skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Honest question: how are you a junior to mid junior after working for 5+ years?
Ask HN: Subscriptions you'll keep and subscriptions you'll cancel?
At this time of the year I review my subscriptions.

What are some app / saas / services subscriptions you’ll keep because they’ve proven valuable to you?

What are some you decided to cancel?
The minimum price for the software can't be changed. It's open source. Once it's out you can't undo it. You will have users paying $0 to use it for what amounts to forever.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/356:_Nerd_Sniping
I mean it’s true. For Haskell you design for programs with no side-effects.
Not forgetting of course that Debian is available commercially:

Vendors of Debian Installation Media
https://www.debian.org/CD/vendors/

They are hardly Adobe, but all it takes is one zealous lawyer on a crusade to force an interpretation that Debian and Adobe are equivalent organisations when it comes to the commercial production of software.

pizza points out that Commercial Activity is apparently a bit more carefully defined, in the act, than simply “money changing hands”: https://lwn.net/Articles/956191/

I’ve never been a fan of the moral position that says certain laws only apply to commercial contracts. If two parties make an agreement (get married, have a child, adopt a cat, go fishing, etc.) then they ought to be held to that agreement. Whether or not money exchanged hands seems immaterial and considering whether it did or not, when trying to decide if someone acted in the right or in the wrong, feels dirty.
This is just a batshit insane thing for a person who supposedly promotes the creative commons to say. Plagiarism isn't learning how to write articles like the NYT or how to write code like Linus or RMS. That's still the case if I program my computer to do it.
OK, fair enough, your suggestion is totally reasonable. However I've been referring to people's "priors" though in informal conversation for about 25 years, to friends, romantic partners, and family as well as academics and programmers, and I know several other people who do the same. Apart from anything else it's a nice non-technical sounding word. I'm not a Bayesian statistics zealot (I don't even work in statistics any longer). But I definitely think all educated people should be familiar with the _idea_ of Bayesian inference. I think that goes without saying. I'm no expert on such matters but clearly our own perception/cognition has some sort of Bayesian flavour to it (you think a mammal dimly perceived on the horizon is probably a dog etc). What I'm saying is -- it sound like perhaps you also have had some involvement with the academic subject -- I think you don't need to push that word quite so far away from mainsteam culture. It's perhaps even a little patronizing to mainstream culture? And I think that if we are ever going to overcome CP Snow's Two Cultures problem then making little gestures like this in the right direction is actually important; especially from people like you and me.
It sounds to me that Hosieth is making too much of the issue.
They may be correct, but this is not in my mind the highlight of 'adademic misconduct' that could be brought to mind.

In general, the chart they refer to says that more sleep equals leff injury, and I don't think that is really disputable.
Interesting, this has really been on my mind lately with Google suddenly telling me my photo storage ran out of space and I need to pay for space.

I think I'm going to print a bunch of photo albums. Visiting family for the holidays, my mom broke out some albums from almost 30 years ago of my child hood, albums of photos from the 50s of grand parents. It's pretty cool those exist.

Other wise I need to make sure i don't lose any of my drives or accounts or my phone and make sure none of that breaks.
Can't you just pick a random chlorite?
I created it for convenience. Can edit, delete, backup easier. I'm not sure that #comment can do that or not
Look up the Jupiter Ace from 1982. A lot like a Timex-Sinclair, but with Forth as the built in language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Ace
But only lasts half that..
I frankly find the whole idea of the switch statement unfortunate. The switch statement in C has a really understandable compiled representation: linear code where you can jump into in the middle. It was fine in 1970. But in 2023 I'd expect introduction of pattern matching instead, which generalizes the idea much better. Python pulled this off successfully. Java pulled it off successfully. Lua could, too.
> However, like all ferrocyanide salt solutions, addition of an acid or exposure to UV light can result in the production of hydrogen cyanide gas, which is extremely toxic.

