skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True, yes, and they fail to serve the needs of many.

I'm skeptical as to whether more tech is the right answer to serving the elderly. Self-checkouts are essentially saying "hey, you're as capable of scanning and bagging as the next person, so do it yourself with a small number of groceries." By definition, the elderly won't be as good of candidates for this on average because they will tend to be slower and not as fluent with tech that serves the majority.

A technological solution might be able to serve both if it could adjust to the user. Since these checkouts are hesitant to implement a more full-fledged user management system, I doubt we will see such a thing any time soon. With user accounts with profiles and settings (beyond just having a store card), the experience could be tailored to what is most useful to the user and make suggestions.

If we're not going to get that, then regular checkouts are the better answer for the elderly or anyone else who will be prone to issues with self-checkouts.
It looks more like vnc or Remote Desktop than, say, something you could use to configure bios settings or other stuff at boot.
You'd be surprised what can be accomplished without funding, and with the goal of recovering from complete disasters which have already been devastating.

It would help having new institutions grown from seed completely outside the current academic paradigm. Which train those having the highest aptitude to focus way more of their valuable time on the science rather than eminence or politics.

You've got to be willing to do 100% of the work to realize 10% of the progress. Indefinitely.

That's why it's called a laboratory. Everything else other than labor is secondary and you need the most brilliant people at the bench. Indefinitely.
> You don’t seem to have thought very hard about what employers are optimising for.

Have you ever seen a hiring process that's simply not effective?

The undercurrent of this irks me a bit. It assumes a kind of omniscience on part of the employer, and enough time for them to develop a good interview process. I think this is really hard to do.

I think you're generally right. And a lot of the time, employers are empathetic, pragmatic, self-aware and really are doing us a favor when they deny us. Some take into account I-O psychology stuff, too.

I (and others probably) are eager to hear what companies you feel do a good job at hiring.

> Everyone realises that programming interviews produce lots of false negatives.

Let's assume a bad scenario. A company can disregard evidence of competency, like having a portfolio, to basically have a rolling, year round tech Olympiad. To them, it's about fronting as a strong candidate in events, even at the expense of being good at the role.

You can be a pro at pole vault or discus throwing, but a poor carpenter. But there's a mentality out there - with some - that a strong, fit candidate can handle any technical challenge.

Can a chemist be a great chef? I bet, I also bet some could overthink and/or overengineer preparing a simple meal. Does the interview process do anything to check for soft skills, like curiosity, simplicity, etc? Hopefully.

> The goal is minimizing false positives. Failing to hire a strong candidate carries a much lower cost than hiring someone who can’t do the job.

I think some companies - not all - can create a "squid game" contest out of candidates. Worse, I feel candidates can unduly suffer and be humiliated in these cases.

The company gets a superb interviewer, who is no doubt a very intelligent person, but not necessarily one that can adapt to technical reality, contingencies, ambiguities, etc. Some interview processes end up focusing on theoretical and rote knowledge, not integration and synthesis, when they deeply need that. Turnover happens.

But we're back to the beginning, did the company: 1. really know what they needed for that position, 2. interview process check for that? My guess is when you wrote that you were assuming situations where both were true?
You definitely can add search pretty easily and without a lot of thought and get something perfectly usable. As with anything, you can spend an arbitrary amount of time optimizing for specific use cases. It's like how complicated is a contact form? Does it have 3 fields and send an email? Or does have 30 cascading fields prefilled on user behavior and synced to a CRM?
It's not reasonable to ask people to remove your code from their project when they've already done the work on integrating it and it's published under an accommodating license. (edit: It seems the person requesting the removal of his project is an HA dev, some context for those links would have been useful.)

As for the DNS issue that seems to be a technical or design issue, I don't see in that thread any bad behaviour on the part of the devs, unless I missed a post.
The Run box is safe, although not useful for multi-line content. That tweet (now deleted) was referring to the Start menu search box.

“You are correct. This traffic was not generated by typing text into the "run box", it was generated by typing text into the "start menu box". We are very sorry for the confusion this has caused.”
> virtualDj is way more advanced software wise

Funny quote from their homepage: "There’s a reason why everybody starts with VirtualDJ." So, they start with VirtualDJ, but what do they end with?
Which part is confusing, it made sense to me
This is a very insightful comment, thank you. I have much the same experience from the Lisp of side of things.

I will say though, these languages have their niches where they really shine.

