skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just started working at a 15-person startup where I am on a small team of 5 devs. People typically "don't have time to write tests" and are encouraged to pump out new shiny features every 2 weeks.

I am a new to development but I've noticed that lots of errors pump through code where "No method X defined for nil object" or something like that. I wonder if I could somehow make the case that we'd spend less time reacting to problems and bugs if we spent more time up front writing tests that could give us more than 19% code coverage.

Does anyone have advice for starting this conversation with my boss or during one of our standups? I know I could somehow pitch the value as "less problems later for more time spent now" but is there a more effective way to say it?
I want to install IPFS desktop but I am afraid it will wear down my drives, will it?
For anyone who hates to write tests, there's another testing strategy that i also found practical and useful, it's called Snapshot Testing. Basically, you can write a script to dump all outputs. And everytime you change the code, just try to compare the old vs new snapshot output.
Of course it does. That’s a large chunk of the model.
That's not dogma, that's the technique. If you aren't writing the test first then you aren't doing TDD, and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with not doing TDD at all if that's what you choose.

The dogma most people see or claim to see is that TDD is meant to be used everywhere (or nearly). Which some fools, yes, believe. But they're just that, fools. People who use their brains (aka, non-fools) know them to be fools and do what works for them and the circumstances because they spend some time thinking about things instead of parroting a dogma (or an anti-dogma).
Actually the roof example can be done at scale cheap enough for a local contractor to market. I'd use hyperspectral but 30 cm optical might work in sure 10cm would. Thanks for the suggestion!
I don't run pirated Microsoft or other such software on my Windows PCs, it's just too much trouble and ultimately more expensive/time consuming.

However, I've long given up updating Microsoft software due to MS's unacceptable privacy policies and changeing policy on-the-fly so it was interesting when I recently had to move my old MS software to a new machine after a mobo failure. Both Windows 7 and Office 2007 moved OK but after installing Office it was clear from the dial-home-to-Microsoft activation page that MS wasn't happy that I was reregistering old software. (I couldn't care less as I normally use Linux and MS stuff is now just legacy—for compatibility etc.).

That's the background, the point I'm making is that I've always assumed Microsoft would spy on what I was using on my machine (both its own software and stuff from other vendors) and it would know if the software I was using was pirated. Anyone who doesn't assume this I reckon is naïve.

Why wouldn't MS do this? After all one hasn't a clue what's in the data that's been sent back whenever software contacts MS.

Since XP, my practice has been to activate Windows with it partially installed—with only what MS supplied in the package/ISO or with just barely enough third party drivers to get the machine functional with a basic network connection (other noncritical drivers such as nVidia video won't have been installed). Automatic Updates is also permanently disabled.

Before proceeding further with the Windows install I'll install MS Office with absolute minimum features—perhaps only PowerPoint (that's if it's installed at all—usually not as I normally use LibreOffice).

Essentially, both Windows and Office can only report home the absolute minimum of information during activation (Microsoft doesn't tell me what's in the info it's sending home so I do everything possible to ensure that it can only skim off the absolute minimum).

Once activation is finished, the internet is disconnected and I finish both installations and install all other software I use.

That's the last time both Windows and Office ever contact home except for Windows authentication. Any essential updates (KB files) are sourced from elsewhere—never from Windows Update. Even then, I carefully vet any update for nefarious content and unless I'm pretty certain the file is clean then it doesn't get installed—no matter how important the update or security fix is.

The next step is to install the very nifty Advanced Tokens Manager utility which backs up the activation data. So come the next reinstallation one doesn't have to reactivate Windows or Office at all. In essence, my PCs only ever need to contact Microsoft just once: https://download.cnet.com/Advanced-Tokens-Manager/3000-2242_....

Incidentally, the PC that failed last contacted Microsoft in 2012 (that's when the software was last activated). That's an interval of over 10 years, not a bad effort I reckon.