Now that does seem like a bit of a concern, doesn’t it?
Markdown is a blessing for any operation that needs to be performed across many files. Load up your favorite editor and get going.
Shinjuku station is a special case because it is so huge.

More precisely, the problem is not the train/subway station part of the station, that part is surprisingly easy to navigate. The problem is when you leave the station. There are 200 exits, and there is a good chance you end up in a place you didn't expect.
Looks like something I'd love to have on an Android foldable. Web based stuff never handles the pen well enough.
Japan has a weird mix of nice people, affordable/good food, historical structures that are well preserved, and modern/futuristic buildings/transportation. It is an "easy" place to visit, not expensive, good public transportation, and lots of well known things to go see (that are more than just tourist traps).

For a first timer, I suggest spending more time in Kyoto and Osaka and less time in Tokyo (but generally, you do Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka on your first trip there and then diverge from that if you go back).
> Saying there are no ads, when there were ads, is just wrong.

right, and Cox Cable has a competitor because there's a dialup service available that competes against the fiber.

That's not how English works, that's not how people work. That's how computers work.

You are communicating with people, not computers.

> Probably doing too many to notice all the ads on cable in the 90s then I guess. Because they were there.

it's a mitch hedberg joke. I was making fun of your insistence that my usage of the word 'now' means it couldn't have also been true for a long while in the past.
> most of which suck

I'd hope so, that's kinda the point.

But seriously, my house hold just replaced the Roombas with roborock and couldn't be happier
I used to have similar problems (and also hell bans at random web sites) because I had a small ISP that uses CGNAT. Somewhere in my zip code, there was probably an infected windows box or something.

You might check your IP in an IP reputation database.

I eventually switched to a larger, more soulless ISP (also CGNAT) because we can’t have nice things on the internet any more.
>This copy is not a transitory copy in service of a fair use, nor likely a fair use in itself,

Seems vastly transitory and since the output cannot be copyrighted, does no harm to any work it “trained” on.
https://www.aao.org/eye-health/news/low-dose-atropine-kids-w... may be interesting.
This should have been the idea of the landing page: https://pluto-lang.org/docs/category/new-features
This is what I use and like:

https://yourls.org
So why pile on even more? Terrible justification tbh. It’s hard for a small business or indie developer. The odds are against you.
You just don't get it, do you? There is no readily available reactor tech suitable for commercial maritime use at the moment, none.

We do have technology so to produce green fuel for ships, and the whole shipping industry, from carriers to builders, is pursuing that in their goal of carbon neutral in 2050.

Of course there is still the possibility of those people being oart of a grand anti-nuclear conspiracy. Or they analyzed the tech and costs and came to an informed solution, one that is now global policy. You pick.
I was there this August with my family. I got my 6 year old kid hooked on Coco's Yichiban.
I agree with this take 1000%.
How else are you intending it to work without that "shortcoming"?
Synthetic methane is limited by the sources of carbon dioxide. Existing prototypes use either biomass or industrial byproducts for concentrated CO2. This is not available at scale. Biomass does not grow fast enough to sequester enough carbon.

Prometheus Fuels is the main player trying to do direct atmospheric sequesteration. But they've not succeeded yet.
I'm not sure about the other things but sun tracking tech for solar panels has been around for a long time and it's trivially easy to find through a search, such as [1].

"But there are also other ways to boost the energy production of solar panels – such as by tilting them to follow the Sun's path in the sky, similar to the way young sunflowers follow the sun from east to west during the day. Tracking technology, which is already in use on some land based solar arrays, helps increase the overall electricity production, as the panels constantly adjust to face the Sun."

1) www.bbc.com/future/article/20221116-the-floating-solar-panels-that-track-the-sun
Software copyright needs to die?

