skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Good beginner programming course that is practical?
I'm looking for a good beginner programmer course for my wife and a friend of mine that want to learn programming.

Any reccomendations?

Paid or free?

I have looked at allot of courses. Probably the best is Automating Boring stuff with Python, but its Python.

I'm looking for a really easy to follow course that is really practical, but isn't python.

Preferably Javascript or something else.
I remember when I first tried to learn programming I found that most beginner courses weren't very beginner friendly at all.

Please don't tell me to tell them to teach scratch.
I want something applicable to everyday life yet where they can still learn fundamentals.
technically, there is no search engine powered by AI
The word “ye” as in “ye olde inn” used to be written “Þe olde inn”. Aka “the olde inn”.

When thorn fell out of use we replace it with y for these archaic spellings. But it was always “the”.
you could even just throw up the job as an endpoint and have Zapier call it once a day or something! provided you can configure timeouts.
Hidden protected area in media + closed source software that writes it = potential tracking danger.
I'm not implying anything, but putting those two things together could be dangerous.

Of course that should apply to all proprietary software accessing SD cards, therefore all phones, all cameras, etc; thankfully, being among the least reliable media out there for carrying files, and less practical than for example a USB connection or dongle, they're often restricted to the same hardware using them, as would be any potential tracking data.
My comment was a bit ironic and maybe low quality in that sense.

They wouldn't be needed if there weren't malware chaos in the first hand.
So people were willing to pay for removing malware and keeping their computers safe because the threat was real and common.

It is true that there is still a big chaos, but it is hidden under the rug.
And yet, even Singapore is not drug free. They have black markets as well, it's just stupidly expensive due to the risk involved for the mules.
The awkward phrasing is SEO spam.
seems interesting
Some manufacturers have proprietary undocumented APIs that allow the host to upgrade the firmware in the card, but I’m not sure every maker does, and very sure most wouldn’t bother to update their firmware unless some horrendous issue came up.
Has this version been newly released? I used used Storybook for one of the project and I really like the idea of being able access UI elements that are somewhere deep inside the UI , without the need to click through it.
This repository has compiled the most commonly used AI tools, websites, papers and tutorials recently. It is hoped that these resources can be helpful to everyone. Stars and PRs are welcome!
> It wasn't a letter of the alphabet any more than the dollar sign, the pound sign, or punctuation were letters of the alphabet.

I'm not aware of historic English alphabets that include the dollar or pound sign or any sort of punctuation. On the other hand there is a lot of evidence of & being part of the alphabet. Wikipedia has or links to plenty of cases:

* Old Saxon alphabet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_Latin_alphabet#/me...

* The Dixie Primer, for the Little Folks: https://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/moore/moore.html#moore5

* Byrhtferð's Old English Alphabet: https://www.evertype.com/standards/wynnyogh/thorn.html

* My Own Primer, or First Les­sons in Spelling and Read­ing: https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/07/the-ampersand-part-2%C...

None of these are songs.
I'm an idea guy by heart.

Try to lose this notion.

The key to success in a startup (apart from timing, luck, having the right idea, grit, focus, etc) is determination to see things through to completion. You have to believe in your idea and see it through to the end, where 'the end' is hopefully an exit of some sort probably years in the future. If you see yourself as "an idea guy" you will be distracted by the new shiny thing you think of, and if that happens when your startup is in a slump you'll give up before you see success.

You do need to be "an idea guy" to build a startup, but all the ideas need to be about driving the core idea forwards. You need to see yourself less as "an idea guy" and more as "a <whatever the startup is about> guy".

To that end, I'd recommend starting a side project to see if you can grow it without getting bored, giving up, etc.
Would you entrust a software you can’t audit to format your computer’s disks?
Not consistent. Not predictive. Not based on anything resembling science. Trivially gamed. Repeatedly debunked. It's a "toolkit" in the same sense that you can call astrology a "toolkit." I can figure out my zodiac sign from my birth date, no test required. But so what? It doesn't mean anything.