In my opinion all those who value their privacy should act similarly whether they pirate software or not—and especially so if they do.
I've been looking into nim lately (just for fun with the Advent of Code problems) and it looks fantastic. I plan to allocate more time to it in future definitely.
Also I have used this company to monitor things like road and other infrastructure construction. Images most of the planet daily.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Labs
I have been buying DVDs at the thrift store and ripping them to my personal Plex server. I do not feel bad, I paid for the media and I am the only person with access to this server -- its pretty much the same as me watching that DVD alone.
> Please make sure that provider and SkyFi attribution is clearly visible on all shared images.

Can you crop the images?

> nor can you sell products you create that contain the images themselves.

Can you sell a commercial report containing the images?

Can the images be published in an journal?
Who's the "man" in this case? Not me. Not a man, and I see that study as a single data point associated with a single event. There are many studies on the social contagion effect of suicide, enough that it's worth considering the possible impact of how suicide is depicted in media.
Why do some of the action keys get stuck down and enter a repeat loop on mobile? Is this more of a keyboard-only type of game?
So this seems to only use 3 DMA channels... So by using all 12, you could have 4 additional "cores".
A paper billionaire fucked with a cash billionaire and found out what happens when you try to do that.
It's freaking annoying that you can't use an Apple device without being connected to Apple.

There should be a law against that sort of thing, for hardware that you fully paid for.
Well hold on now. Parent presented that as fact with no evidence too!
I think it can be taken too far but why not have some unit tests? They are the easiest kind of test to write and the fastest to run.

Also, you dont see it because those bugs were fixed before production.
That's my point. No one knew the St Petersberg stock exchange would close in 1914. The US stock exchange could close in 2044 and no one would be expecting it. 50 year predictions are unreliable.
Ask HN: How do you back up your 'daily driver' computer?
I'm interested in hearing what tools or processes other folks here use to back up their main computer.

The online research on this seems to be full of affiliate sites with mixed incentives, so I'm looking for direct, first hand experiences.

I would feel pretty bad if my macbook SSD died with no way to recover it, so it's better to be safe than sorry.

Automated daily backups on my servers from the hosting providers saved me tons of time the last few years, so I want to take precautions on my personal computer too.

What do you recommend?
> where the knight must go is the easy part because there something interesting to do there (like capturing a piece)

The aim is to build an intuition for where the knight can traverse without getting captured in N moves. If you can see further into the future than your opponent, you may notice a pattern before they have a chance to stop it. This intuition isn’t fundamentally tied to notation. But having intuition for the notation facilitates it since that’s how discussion and literature will interface with you.
Like this laptops side by side https://youtu.be/YGxTnGEAx3E?t=652
There's actually several official nops on x86, each of different instruction length. To be fair, I think they back ported this behavior to the official arch after Microsoft relied on it. AMD defines up to 11 byte sequeces, Intel defines up to 9 byte sequences.

90 NOP
6690 66 NOP
0f1f00 NOP DWORD ptr [EAX]
0f1f4000 NOP DWORD ptr [EAX + 00H]
0f1f440000 NOP DWORD ptr [EAX + EAX*1 + 00H]
660f1f440000 66 NOP DWORD ptr [EAX + EAX*1 + 00H]
0f1f8000000000 NOP DWORD ptr [EAX + 00000000H]
0f1f840000000000 NOP DWORD ptr [EAX + EAX*1 + 00000000H]
660f1f840000000000 66 NOP DWORD ptr [EAX + EAX*1 + 00000000H]
66660f1f840000000000 66 66 NOP DWORD ptr [EAX + EAX*1 + 00000000H]
6666660f1f840000000000 66 66 66 NOP DWORD ptr [EAX + EAX*1 + 00000000H]

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25545470/long-multi-byte...
Collaborative Information Retrieval: Gopher from Moo (1998) [pdf]
Next up for CRISPR: Gene editing for the masses?
Not so different from software I would hazard a guess. Document requirements (accuracy over intended usage period, human interface, weight, size) and identify potential subsystems and interfaces. Obtain industrial base with both practical and theoretical expertise in mechanical engineering. Brainstorm possible solutions and compare to requirements. Prototype and iterate. Test. Train.
I never understand the logic of letting someone stay out of prison after they're sentenced pending appeals

* If we think they will win an appeal, we should just declare a mistrial

* If we don't think they will win an appeal, they should be in prison.