The oft understated power of Lisp is in creating software that is infinitely configurable assuming you know a bit of Lisp. Extensions are a first class citizen in Lisp programs. The configuration is just some lisp code that's compiled into the running program upon loading. The config can even redefine existing functions. One time I used the config file to fix an actual bug in a program that was abandoned by the maintainer. Of course, only programmers want this functionality, and so its usefulness is limited to things like Emacs. But it still has its place.
1980s Home Automation System
Did dinosaur blood run warm or cold? New study aims to settle the debate
I have another point of view as a non-pro user. The leas thing my router is doing the better. I want my router software be as simple as possible to reduce possible bugs. Plus I want it to put all cpu time onto processing packets.
I would consider using pihole like functionality if it’s baked in firmware. But definitely don’t want to install extra software.
I don't think anyone has denied the existence of students who don't cheat. If 80% of a class cheats, that means 20% don't. You may have been among those.
> Our phones and smart devices all use either DoH or hardcode a specific DNS resolver

My phone uses whatever DNS I configure it to use. When I'm at home, it uses my PiHole.

If you mean individual apps going their own way, that's a different problem.
We might agree -- because it's not excess if people still aren't having their needs met. But producing exactly enough is a recipe for not enough when something unexpected happens. There should be waste (or unused capacity, that can hopefully be somehow reclaimed as compost/bio-char/chemical feedstock/fuel/etc) in such an essential system.
Very unfortunate but it does happen. I worked for a company where we had recruited 10-15 summer interns, they had already accepted their offers and we had started planning who was joining which teams, and then our finance department decided we couldn't afford to bring them in, so we had to rescind the offers.

It was pretty embarrassing professionally, and we actually didn't go back to the 3-4 universities from where they were recruited from for several years. Hopefully those kids ended up finding something else that late in the intern-recruiting season...
Yeah, this doesn't crack the same nut at all.
Such a device exists and can be bought from Amazon for less than 20 dollars. Keyword USB HDMI Capture.
Always seamed to me overengineered. Maybe is because I'm skeptical about automations, and I like physical buttons, one button that does something, and automations made in solid and reliable ways (such as mechanical relays for example). But if I need something "smart", and I have a couple of devices in my house, with a couple of automations (basically for laziness, not something I couldn't have done by pulling some extra wires and with mechanical timers and relays), I do them in the most simple and clean solution.

Now all the automations rely on a local MQTT server where my devices connects to an a ~300 lines python program, that communicates with the MQTT server and applies all the automations, and also exposes a simple REST API to do things with a simple `curl` if I need so. Everything (MQTT server and python script) runs on my home router that has OpenWRT on it. I find it simpler to express automations with code than with complex web interfaces or yaml configuration files that are as complex as a program.
> Yes, but we could have decided as a civilization to count in base 12 just as we decided to measure things in the metric system

But we did not, so it’s a moot point. The metric system succeeded because it fit easily with how people measured things and had some unarguable upsides (like replacing the ~20 different units of length all called “foot”). The metric system itself was not a great step into decimalisation, it was just the recognition that the number systems in used were decimal already. That’s why it was so easily adopted.

You can see it in the units that were not accepted and then all but disappeared: the time and angle units, for which the non-decimal units had practical advantages.
That seems to be describing a single type of task which is not what 95% of time is spent on by professionals in a work environment. This seems akin to a whiteboard session which traditionally is solved by just grabbing a whiteboard for an hour. But then you're not comparing VR to a monitor but VR to a physical whiteboard.
Not GP, but this isn't something you'd need to calculate. 130nm transistors are so much larger, with so much higher power consumption to modern 7nm transistors, that it'd be like comparing the fuel consumption of a motorbike to a school bus.
generally easy to cut and thus inferior to a D-lock

Is that a serious consideration? Jesus, I had no idea the environment in which these were used. I'd be scared to leave my house.
Reading the yesterweb criticism page of crypto/web3 that is linked to by the OP makes me think this movement is not going to gain much momentum. The criticism is somewhat accurate, but extremely shallow and makes no attempt to steel man potential benefits.

Not that I expect this to land well with the HN crowd, but web3/crypto has the tyrannical effects of capitalism/growth on its side as a force for the “future of the web”. Going up against that with the non-profit model seems… quaint.
If you need some sort of "compilation" (e.g. TS->JS, Webpack), you need to run that before the packaging command yourself. A VSCode extension mostly consists of a single package.json file with a "main" field pointing to some .js file. As far as I understand, vsce does not parse or handle anything, it just checks some metadata and includes the entire folder. This is also why extensions often ship with several files that are not required at runtime.

As to why - since extensions can do anything they want including running bundled binaries, there is no way for the IDE to know which files may or may not be relevant. That doesn't justify going an include-by-default strategy though, an allow-list would be much better.