No more software licenses?
Not going to lie, if I were trying to infect some devices, it might be through “porting” unofficial “patches” (that no one will ever realistically inspect) for 10+ year old, out-of-support devices whose users have allowed root access.
Alexander Fleming and Jonas Salk are akin Atticus Finch, but in real life.
Would be great to get Linux running on and driver coverage for all of the system-on-chip of these devices. Talent exists for this but they are busy with their jobs or more interesting problems.
My favorite is still Starship Troopers "would you like to know more?" everywhere you look, but Minority Report's personalized annoyances after identifying you. Then of course, there's the Black Mirror's version of ads. Black Mirror is obviously more recent, but even back when some of this older stuff was created, pervasive advertising was already being made fun of. I wonder what Robert Heinlein or Philip K Dick would have thought of what we really have today
https://storycorps.org/about/ is the formalized version of that, as well as archiving the stories in the Library of Congress. They air every Friday morning on my local NPR station, and the stories they air are very, very diverse so I'm of the impression they'll take anything they can get in the vein of preserving first-hand accounts of "the way it was"
I almost pulled the trigger on the Z10, then got worried I’d just brick it and backed out. Now it’s not even available. Hopefully there will be another no-solder option soon.
Cool stuff. Interesting to see how these ideas evolve, now with LLMs. I made the similar thing some time ago (>2yrs): https://shkur.ski/chronocatch/ for Mac/Win (Intel, H264 for interframe compression and BM25-ranked search). Then the war started and I regret not sharing this back in time "as is" when I could.
Still the best IDE.
GP is incorrect. Roomba does not charge by sqft
I really hope so - but how? If they only measure profit, what will contribute to reduced profit?
The users in the comments seem to be rather upset at the company's recent actions, but I do not have the context as to what's actually going on.
"Accident" is the official terminology, not an attempt to downplay the severity.
Broadly speaking, the cost of making a tech-related decision that makes things easier now but harder in the future.

Personal take: tech debt isn't "bad code" any more than a hotdog is a bad meal when you're working with what you have. Sure steak is better, but we can't always have steak. People ascribe more/deeper meaning to the phrase than necessary and get tangled up in the metaphor far beyond practicality.
Theano existed, but it didn't use autodiff at the time, most loss functions had preprogrammed derivative functions. Python first had native autodiff in June of 2013 with the ad package, but previously had bindings to Fortran and C++ libraries that supported autodiff in different use cases. Julia first had native autodiff in April of 2013 with ForwardDiff.jl.
shared earlier this year, a blog post about a clandestine visit in 2014:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35672840
> There is no readily available reactor tech suitable for commercial maritime use at the moment, none.

You realize there's a nuclear powered cargo ship in operation right now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevmorput

This technology not only exists, it's being used presently. And that's on top of the other three nuclear cargo ships that were previously built. We still have those proven designs.

> We do have technology so to produce green fuel for ships, and the whole shipping industry,

We do not. Existing synthetic gas plants are not capturing CO2 from the atmosphere. They are either using biomass or industrial byproduct CO2. The former of which does not scale, the latter is not truly carbon free it's just using carbon that would have been released into the atmosphere anyway. Neither is a pathway to producing green fuels at scale. Startups are pursuing atmospheric carbon sequestration, but it's proven elusive so far.
This feels like something that could be ameliorated by trustworthy curation, but The Wirecutter hasn't given good signal for years now, if it ever did, and I haven't seen anything else yet.

Maybe I should try paying for Consumer Reports
I looked into the jump table optimization. The normal Lua version is here[1] and it uses the opcode as a index into a static array to jump to the label. The “faster” Pluto version is here[2] and it just uses a switch statement on the labels. I would naively assume that these would compile to the same code because the lua version is just manually creating the jump table and the pluto version is leaving it to the compiler. How could the compiler optimize the switch so that would outperform the manual jump table (by a decent margin)?

[1] https://github.com/PlutoLang/Pluto/blob/main/src/ljumptabgcc...