Which is it?
This is a rather nice route for malicious code to hide itself... A full trace of what the CPU is up to could never find this.
I am getting 503 as well. HN hug wouldn't be 100,000 sessions per minute. Strange.
The Drive has more details https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-thieves-are-stealing-hyund...

My read is that a USB connector fits nicely on the ignition tab, after the column is ripped open and the keylock removed.
I did the same thing with DVDs, Blurays and CDs. Everything got pulled out of the hardcase unless the hardcase was a special design or unique in some way. Kept the inserts for each media type in a couple of small shoebox sized storage boxes, put each disc in to a soft sleeve that I bought in bulk for about two cents each, and then put all that into two banker's boxes. Reduced from eight or nine banker's boxes to nothing at all. The digital contents are stored on my local server and I can stream it to any local device or over the internet to my laptop or phone.
Yes it is.
It’s the “as much money as possible” part that makes it so.

It’s fine to charge cost plus some nice profit.

But trying to maximise the price in a medical context is morally equivalent to finding a person dying in the desert and making them sign all their assets over to you before giving them water.
> Yes, that’s right, people crusading in the name of open source–a movement intended to promote freedom to use source code–are now claiming that a neural network, designed to save programmers the onus of re-inventing the wheel when they need code to perform programming tasks, is de facto unlawful.

This is disingenuous... the issue for FOSS is the scrubbing the license off the code and then users not observing the terms copilot or whatever concealed from you... that is against copyright law.

It's not a real problem? Great dump MS monorepo in there for public use.
> I want pharma and medical innovation to be huge money makers.

I want citizens to not die of treatable diseases. Our goals seem to be different.
I bought a copy of ‘Tropic Thunder’ for exactly this reason. One day it will be pulled from all streaming platforms due to RDJ playing a black man.
> Another thing I don’t like about Swift are the named parameters which was an objective C thing.

Might just be what you're used to, but I find languages without named parameters annoying, particularly when I'm reading code I'm not my own. They do a lot to disambiguate and make reading unfamiliar code much smoother.
“Can I use my Newton as a web server?”

Really? That’s a frequently asked question?
That doesn't mean we shouldn't complain about services that launch even more of such ships.

This offering is a stalker's delight. The only thing that would make it worse is if they paid people to turn up to a specified location and take photos, like some sort of Uber for creeps.

At minimum, they should have a form where you can opt out of having your home included in this sold imagery. Better would be to notify all property owners and dwellers within a photographed region that the imagery has been purchased, with an option to opt-out. Best of all would be if everyone being photographed had to opt-in before a sale could be made. That would be a company taking privacy seriously rather than trying to profit from breaching it in bulk.
A very "semantically open" use of 'anti-', as some may be surprised to know that there are people who watched that episode and did not judge it the least deprecatory towards any category.

"I mean", as if Douglas Reynholm (the "phobic" - finally, a literal case - in the episode) was drawn as an exemplary character, a model of a human being... "I mean II", I checked on a search engine for the spelling of the surname, and the first under-link stub that resulted is «Douglas Reynholm was an incredibly arrogant, self-righteous, pompous, cruel and elitist egomaniac who considered himself to be somewhat above everybody else. He viewed women as objects to feel and manipulate to his incredible sexual mania»...