Is this normal in JS ecosystem? Not really I'd say. NPM packages for example have a "files" property where you specify what to include, and I feel like the general trend is towards a saner approach of modules and imports anyway.
In memory BBC BASIC was tokenised so for instance PRINT was stored as just the byte 0xF1, so you could write a program lister that used other language's words (I remember at least one of those existing) and it would be similarly easy to go the other way too.
Indeed, it's clear that Ive hasn't been a positive force on Apple's products for a while. His pathological fetish for thinness at all costs resulted in objectively inferior products.

Apple can and does make mistakes, for example the touch bar, and the MacBook keyboard.

If Ive is involved I predict that this product will experience a brief but intense surge in popularity based primarily on the novelty factor and social media influencers followed by a rapid decline into irrelevance.
This is a lifesaver for collaboration with people who only use M$ W*rd. I like to do all typing and formatting in org-mode. When I need to copy over a big table I’ve done in org (which exports nicely to LaTeX), I’ll use this snipping tool to convert it directly to a word table. I also like it for when I’m lazy, instead of copying formulae by hand into my notes, I’ll just use this.
I didn't build it myself, but I maintained one for a while as part of a student job.

The website itself was hosting various resources for researchers, etc. Each resource was annotated via a specific XML format and XSLT was used to dynamically create HTML pages, as well as to transform the XML files into various other file formats.

The by far biggest problem was, and still is, that XSLT is very verbose and not well-maintainable. Small changes here and there were possible, but larger changes almost always required rewriting the entire stylesheet. On top of that, the XML format got bigger and bigger as well (as it was used and modified by Universities across Europe), edge cases were added, etc., that did not help when it came to writing the XSLT stylesheets, but that's a different problem.
We also had to switch to XSLT 3.0 at some point and had to render the HTML server-side, since browsers don't support anything beyond XSLT 1.0.

Overall, I still kind of enjoyed working with it. For complex XML, it was by far the easiest way to work with them.
The internet is much improved since the end of the dork stage of development. Don’t know why HN romanticizes slow connections and a few text websites made by obsessives. Tik Tok, YouTube, etc. are leaps and bounds better than anything I saw online pre-1999.

I can’t wait for VR/AR to be fully monetized and mainstream. I’m sick of speculative VC-funded crap that I can’t pay for because they’re in “growth mode.” When something’s monetized at least then I have some faith that it’ll be around for awhile.
Leafpad
> At some point, everything is political

No. Football is a-political. Thanksgiving dinner is a-political. My javascript library is a-political. My silicon design is a-political.

What's happened is an extremely small subset of people have decided to push politics where it doesn't belong. Everything must become a political weapon, because everything must serve the goal of some arbitrary progress. Merely existing without putting on badges in support of The Latest Thing(TM) is offensive -- because you have implicitly not taken a side, which explicitly means you are supporting the enemy. And if that goal requires sacrifice of thanksgiving dinner and family, than so be it.

It's done wonders to improve society's polarization problem, I tell you.
Human factors aside, the practical result of this is that the methods of getting Home Assistant running are trash. Sure if you stick it on a dedicated RPi with their prebuilt image or use Docker, it "just works". But both of those methods basically guarantee suddenly needing to tinker when your setup randomly breaks. Ultimately if I can't simply apt-get or environment.systemPackages it, I don't really consider it sustainable software to rely on.

I did give in and actually had it running with Docker for some time. Eventually it just got real laggy and stopped responding to input or device state changes promptly. I had no idea why that would have been, and had no desire to wade through Docker manure to figure out how to debug it, so my setup just kind of fell by the wayside. Now when I think "home automation would be nice to have again", I envision just writing my own mqtt-native daemons some day.
of this is cool a language specifically to help new programmers to learn programming when their primary language is spanish?

honestly this would a be godsend for my girlfriend. Most algol programming languages are super focused on english keywords that are very intuitive for a natibe speaker but nto so much for a Spanish speaker.

case in piint. "if" in spanish is "si", but "si" is also spanish for "yes"

as you can imagine, trying to explain with teh language barrier can get difficult
Very nice! Where can I download this?
I'm a nobody and even I have had run-ins with certain people on the project. I think they have a similar problem to many hugely popular FOSS authors - you spend 99.99% of the day explaining things to idiots who don't get why things are the way they are, so when the 0.01% of useful, constructive issues float past they get written off by habit.

I personally think some of their leaders also have an over-reliance on gut reaction - have never once seen them admit to being wrong, even on multi year issues where context has changed. I think a useful litmus test for anybody in a position of power is "when did I last change my mind". If the answer is "never", either you're perfect or you need to think about how you've been making decisions.
> But there's also so much weird, non-commercialized crypto stuff out there that shares a lot of the ethos of early web tinkerers.