M-B belongs in the dustbin of other useless pseduo-scientific "tools" such as phrenology, nativities, reading entrails, omens and signs, palmistry, tarot, ouija boards, etc. Of course some people want to believe in those things, but that doesn't make them useful.
Solar panels are dead cheap these days. A 600 watt plant, with panels, cables and an inverter, is at ~600-700€ here.
Certainly not a dead thread and thank you for your long and well reasoned comment. It reflects a chunk of a conversation I had with some colleagues a few days ago.

And the 'Chinese Room' turned out to be very feasible, much more feasible than people ever thought it would, probably including Searle (who is still alive, I really wonder if there is any text from him post ChatGPT that gives his views).
Marketing isn’t a problem if your product is good. You could waste a lot of time learning the usual marketing tactics. It’s way better to spend this time talking to customer and learn how to build.

If you build something people really want you just need to tell them that you built a solution and you got a client.
My work installed Windows 11 to fix a drivers issue. After 2 days of understanding most of the quirks, I tried installing the same on my personal desktop. The installed failed with some random bsod. It gave me an option to rollback to Windows 10 thankfully. I will stay with 10 for as long I can.
Fix the Reaction Button UI in Google Meet
> Medicine is evidence-based but they won't hand you a bunch of studies before surgery.

Well, they surely should be able to if you ask for it. And ideally, that information should be easily available to you anyway.
Some ecoli outbreaks are caused by human feces on the crops due to poor working conditions on the farms.

https://time.com/3974244/cilantro-feces/
This is what we in the Bitcoin ecosystem call an "Affinity Scam". Make it sound like something it isn't to capitalize on the hype.

It's honestly quite sad :(
Show HN: WebQA API – ask natural language questions over any website(s)
>On really crucial industries, we don't have anything, especially not in China: Social networks with billions of users, AI, computer chips, raw materials, PV cells - nothing. We couldn't cut them off from anything critical because we don't have it.

From what I have heard Chinese factories use alot of German engineering. It's been a key component of China's ascent and the current leverage they have over western interests.
I don't see a functional difference between a video chat and a text chat beyond the technical limitation that if a text message isn't kept for a short period of time then the recipient will likely not be able to read it.

Where would you draw the line?

Telling another human to deliver a verbal message only within the next 24 hours is okay. Training a parrot to do it is okay. Programming a robot to do the same is okay? Programming a computer to do that is not?

Is it okay if it's a one hour delay? Four hours? Until it detects that the user has read it? Until the user manually marks it as read (does that count as explicit deletion)? If it's stored in RAM? On an HDD? On an SSD in swap? On ticker tape?
"640K of memory is all that anybody with a computer would ever need"
Oh, I mean more than just tax filing requirements. Which (I can say as an ex-pat) are a massive PITA.
Good.

I'm really left-wing (compared to the average American I'm far-left :p), and while I understand why college were the first to understand and act on affirmative action in the US (during the civil rights movement), those policies were 'good' at the time but it's not the case anymore.

let's be honest, they didn't 'trickle down' that much, or rather, they trickled 'up' in sports and entertainment, and that trickled down. Affirmative action by educated people did its job, but until you build equality from the ground up, you will never have it, and I think people on the left have to let go old policies that formed (or even formatted) them and don't work anymore.

Affirmative action in college is at worst reactionnary, and at best stationary (and, paraphrasing D'avray: being stationary is going back).

I'm not knowledgeable enough to judge what's the effect are, and how it work in the US, but it looks to me like liberal feminism, where the response to 'your economic system create systemic inequality and poverty to everyone, and my group in particular' is 'but look, if you conform to it, you can get almost as rich as we are'. Except it's education instead of wealth.
There are also a lot of great products that don’t communicate what they do well — there’s some intersection between marketing and good UX there.