--

Edit: Furthermore. As "everyone" knows, Graham was a humble watchman in the hospital where Dr. Rick Dagless worked (the "Darkplace"), and probably does not even speak TCP today. So, when he wrote the scene of the people who believe they have in front of them "the Internet" - like the one called "«stupid cow»" by an adlibber because she did not realize "the internet is weightless" (and so also must be "the box which is the Internet" in the scene) -, when he wrote that, did he mean to diminish and elicit contempt for all the non technically inclined, probably including himself?
What if LPs were agents of pension funds, endowments, etc? Such LPs have no skin in the game.
Bad Companies
What do you have to sue for? Nothing atm. Only long term solution is a steady job + freelancing or side hustle
You absolutely need that.
"Extended Algol has always been the primary language for MCP systems, extending back to the Burroughs
B5000 of 1963. No doubt more lines of code have been written in COBOL for these systems, but most of the
really significant code has been written in Algol or specialized languages derived directly from Algol. You
can't be considered to be a master programmer for MCP systems unless you are also a master Algol
programmer. It's our assembler language, our systems language, and for some of us, our everyday, go-to,
application development language"

Today many programmers love Linux/BSD/etc, before that many were especially fond of Sun Microsystems, before that DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation, of DEC-10 / PDP-11 / PDP-8 etc fame)...

...and before all of those, Burroughs.

I read that IBM made virtual memory popular (which required educating customers), but Burroughs actually invented it. And Burroughs made fancy architectures that were Algol specific. And so on. All back in the 1960s, even the early 1960s.
Like a restaurant almost.
Show HN: LootList – free storefront for your in-game loot with Discord messaging
Don't know how many gamers are in the crowd, but thought I'd share.

LootList gives you your own online storefront where you can easily list any in-game items you're trying to sell (think MMOs, loot-driven ARPGs like Diablo, etc). Essentially a free web page to put your loot. You can share your storefront/listings, or just use it as an inventory management tool. Works with any game.

The other big feature is integrated Discord messaging. Anyone who sees your listing can click "Message <you> on Discord" and they'll be instantly connected with you in a private messaging thread on Discord.

I built LootList as a fun new year's project. Feedback is more than welcome, since it would be cool to spend more time working on it and making it better.
If you're doing TDD then yes, you're writing the tests first. But even Kent Beck says you don't need to do TDD all the time. So where's the dogmatism?
Piperlongumine, a Potent Anticancer Phytotherapeutic
I think that's more about asset sizes and loading times than rendering capabilities.
Its use is mostly limited to STEM undergrads that for some reason have trouble installing/running MATLAB.

Especially in Engineering (Mechanical/Electrical/Civil) Octave is not a substitute to MATLAB for the simple fact the former does not feature the various toolboxes useful to practicing engineers.
> It's amazing that they have the bandwidth for this.

We seem to have broken that bandwidth because I'm getting a 503 now!
I still have one out in the garage in my bin of vintage graphics cards. This card came in my mom's IBM desktop in the 90s. But yeah, lots of old hardware that was amazing in it's prime is completely obsolete and unworkable with current gen operating systems.

R.I.P. Hercules Game Theater XP / GTXP

https://images.hothardware.com/static/migratedcontent/review...

https://hothardware.com/reviews/hercules-game-theater-xp

https://support.hercules.com/en/product/gametheaterxp71-en/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Theater_XP
You can select maximum cloud cover in the resulting image, over a month long imaging window. They predict cloud cover to task satellites. It's kind of the dual problem to "get me and image on this date"
Came here to post this.

> The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck.
I think it's basically a process of figuring out the equations you want, then how to "mechanize" them with gears, cams, and differentials. Then it is mechanical engineering to fit all the gears in a box. (The equations are generally much simpler than you'd implement in software, and you're not dealing with algorithms.)

Another thing is that the Globus went through multiple revisions so the original didn't have as much functionality. So it's kind of like any project where you make the minimum viable product and then incrementally add features.
Uncovered code tells you something useful. That there are no assertions made about some code.

Covered code tells you nothing. It tells you this code may or may not have assertions made about it.

