skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Give the choice of waiting 40 years for not a huge payoff or gambling your 5K-10K of savings for a potential 10x return in a year or two, it's easy to rationalize the latter.

Indeed. For someone who can save $25/month, if they invest it on an index fund for 40 years, assuming 8% average/year, by the end they have about 87K. Adjusted for inflation 40 years from today, that's won't be much money.

So if you all have left is $25/mo, it's almost more rational to buy lottery tickets with it. Sure you'll almost certainly never win but the investing won't get you much either.
I use Firestore. I think your analysis is spot on. It is great for OLTP workloads. For query/analysis, you'll need to replicate to another database.

another area where it truly shines is zero downtime for schema updates.
I hope you will still include the faster, more straightforward mode for those who want it. Otherwise this is another example of catering for the common denominator and giving techies the increased impression that all software is dumbed down for the masses.
> People spend a lot of time discussing the chronic youth issues but the reality is that Juul never wanted to sell to youths or anything of the sort — they were just _so_ incompetent at operations that they couldn't do anything.

> I do not believe Juul consciously or explicitly wanted youths to use Juul

This... is not incompetence or a side effect.

They fucking paid schools to tell kids that Vaping was safe. You can try to say "oh, they didn't realllllly want to sell to kids, they just weren't good at their job".

They gave ad agencies specific briefs saying that their target market for a campaign was '13-17 year olds'.

"They didn't realllllly want to sell to kids".

No. They knew exactly what the fuck they were doing.
But why ban paper straws and not plastic wrapped plastic bottles with plastic stickers on a pallet wrapped in plastic? Just eliminating the "sixpack" part of the packaging of sodas would save more plastics than the straws bans do.
The idea of political "neutrality" is completely subjective, which is clearly lost on these researchers, especially after reading their paper. The idea that it is possible to distill political positions to a left vs right spectrum is incredibly absurd and reductionist (despite how widespread it is) - which the authors themselves admit in the paper! For example, in their methods section, they list the Washington Post as their benchmark for "center-left". There is perhaps no large publication in the United States that beats the drums of war louder than the Washington Post for every war, invasion, attack or bombing suggested by the Pentagon - but they are used by these researchers as an objective metric for being "center-left"?
And when they told their ad agency that their target market for a campaign was "13-17 year olds"?
As I see it, this breaks down into a few steps, each of which is non-trivial:

A) From a set of 2d images, construct 3d models of a person in that pose. Map the original image pixels onto that model (as a texture?)

B) Rotate those models in 3d space to look for coincidence, and work backwards to figure out the respective angles, and merge the 3d models.

C) Iterate to improve the solution

--

Much as the SIFT method for generating scale free "interesting points" for 2d images enabled the panorama stitching software of the past decade, this enables a new software space that should be quite interesting.
> the same tiny, tiny world

Manhattan? To be fair, probably Brooklyn, too, in recent years.
You don't have to consume social media to post social media. He was a prolific pamphlet writer, which could be considered the bite-sized easily consumable publication of his day.

Without really knowing too much about the guy outside of his historical impact, I think he would use whatever method was effective at promoting his ideas.
I don’t understand. What do you mean by `Converting something that is promised as free`? Gmail is still free. There are ads and upsells, but the core product does not cost money to use.

> We're all so complacent with terrible service from everything that we keep giving passes to very profitable companies that completely don't live up to some of the most basic principles of service provision.

If you were complaining about a service that you pay money for, I’d understand. What level of expectation can you have of a privately offered free service? Common sense says none.

I pay money for my email service because I think it’s worth it. I want a level of customer service available to me if I need it.
Humans vs. Gary Marcus: The Complexity of Measuring Machine Intelligence
So why not ban actual cigarettes? Why only Juul?
It was a fair amount of work but I was able to get it running. Fixing the clock drift was by far the hardest part -- I had to install a custom kernel module. Getting networking inside the VM was pretty difficult as well.

Email me at aaronm04{at}iforgotmy.name if you want help.
Choose your own adventure game takes users into the lives of Indigenous youth
That's a really good summary. I didn't pick C# in part because it feels more tied to Microsoft and Windows than I wanted the book's language to be. Java (to me at least) feels fairly platform and corporation independent.

If you would have prefered I pick Go, you'll definitely like Thorsten Ball's two books.

Choosing a language for books is really hard these days. There are so many choose from and most are quite large and complex, so it's hard to find a single language that is familiar to a large enough segment of the audience.
Heroku apps unreachable (follow-up)
I just watched the latest Dune movie on the weekend after being fairly keen to watch it knowing it was a famous novel. I didn't realise that it had already been made into a movie in the past and I think from memory, also adapted into a TV series.