[2] https://github.com/PlutoLang/Pluto/blob/main/src/ljumptab.h
Stevens (APUE and Network Programming) doesn't hold up. You'd do better with Beej. They weren't all that great even at the time; what they were were book-length treatments of the topics that you could reasonably expect to find on the shelf in a suburban Borders bookstore. Even the motivation for those books is obsolete!

Varghese is much too situational a book for this list; it's like bringing a trebuchet to your street fight. It's a book about building dedicated middleboxes. You can Google the title and get the PDF of the whole book on the first search result page. I like it a lot but I can't imagine sending anybody to it.

I will give the list this: Hanson is probably the best general-purpose C programming book. Of course, part of that is that almost nobody writes general-purpose programs in C anymore.

Stroustrup, on the other hand, is like being one of those flashy sword fighters in the souk in Cairo in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indiana is just going to shoot you before you make it through the first chapter.

Axler is not the linear algebra book I would take to a street fight. Nobody writes proofs in a street fight. You want Strang.

Maths aside --- you need the exercises at the ends of the chapters to get anywhere with math --- I'm not sure books are really the thing anyways. I can quickly think of things I've learned by doing (and being taught while doing), but not a lot of things I feel like I meaningfully picked up because I read it in a book. Excepting maybe Hanson's C book, which definitely did change the way I wrote C. (Alexandrescu's book changed the way I wrote C++, but it also set me on a rapid trajectory out of C++).
What was it like "volunteering to become a programmer" back in those days? Did you know what you were getting into, or did it just sound better than working in the mail room? Was "Programmer" a well respected job at the time? Were you seen as a sort of magician working on the mainframe? Or the equivalent of a "grease monkey" changing oil in a car?
All software is simple enough to regulate. You don't have to micromanage every single line someone writes to regulate something. The way most professional regulations work is that someone writes down the safety practices that should be done, and then the law requires people to do those things.

For example, one might require some software to undergo various degrees of planning, testing, analysis, support, documentation, etc.

Right now, the amount of planning, testing, analysis, support, and documentation required by law is generally zero. This might be fine for someone's hobby project, but it is not okay for software that human lives depend on.
Build schools outside, more hybrid spaces/semi-indoor, spend more time doing activities outside, teach your kids sailing,mountain climbing, astronomy... Etc, engage with more nature. Learning happens in the real natural world as much as it happens in books. Take the books and apply it's lessons to reality. Step out of Plato's cave and discover the world. I grew up with myopia since I was 12. I always wondered why it exists evolutionarily it seems like a huge problem for survival. It's another modern disease. I know what to do to change things for my kids in the future.
All entertainment subs cancelled except yt premium.
We had Prime, but cancelled it today. Their frequent price increases, and this new stealth price increase to stop ads was the last straw.
Building Effective Incident Response Plans
The most useful part of writing docs for me is that they shine a spotlight the sharp edges of your product. Why is this feature so hard to document? Oh, because it sucks! Let's make it better, and then the docs will make sense too.

At work I sometimes frame discussions about new features in terms of how I'd describe using this new feature to different users of our product. If it isn't straightforward given the context then it probably isn't a well-developed idea, yet.

One notable example--we (a payroll platform product team) needed a better way for users to fix mistakes in checks they'd already committed to the system. We have a non-negotiable stance that says we don't edit transactions. We can add new ones to cancel out the old ones, but we don't edit stuff that's already happened. This gets really confusing to users when they're trying to change a $200 to a $50 and need to commit a -$150 transaction someplace (and then also adjust all the other things downstream from that, like deductions/taxes/etc).

So we built the "time machine". Using this feature, users can type in the $50 and let the system figure out what transactions need to be added. There's a lot of complexity in the phrase "let the system figure out" but that's sort of the point. Now our tutorial on making payroll adjustments literally says "1. Find the check you want to adjust, 2. Click 'Adjust', 3. Type in the new number and 4. Click 'Finish'".
Your purchases carry forward to newer devices, no? If nothing else, people would keep an older device just to make purchases and then install it on their newer iPhone.
I find this pretty useful: https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/
Ok.

