system, which has been discussed elsewhere in this thread, and it's possible to get something like that, even for a bike shop.

Then you have text: let's just look at value proposition. Do you appeal to their love of the open road? Their desire to exercise and get more fit? Spend time with their families? Replace an old bike that's causing them maintenance headaches? By learning what aspect of biking individual people care about, you can tailor subsequent communication to emphasize those things.

A bike company has virtually endless ways to tailor their message.
WebKit which was forked from KHTML. Apple did work, of course, but they did not make that from scratch.

I love Apple, been a user since we had a MacPlus at home (then a Mac 2Vi, then a LC3, then PPC7600, then...) but let's not be overzealous.
I believe no based on my limited knowledge and a quick googling and more than that I think you'd find it nearly impossible to get paid through the traditional financial sector as I don't think any banks will let you send/receive funds from Iran.

https://www.hugheshubbard.com/news/united-states-new-u-s-ira...
I know that, and I still can't tell.
That's not what this is about though. It's about sparking interest in math, and many on here are showing exactly why math people can me off putting for non math people.
I'm not sure if "disappearing" is the right word, but it is definitely moving towards also requiring reliability engineering / stronger than usual automation skills.

It's also a role that's thinning out, because these managed offers are good enough a lot of the time and developers are using the most common parts of the feature set on offer.