I have to say I watched it with my housemate and whilst the soundtrack and video effects were great, the story lost me. I felt like I'd started watching the second Lord of the Rings movie before watching the first. I got the gist of what was happening, but the dialogue felt like it lacked depth in terms of where they came from, who they were and what they were trying to do.
I wonder how much of this is also people wanting to see value for money?

By this I mean regardless of how much work has to go into getting the information on screen, if it's just an information screen that does not allow much further interaction then the experience is finished after the first look. If you have to dig a little to find the information you are after, then the experience is extended which along with the feeling of discovery results in more satisfaction.

It's a problem I encounter when developing tools system support. I try for the simplest UI, but when presenting the tool inevitably get people asking how it took so long to develop something so simple?
Nope. PostScript is interpreted. All you had to do was squirt "raw PostScript code" down to the printer and it would interpret it. You didn't have to create a new cartridge. People wrote PS programs to do custom stuff all the time.
This reminds me of an incident a few years ago where a Chinese company created a protein powder that contained melamine ( a high nitrogen ingredient) that he sold to people for cat/dog food and baby food. The melamine fooled the nitrogen/protein quality control on incoming ingredients so the maker felt the ingredient met all specs. Sadly, the inherent toxicity killed thousands of cat all over the world as well as a number of children. Child fatalities were lower as mothers soon detected WTF with their babies and a urine test saved most. Cats/dogs were not so lucky. I wonder if these crumbles are toxic? Some mention of aflatoxin a common rotted protein toxic substance, often found in rotted peanuts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_pet_food_recalls

I read somewhere that one or more Chinese executives were executed over the child deaths - but I was unable to find a link about this.
It didn't seem like it worked. I haven't tried it in a while though, so I could be mistaken.
> Probably due to historical precedent set by RJ Reynolds where they overtly and intentionally marketed cigarettes to kids because their research found that getting people addicted young was the best way to gain market share.

But they still didn't ban actual cigarettes
Why would the start point make a big difference? Is the assertion that if it started at 1820, you’d see a stair step and then flat from 1920 on?

Either way, these graphs look flat from 1920 on. That’s the point of the article.
Vacuum won't work with current technology. The heads use air currents to fly a few nanometers over the platter. If you put a running drive in a vacuum chamber the heads will touch down and everything will be destroyed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_height
$11,900, not including battery. You can buy a finished LS long block for the same price making the same power that weighs a small fraction of what a 300-mile-capable battery pack does.

EVs are going to remain the punchline of jokes to enthusiasts until batteries don't add an extra Miata's worth of weight.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily (exclusively, in fact?) for political and ideological battle. That's not allowed on HN, regardless of which ideology or politics you favor. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for, so please don't create accounts to do this with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Great! Finally, a solution that will help reduce googling numerous times, like "blah blah filetype:pdf site:edu" "blah blah site:reddit.com" for good search results.
There are more blind developers than non-binary ones.

Perhaps we should add Braille to our business cards besides the he/him they/them descriptors.
The word アーケード (akedo) does exist but is not used very often, and the average Japanese person would probably be confused if you used it. Game arcades are called ゲームセンター (game center) and shopping arcades are called 商店街 (shoutengai).

Not to throw shade on your name choice though, I think it's cute and a nice short name.
you in thread for grug story! no like, no read!
There is a party game based on this principle. Mad Gab.
Thanks. To a large degree I think that many other comments on the original article should read this one too.

In many ways, I feel that this article gives credit to the woman who otherwise was little credited. But apparently, she didn't care either way.
Yeah, I have a VPS that's been running OpenBSD since 2015 and it's been great.
After dealing with Dropbox recently, that actually sounds nicer!
Not just drugs- any kind of deviant culture really.
Would family names not be allowed either?
Not in the US, but "Winners Don't Quit" is a tobacco company marketing campaign from 2019 on.
> public perception of which is quite crucial for human survival

Might be good to find some new words there. Last time I heard those it was after government leaders were lying to me about masks.
Consider from the lens that the OP states that JUUL employees were incompetent and also that he was a former JUUL employee.

Vaping was a "meme" largely BECAUSE of JUUL -- who else was even a market player?
This is absurd. If all network traffic is malicious, just unplug your device. Boom, more secure.

At least some traffic is expected to be valid, but the majority will not if internet facing.

Google “Linux hardening for beginners hacker news” there are articles with easy steps and thoughtful comments from time to time.
This will in fact be the case. If we can instruct an AI to draw a picture of Donald Trump catapulting himself over the Eifel Tower, then software can be instructed to write working code with basic English. It's just a matter of time, and the writing is on the wall for us.
These are both Seagate Exos drives, one is a generation newer than the other. I'm pretty sure both have the same number of platters, thus same number of heads.