So the author couldn’t pony up 129 dollars to pay Evernote, which has graciously allowed this person free use of their product for 10 years.

They cannot justify paying Evernote 11 dollars a month. I suppose they probably never eat out or drink coffee from a coffee shop, ever
I feel arguments like this always ignore the fact that buying a toaster in 1950 was a major investment for a family, and if you want to spend $2000 on a high-end toaster in 2023, which is probably equivalent in inflation-adjusted price to the 1950s toaster, it will probably also be very nice.
Check Theseus OS. It’s very new but very exciting too.
/etc/passwd is the same on every device because it is in the system image, which is world readable. I don't think this exploit can be used to read the call history database as the author implies because it is outside of the sandbox profile.
I thought you were going to provide a screen shot of the horror show, not the clean version. It really boggles the mind that someone could look at a site and see it as the GP describes, and say "yeah, that's about right". They really have to work hard to get it to that point, so it's not like an accidental "we didn't know what it would do when we included that JS from the ad tech company". That's a sociopath/psychopath/masochist level of lack of concern for your viewers
Oh wow. The Goodyear Plant must be the one in Gadsden AL which is my home town.

I would love to hear what they think of the advances in technology from when they started till now; on the software side: which machine series they liked dealing with the /least/ and wich the most and why. What operating systems they liked the most.

Any fun anecdotes about user issues, idiotic design quirks they dealt with etc.

Also, if they have any old ephemeral like notebooks, manuals, etc? That sort of thing would be a treasure to scan in and send to archive.org and bitsavers!
> the fact that the "more permissive" open source licenses actually condone such behavior

The permissive Free Software licenses do the same, being the same licenses.
This sort of argument does not pay attention to numeracy or the existing plans for battery production within the 2020s.

We can't build more dams because there really is a hard limit on the geographical sites. With batteries, we already have commitments for factories to build 1TWh/year within the US alone by 2030. Worldwide production will be several times that.

Average US electricity production is 500GW, at 8-10 hours that's only 4TWh. With batteries lasting 20 years, only need 200GWh/year of production to fill that diurnal need.

Batteries are cheap and scaling at a scale that we couldn't dream of scaling our construction capacity. Our limited construction capacity should be reserved for high speed rail, subways, and housing in urban centers.
The First Secret Asteroid Mission Won't Be the Last
wsupdate: A comprehensive and extendable Linux system updater, written in Python
I first wrote this script in Bash a few months ago, and now decided to rewrite it in Python, add in some extra features, and set it out into the world.

I was going to submit the package to PyPI, but they have a registration suspension active so that'll have to be done at a later point.
https://archive.ph/BM0Pm
You can buy a top of the line 1970s toaster for $250 or so. A steal compared to what it cost then!
Check out Lapce. An improvement over nvim imo. Maybe the ecosystem is not as mature though.
For me, I think the prime comparison is the KitchenAid stand mixer. You can get a new one that's functionally identical to the classic models that have lasted forever... and it'll run you at least $350 even during a major sale.
Using services is not the same as operating those services. I think if you could see the true costs that all the regulations bring, you might change your mind. And if you're happy to pay these costs you're most likely wealthy enough to be able to bear them.

Healthcare companies operate in an environment that is very much not a free market. For these companies, the regulatory burden is welcome as it is a high barrier to entry for new players. Read up on regulatory capture.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
I try very, very hard to live by Morris's credo. It is not easy. Finding things which do their jobs well and hold up takes so much time and energy. And on top of that, I despise waste, so I'm usually not willing (even if I can afford it) to buy a dozen different models and throw away the losers. That's the best way to do it, if you can manage it.

But there are a few good things out there if you know where to look.

Tools, especially, have good options. But then I use a lot of those professionally and get to experiment using someone else's time and money.