Making something “people want” inherently has “marketing” implied - people don’t want something they’ve never heard of!
> I asked ChatGPT for a rundown and I just see a list of “moved things around and refreshed the UI”

Why would you even admit that? Embarrassing.
Probably because software will be the most important criterion for choosing a car and you as a manufacturer won't be replaced by Google and Apple (who both develop their own cars). However, you suck at developing software and people are already using Google and Apple, so you will get replaced by Google and Apple anyway.
The problem is not with progress. The problem is with denial of a dilema. Human baseline nature is unable to handle much more progress.
Meaning, we are already very close to the killer drone dilema, and as even small crisis like the Covid virus have shown, once we come under pressure we fall apart. We can pretend all we want in good times, that we are strong and cohesive and we have good captains steering the ship. But in the bad times, its revealed these are just play actors, standing with unconnected steering wheels in light opera uniforms on deck of breaking vessels.

To think that handing more dangerous technology to such a unpatched humanity solves problems instead of just upping the stakes in a dangerous game, instead of patching the holes in our heads first, is contraproductive. We need to tame ourselves, before we are able to advance. Thus we need a realistic assesement of all our behaviour, a solid patching holding up to crisis and a almost stoic with apps as result, before progress can continue. Our hands are to flimsy for the tools we can make.

PS: " Automnomous suicide drones in city XXXXXX due to progress" should be the real title.
No, no. It will be GPT5forAll then.
https://imgur.com/a/jEQzRzT

Great job at OCR-ing the text and recognizing the context, but it still can't do doom and gloom like us eastern Europeans.
The same way it was the US’ business to free you from Nazis just 80 years ago.
Why would they have Suite A then?
Without context - it’s true.

However I do have an autistic trait that makes me forget easily people and things without context. My spouse regularly nags me to touch base with family as I just have my attention elsewhere. Tried various “friend managers” but they didn’t work as I rather pursue software than people.

E.g. I had multi year relationship when I gamed. I stopped gaming as much and those relationships deteriorated. I am godfather of son of a friend with whom I studied. Since we graduated we met twice or thrice.

And I know many people that go like that. Men’s friendships usually evolve around “do” rather than “discuss”. If there’s no shared “do” they fade away. Add above trait (which isn’t THAT uncommon) and building long term contextless relationship is very difficult.
Umm, grep?

To use it you have to crawl the web first though.
> That was the original arrangement...

Besides the fact that this would only apply to 4 of the 11 confederate states, they were all part of the country as the relationship between state and federal government changed, or had agreed to join it as it was.

In fact most of the first 15 presidents were from the South. Virginia specifically had the most presidents and the largest representation in the House because of the 3/5ths compromise, as well as Southerners controlling the Supreme Court (remember Frederick Douglas) and half the Senate. The South was fine with the federal system until they were going to lose slavery. If they had the votes, they would have been quite happy to force the North to accept slavery (and they tried). When they were outvoted, instead of respecting the democracy that they helped create, the South rebelled to preserve slavery. Any other version is a distortion.

None of this of course will affect southerners opinions and alternative facts, I'm sure.
> [...] A would be read as “A per se A”, [...] I, similarly, would be “I per se I” [...] O would be “O per se O”

That's incorrect, these would have been respectively "per se A", "per se I", and "per se O." The confusion is coming from how the ampersand was listed out in the alphabet:

> The alphabet is A, ..., X, Y, Z, and per se and.

That doesn't mean "&" was spelled out as "and per se and" separately. The first and is because it's the last item in a list in a sentence. Only the second and is part of the full phrase of per se and. If you use it as a single item in a sentence, it works like this:

> The last letter of the alphabet is per se and.

The last sentence of the article:

> the alphabet once ended with a final “X, Y, Z, and & per se &”.

Should be:

> the alphabet once ended with a final “X, Y, Z, and per se &”.
I'm sometimes still surprised that some people can find reasons to defend even that.
Windows is horrible, it started to derail ever since Windows 8 came into the picture.