Tracking coverage is good because it shows you what code isnt tested. But once its covered, you have no idea. So instead of increasing coverage, you should be evaluating the new assertions being made to uncovered code. But virtually everywhere I've been has just used coverage going up to mean your tests are sufficient.
Yep, agreed. I tend to just code a single giant integration test where I map out the happy path to start with, and then when it works code tests for known edge cases at specific parts.

Keeps me focused.
If you're able to horde in a healthy way it's no problem. I just think for a lot of people it tends to become an unhealthy obsession of relying on obtaining media to self medicate. Chasing the dragon trying to obtain more and more media. Then ultimately facing the disappointment when it doesn't provide the dopamine fix or childhood nostalgia you're hoping for. I vividly remember the terrible feeling of opening up Plex with countless terabytes of data and realizing nothing here is going to actually make me feel better. Media is a powerful stimulant and I've reached the conclusion for myself at least it has to be used in moderation.
It’s not a worst case interpretation. It’s a relief to go.

I think it’s not possible to understand unless you know the feeling. You’re right that most people don’t. But many do: Robin Williams, David Foster Wallace, Aaron Swartz.

I don’t claim to speak for them, but if any of them used it as an escape — which seems somewhat likely - then they’re examples that the logic can be turned against someone strong, using their strength against them by encouraging them to accept the inevitability with composure.

You’ll have to take my word that there are many more of us than those famous examples, though.
> Just wish the PIO had a bit more logic/registers.

Seriously. I'd kill for PIOv2 to be some RV32E subset. Hell, I'd take stripped of normal LD/ST instructions if that made it easier for them.
My method is to use rsnapshot [1] to make a local copy. The rsnapshot script uses hard links to save space for files that have not changed. That has made fixing a corrupted git repo easy and I am lazy so that works for me.

I then rsync that snapshot to a local NAS and also copy that data from the NAS to external SSD USB drives. The NAS also has rsnapshot for important folders. The SSD drives get unplugged and one goes into my vehicle in case the house converts to another state of matter.

If something is extra important I encrypt it and then lftp+sftp [2] it to a chroot SFTP server on the internet. The lftp command has a mirror sub-system that can replicate most of the behavior of rsync except using multiple threads to a chroot sftp-only server to make it faster than native rsync.

[1] - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/rsnapshot

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lftp
While not specifically that, the EU's Digital Markets Act is moving things in that direction. I recommend reading the full text of the legislation, it has many gems.
> The only time I saw scrum masters really do anything was “leading” standup and “leading” planning meetings every other month. I put leading in quotes because there’s only so much leading one can do if everyone else knows more about the product due to the inherent transitory nature of the scrum master role.

100%

I interviewed with a company (not C1) earlier this year that had one of those “every team has a manager, every team has a scrum master” bits going on. I asked multiple times what the difference between the roles were, and couldn’t make sense of any of the answers I got (which were full of consultant-speak). I declined to move forward.

Like anything, I’m sure there are teams out there with this situation that make it work. But it sounds to me like a recipe for confusion, conflict, and atrophy.
You have been blessed to work on self-organizing and self-managing teams. When we come into client orgs, they typically have no process in place and cannot understand why they're not shipping features.

Scrum isn't perfect, but its an "industry-standard" practice that we can use to get quick buy-in from client stakeholders, and then use to apply even the most basic level of process to these teams.

As an engineer at Google or a freelance developer it never made much sense to me.

But as a manager of remote, distributed, international teams?

It makes a lot of sense.
no, you were both wrong. rip the discs to an external drive and play it over your local network. or even better, over the internet with plex/emby/jellyfin.

how are these articles getting up voted? what boomers are reading HN on a Saturday and going 'yeah I miss my DVD collection'?
The DVDs actually doesn't take up a ton of space. What we did was buying the cheapest version of a movie and just throw away the cover. You can get DVD/BluRay binders that will hold 200 - 400 discs in the space of a few large books.

I find ripping movies a little tiresome. Getting the quality, sound and subtitles right can be challenging.
Ah come on, it’s amazon and Bezos we’re talking about here… hardly paragons of virtue.