And yes, HP changes the firmware and model numbers... super annoying.
There have been reports that if an individual's account has been banned, they can "poison" another company's account by being added to it. I have not heard of this happening across companies.

https://www.androidpolice.com/google-terminate-personal-acco...
Not the original intent, I don't think.
Anecdata: I have a lovely old Canon Cat in working condition that I want to sell to someone who is interested in this piece of computing history. But I have somehow misplaced the box of floppy disks that came with it!

I know they are here somewhere. Looks like I have some housekeeping to do.

When I find them, that number will become nonzero...
No, it is absurd to claim that something which predates using base 2 based counts being common is designed to con people who work in that sort of unit.

Communications theory used 1,000s and such to state transfer rates as with any other scientific unit long before modern drives. That stuck when things were recorded to mediums such as tape, and every disk ever has been measured on 1,000s or 1,000,000s or …

There have been some oddities along the way: punched cards were all over the place and were measured in characters not bits/bytes, many comms methods too were measured in characters/symbols or modulations rather than bits & bytes, many comms and storage (tape, disk, and RAM/ROM) formats are not nice round powers of 2 in raw form due to check bits, parity bits, and stop bits.

The one and only occurrence I can think of where 2^10 was used officially for a physical storage measure is the 1.44Mb floppy format which was a strange bastard of multiple divisions: it was 1440KiB, so 1.4410001024, so really was either ~1.38MiB or ~1.47MB.

> Nowhere else in the computer is the base-10 version standard, and it shouldn't be.

Nowhere else in science nor enginerring is 2^10 the standard instead of 10^3, and it shouldn't be. In computing we've adopted 2^10 that because some things are easier for us to think about that way, and 2^10 and 10^3 are close enough for many estimating or quick calc purposes, but why should science that predates that practise being common be forced to change simply for our convenience?

Yes I support moving from imperial to metric where that hasn't already been done, but not because I encountered metric first (I didn't) so the other is unfamiliar but because it makes sense. You might argue that to programmers or less technical tech users 2^10 makes more sense, but they are less important in terms of science and engineering then, well, the rest of science and engineering.

> what's the max file size of a file stored on a FAT32 filesystem again?

2GiB, or approximately 2.147GB. Many people incorrectly calling it 2GB does not change that G as a prefix means 10^9 and not 2^31 - otherwise we have to accept other things like “u” being a correct spelling of “you”!

It isn't a grand conspiracy to defraud us. We chose to give those prefixes a double meaning, it isn't the rest of science & engineering's fault that we sometimes get confused by that choice that we made and they didn't.
I went to primary school in the Netherlands in the 70's. From those 8 years (2 years 'kleuterschool' (preschool) and 6 years 'lagere school' (primary school), a few high points:

- we had 'tropenrooster' (tropical schedule) several times when the temperature went above 30°C, this entailed an early start to the school day so we could go home around noon. The main reason was that the heat in the class rooms was too much to bear.

- roads were closed several times because of the asphalt melting from the heat

- ...while at the same time I skated (as in ice skates) to school several times, once even over the roads when they were covered in a few cm of ice

We had some hot summers and some cold winters, this was in the same period when there were warnings of "a new ice age". That ice age did not materialise just yet [1], nor did those hot summers mark the beginning of a trend.

During my first years at university I lived in a little house on a farm somewhere in the countryside. The first winter I was snowed in for a week. The toilet froze, there was a snow ledge on the inside of the front door. The "Elfstedentocht" - a 200+ km ice skating marathon between 11 cities in Friesland - was held twice during my time at university after a hiatus of several decades. It has not been held since.

All of this is anecdata but the story it tells is clear: it was hot back then, it was cold back then. It was hot in between, it was cold in between. It can be hot now, it can be cold now. It would be possible to draw a regression line in an attempt to show some trend but whatever it would show would be misleading, the period is too short and the data points too few. Have a look at the temperature graph for the Holocene [2] to see a trend line over a somewhat longer period, in this case about 11.800 years. Even there it is necessary to even out the bumps over several hundreds of years to get at the real trend which was a stark rise from ~11.800 years ago culminating in a maximum around ~8500-4000 years ago followed by a slow decline. Looking closer the "Little Ice Age", the Viking age warm period and the Roman warm period can be recognised, all of which had a large impact on human activities and development. As to whether the "Little Ice Age" never saw hot summers or the Viking/Roman warm periods never saw cold winters we can only assume they did, just like the supposedly cooler 70's saw some hot summers while the supposedly warmer 90's and early 2000's saw some cold winters.