This is an OS that does not respect its user. This is an OS that normalizes hostile software design, and makes it acceptable. This is an OS that spits in its users' faces and the users can do nothing about it. It's partly the user's fault as well. I used to use Windows, increasingly disliked it every day yet did nothing about it. Moving to Linux was one of the best decisions I ever made.

The grass really is greener on the other side, especially when you're standing in the Windows garden.
Closest I can think of:

https://search.marginalia.nu/

From the homepage:

This search engine isn't particularly well equipped to answering queries posed like questions, instead try to imagine some text that might appear in the website you are looking for, and search for that.

Where this search engine really shines is finding small, old and obscure websites about some given topic, perhaps old video games, a mystery, theology, the occult, knitting, computer science, or art.
irc is the place, get yourself a proper bot.
It's particularly common in German blackletter texts though they use ⁊c instead of &c, same origin though.
I just tested now and OpenShell (release 4.4.170 at this time) does work for Win 11, albeit needing some tweaks.

The start button image has to be replaced so that the replacement intercepts mouse clicks.

Still far better than the MS start menu fetching internet garbage instead of just launching an app as it's supposed to.

For those who know Classic Shell, Open-Shell is its successor.

Open-Shell:
https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu
VCs gave it to them when they wrote "<existing business> but on the internet!" on a napkin.
Our future was robbed between the 1960s and now.

Crazy great things have happened - usually thanks to the best of us. But the worst of us have been pulling the same mega-destructive stunts for decades, and they keep getting away with it.

There are good reasons to have optimism, but like... We were violently mugged, and are bleeding. We need to do something about all that before worrying that our outlook isn't rosy enough.
There will still be giant AI models, they will just be improved by other means than making them bigger. Subtle but important distinction.
But there is no vendor lock-in here, VPS providers are interchangeable.
For the same reason the first question for any tech support, sale etc. is understanding the customer's requirement. Not asking that would be very rude.
API stability is THE #1 most important thing to get right.

I don’t care about the details of your API. I have worked with API’s that triggered a WTF every 5 secs. But I don’t care. I figure it out, build an abstraction on top that makes sense to me, and move on with far more important things.

So do what Linus does with Linux. Don’t f* break clients! Add a separate new API instead or expand the old API with additional entry points. Never ever deprecate anything in your API!

API developers that think it makes sense to break all clients, and force those clients to make changes, just because they wake up one day thinking that renaming FooBar to BarXk is a good idea, makes me want to throw my PC out of the window.

And who actually thought that marking things “deprecated” is a good idea? It is still an API change. With annoying warnings/errors added as a bonus.

Don’t. Do. It.

Use your brain to figure out how to accomplish the same task without breaking clients. The Linux guys can do it. So can you.
not the algorithm. the various implementations of it. evidence? ask a friend.
It's good enough for French military.
tl;dr check for desirable presence of argon2id as key derivation function in the output of

lsblk
sudo cryptsetup luksDump /dev/sd[xy]

or more terse (not sure if this works for luks1 header format too)

sudo cryptsetup luksDump /dev/sd[xy] --dump-json-metadata | jq '.keyslots | .[].kdf.type'

if you see anything but argon2id, consider migrating. Thanks for the explanation and PSA @mjg59

https://anarchistnews.org/content/update-ivan-alocco has the english translation of the letter by comrade arsonist anarchist
The net impact is definitely more than piped gas. I'm just saying it works as a backup.
GPT4All is obviously capitalizing on the hype of GPT4, it's very unlikely to just be a coincident that it's has GPT4 in the name while GPT4 is receiving a lot of attention. They could have named it GPTForAll, but chose a 4 instead of "for" for obvious reasons.
Marketing is important, but like many skills, it needs to be applied to be valuable. All the books in the world won't tell you what resonates with your audience.

Start building an email list, and post regularly, 2-4 times per month. Don't wait until you have a product. Obviously you at least need to try to have a general idea of who your audience is.