Bullshit. Without miners there's no "crypto" and without payouts there's no miners. So "web3" can only exist where there's some financial incentive to run miners. Users can't spend real money to access this system so they need to convert their money to Geoffrey dollars to even access "web3" content. This is 180° from the "old web". End users needed no more investment than their computer and Internet connection. They didn't have to prop up some asshole's upline to check out the Unofficial X-Files Fan Page.
To be clear by service there I meant like 'customer service', the support, experience of being a customer etc.

Anyway we're basically in agreement on the state of differences or lack of them - I just don't understand what more you want to be different that can be?
So does Waitrose. You can either scan using your phone or one of their hand scanners (you get them when you come into the store by scanning your loyalty card).
Have you never worked in a large company before? These people are everywhere, and breeding like rats!
IIRC Van Moof bikes have internal security built-in, so you can't easily stole one of them on a whim.

Even if your bike cannot be recovered, Van Moof gives you another one [0].

[1] also tells that the bike locks automatically when you open the kick-stand, and unlocks when you're around.

[0]: https://www.vanmoof.com/en-NL/peace-of-mind

[1]: https://www.vanmoof.com/en-NL/s5
I think the trick is whether they are using TURN or STUN wrt reliability.
Should I contribute to open source before my first job?
Should I contribute to open source before my first software engineering job so I can get experience working on a large unfamiliar codebase? Like experience adding features and fixing bugs. Thanks
It's perfectly possible to do FTTH builds for 30-40 homes at a cost of $30-40k. Just make sure you know what you're doing and avoid getting fleeced by engineering consulting firms and high margin construction companies.
> As for the DNS issue that seems to be a technical or design issue, I don't see in that thread any bad behaviour on the part of the devs, unless I missed a post.

The whole thread brings back PTSD when I was running it. It is reminiscent of every major problem they've had.

> seems to be a technical or design issue

This is the exact issue. The head devs don't keep contributors in line or provide any guidance at all. People just submit things, there's no checks on "is this a good idea?" and into master it goes. Does anyone actually want this? Does it make sense on how it's implemented? Will it break anything?

Those are questions for later.
Handheld scanners should displace both self-checkout kiosks and traditional kiosks.

I can scan things straight into the bag in my trolley. And if I've used my phone as the scanner, I can pay and leave without going anywhere near a physical terminal. If this could be the experience for the 90%, and you only needed a couple of tills open, supermarkets could reclaim 10% of their floorspace and several jobs.

When self-checkout kiosks came alone, there was an argument that the supermarket is making you do their job, but there's little I resent more than loading everything into a trolley, and then having to get it all out again before repacking it all in a massive hurry. I'd much sooner fight an awful app on my phone and do it once than do it all twice.
> Of course I know about the SI base units, which effectively remove the ability of ordinary people to tinker with, use, and reason about measurements by placing the system in the hands of ultra-experts.

It’s the complete opposite, in fact. A simpler way of defining unit helps non-specialist understand them, and not only people who’ve memorised dozens of arbitrary conversion factors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bifOI4MbHVU
Started on VDJ about a decade ago because it was the most pirated easy to get run entirely on your PC DJ software. Got serato pro with a bit of hardware and it's incredibly underwhelming piece of software. Legit it actually sucks compared to VDJ. Half of seratos features are a paid upgrade, it sucks for supporting hardware, they basically ruined their DVS support. Not to mention like ultra basic aspects of programs arent even implemented. Serato...zero touch support, zero capacity to re arrange the UI, lol it doesn't even handle scaling well, can't read text on half the menus because they get pushed off screen by scaling, can't even resize them to fit. Lol serato is a joke so is the industries support of it.
It really doesn’t, you don’t buy fuel on the futures market, you buy it locally from the coop or whatever local purveyor you use for future delivery, hundreds of gallons at a time.

The same for your other inputs, you have contacts to buy them well into the future, you don’t just pay the market rate when you need it.
I think people would trust the government and authorities generally more, if those authorities weren't constantly lying to them. The authorities could say "Here is a rigorous procedure for DIY formula. We strongly recommend against using this, except in an emergency, because slight deviations could result in harm or death for the baby." Instead, they seem to give the impression that DIY formula is never advisable or borderline impossible - which is probably wrong, and that misrepresentation makes people distrust authorities more generally.
There's a whole universe of scholarship on the reasons people want stuff. If you think about it, anyone trying to sell you stuff is dying to figure that out.

"Because other people want it" is, no doubt, ONE of those reasons. But the only one? Please.

As for ManU not being the People's Team anymore: the explanation for that has more to do with money and the structure of professional sports than anything else. I watch the Cubs and don't know half those players, either, and it's not because of globalization. Maybe Mike Trout will play his whole career with the Angels, but most players move around.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that I have a patent [1] on using "endorsements" to sell stuff! So obviously I'm not denying that there's some role for influencers.

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US20150363809A1/en?invento...