[1] ...or rather we are still in the same ice age as before, to be more specific in the Holocene interglacial period which is probably running on its last legs if previous interglacials are something to go by, just a few thousand years from now there will most likely be a new glaciation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene

[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Holocene...
How are you hiring your devs?

The more abstract-problem/algorithmic the hiring process, the more I see this.

Ask practical coding problems instead, screen for practical devs who can find 80/20 style shortcuts.

(You probably still want some of the abstract folks too, though, to round things out.)
Java is the opposite of boring.
It lacks basic fundamentals such as algebraic data types and pattern matching.
You will be kicking and screaming the whole ride.

A boring language would be a language where you aren't triggered/bothered by its basic ergonomics and hygiene. In Java, you must translate discrete variants into dogmatic OO paradigm instead of using language primitives.

Thanks to Java's poor design, it's fundamentally a hazard and a land mine thanks to null not being first class in type system. The use of null as a value inhabiting any type should result in a slap in the face upon opening a pull request (until Java adopts type-safe optionals like Kotlin)

P.S. Switch expressions and sealed interfaces aren't there yet, Kotlin and Scala are still the only options if you are imprisoned to JVM.
>A thought has been lately put forward, which may or may not have truth in it. What if — instead of Jupiter being a world, inhabited by animals and people, as is often supposed, with a small distant sun and five dim moons to give them light — what if Jupiter is himself in some sort a second sun to his moons, and what if those "moons" are really inhabited planets? It may be so. That is all we can say. The idea is not an impossible one. (p. 207)

And that's still all we can say about at least one of them[0]. :)

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_(moon)#Habitability_pot...
I don't read thread, but I click on link to articles.
Will you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamewar comments to HN? You've continued to do it repeatedly since we asked you to stop. If you keep it up, we're going to have to ban you.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
IMHO they’re taking the wrong lesson from this. Users don’t want complexity and they don’t want to hunt, but they desperately want not to waste time — they want some confidence that the action they’re about to take will further their goals. Showing an unordered list of unfamiliar names doesn’t further anyone’s goals, and it gives no confidence that further action will help, either.

Why keep scrolling if all the names are arbitrary? Why read one random trail report from one random person? No one has actual needs that are afforded by the original design. What’s the user story behind this? “As a sheep, I want to maximize my engagement with your application, in order to meet your KPIs?”

They write, “See, I'd made the information so readily available that it left the user no desire to dive deeper.” This is baloney. The first design presented no information at all; at best it presented a small amount of data, and data entirely abstract from any human use case.

The map design allows people to easily pay attention, on a familiar substrate, to things that are important to them. It gives users agency and confidence in the future.

You don’t need to present users with a puzzle or a journey, or to manipulate them at all. If they’re not using the UX surface you put in front of them it’s not working hard enough to show that it affords their goals. Get to know your users better, and quit falling in love with your own designs.
Ask HN: Quitting a job to get time to prepare for interviews
So here is some background information for some context:
- Am 25 yrs of age
- I live in a developing country(if that matters)
- I finished my studies in 2020 but graduated with a degree in computer technology in 2021 due to Covid
- But I started developing real world applications in 2018, due to financial issues. The freelance contracts
I got around that time, helped alleviate my financial woes including paying for my fees.
- Got my first permanent software job at a remote startup in a developed country in 2019 and
been working there ever since as one of the founding developers.

But now I have been interested in getting another job for some time due to a some issues affecting me in
the current company:
- Working on some weekends, frequency increased in the past 8 months
- The boss claims he will give me a weekday replacing the weekends worked but most of them are not
replaced(giving an impression am working for free)
- Occasionally, there is always a deadline leading to working 12 hours+ to meet it
- The long working hours and weekends got so bad that I got burnt out and tried to quit a few months ago,
but boss told me he will replace them but the bad patterns have already emerged again
- Changes in some of the clauses in the contract or per what we agreed without letting me before hand.
- I suggest we follow best practices but the boss is more focused on how many features we can develop,
tasks we can do.

I have applied to a couple of jobs(on and off) in that span of time and although I was able to get
them to have a call with me or get tested for my skills, I often failed the technical
assessments due to lack of enough preparation(since most of the time am working and rest when I am free)
Also I see most jobs either requires to have experience in distributed systems(which I have no professional experience)
and use industry standards to write software(which we never followed). This makes me feel like I need to learn
even more things in order for those companies to see I am experienced and its not just fluff.

The current job limits my time but I want to grind hard on various technical questions so
that I can be considered for any role and at least reach the offer stages. I also have 4 months reserves
to sustain my current lifestyle. I also heard you are more likely to get a job while you are on a job.
Now comes my question, should I quit my current job then I practice for interviews to increase my chances of
find a better job?

Also any help on how to prepare for interviews and crafting a very attractive resume would be appreciated. Thanks!