As a solo founder, you'll need to have your hands in everything. That doesn't mean you'll always do the work, perhaps you can hire contractors, but you shouldn't have any blind spots. So round out your knowledge. For instance, if you're a front-end dev, learn to build the backend and the cloud essentials. (Don't use the idea that you can punt to Vercel or Heroku as an excuse - you still need a foundational understanding)
From [1]:

> Content Protection for Recordable Media (CPRM), the content protection technology used for SD standards, is key to enabling a distribution system for music, video, etc. CPRM provides a high level of protection against illegal copying.

Sounds like someone intended to sell movies on SD cards, replacing DVDs/bluerays.

[1] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/316421
Ask HN: With so many brands of bottled “water” which do you drink?
And how many years will that take? Hint: more than we've got, if we want to have a prayer of avoiding more than 1.5 degrees of warning.

Just read for yourself here: https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/04/1115452

> “This assessment shows that limiting warming to around 2C (3.6F) still requires global greenhouse gas emissions to peak before 2025 at the latest, and be reduced by a quarter by 2030.”

Ain't happenin', and this isn't going to get us there. Only massive, worldwide action will save us.

Again, this is not a "fix" in any sense of the word. At best, by itself, it's a feel good measure. But I'm sure we won't commit to what it would really take.
If it's obvious someone with marketing skills can also steal it and sell as their own .. but if not, they won't know until it's too late
I have a CS degree and pursued a marketing MBA. To make it short:
i) a great product with basic marketing trumps a bad product with "fantastic marketing" on the long
ii) the product makes the money, not the marketing
iii) one can't hold both a CS and a marketing role at the same time as business grows, you will have to choose one or the other.
About learning marketing, practice trumps theoretical knowledge.
IMHO: build a great product and team-up with a competent marketer.
The main problem with humanity is the lack of wisdom, not the lack of progress. Discovering something is nice, but if you are not able to handle it, it is of no use. When antibiotics were discovered, it made a great improvement on health of people. But instead of using it in a wise way, it was grossly overused, resulting in widespread resistance, slowly undoing all it positive effects. And that is how it basically has gone with every discovery.
I had Windows 10's installer try to install its bootloader into a Windows dynamic disk volume, which trashed the volume

rather than trust the quality of Microsoft's software: the general rule is to unplug anything other than the drive you're installing onto
People who use Windows or Mac do that all the time?
It really sucks because there are users who practically must use Windows. People with disabilities aren't considered within FOSS, so are left out in Microsoft's cold embrace. Luckily there's WSL, and I use that quite a bit with Emacs and Emacspeak. But it's nothing like having a full Linux OS with no ads using up CPU cycles and RAM. I can't even see the ads.
The best way to learn how to launch startups is to launch startups.
Helmet rules are a key part to that, it encourages the incorrect belief that riding a bike is dangerous (not to mention being something else to deal with), thus fewer do it
Our best look yet at what Apple’s announcing in June
2048 words in 6 positions is simply not enough entropy for the NSA's encryption cracking infrastructure. If it is worth it they'll crack it. The NSA does not use a single ASIC cracker.
'I'm an idea guy by heart' -> Who isn't, it's the easiest part.
A few things odd about this post:

1. The poster of this post is also the author of this post. No clarification from the author yet about why the HN title does not match the actual title.

2. Current title on HN: An evidence-based guide to expanding your comfort zone. Actual title on the blog post: When You Plateau, So Does Your Company.

3. There is no actual evidence provided in the blog post. The current title is misleading.

Anyway I have flagged this post because I don't think self-promotional and misleading posts like this should be on the front page of HN.
Yes, I also worked with him in NZ for a year or so, some time ago. He is a nice and fun person to chat with.
I live in a small European town. Lived in bigger cities for a while. Not for me. I can just walk into the pub and have a pint and a conversation, with a friend or a stranger. Good times.