skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What would you look for in a platform to learn programming?
Hey everyone!

I'm curious, what does the perfect programming education platform look like to you?

I'm an experienced developer, but I really think that the current options for learning programming could be a lot better. I know that there are platforms like CodeCademy and places to watch video courses like YouTube and Udemy. There are also so many scammy "learn to code" sites (CodeFinity).

The pattern I notice is that platforms like CodeCademy are web-apps and are very career-path-oriented (i.e. get certifications). I personally think that having a platform which was a desktop app would be a better solution. Rather than focusing on career-tracks, you could follow courses to build a specific project using an integrated IDE, 100% on your machine.

How important are career-tracks and certifications to you? Or, would you rather just learn to build a specific project on your own machine all in one application?

Basically, a native desktop platform to learn programming by actually building projects on your own machine. No BS.
This can definitely be the case. I had a phone that for a year would drop out frequently doing cellular data. I assumed my provider was throttling me. Upgraded my phone and the problem went away; likeliest culprit was the cell circuit in the phone was slightly damaged and running full data comms was causing it to reboot.
US agencies warn companies: Don’t delete Slack or Signal chats
Hey every third person everywhere needs advice about brewing!

From cold cups to steeping too long or too little, from MIF to leaving the spoon in the cup, there are mistakes verging on abominations committed daily on both sides of the Atlantic.
Most of my EU friends would absolutely never install a separate Meta store to install WhatsApp, they'd just switch to Signal or Telegram, which lots and lots of people have been doing of late.

I mean, there's nothing stopping Zucc from doing this right now on android, yet they don't.
Let me put this very clear for you. You have no idea what you are talking about. Let me give you just two examples: Chernobyl, Aral Sea.
And: how come there is free beer, but no such thing as free lunch?
Yes, I meant deb/rpm repositories. NPM is not a Linux repo, it's multipurpose, with lots of proprietary software.
Why pretty blogs usually suck
So if it isn't to save land, why does Japan go through the effort to burn or recycle most of it's trash? Altruism?
Did you remember to tweak your grade?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSRigsskFR4
I don't understand what you're expecting but not seeing.
And: how come the truth is paywalled, but the lies are free?
Stationary systems for grid scale storage have amazing options - e.g. Form Energy - that needn't rely on power density benefits of Lithium chemistries. I wouldn't be surprised to see this sector dominate the GWh/yr chart in the next 6 years.
In high-school, I had to write an expose... something about the "silver age of Russian poetry" (it's Block, Belyj, Akhmatova, Gipius, Gumiljov etc. if you are interested). It was about 20 pages long, on a typewriter.

It's physically more straining than to type on any computer keyboard, even with very stiff keys. And I didn't know how to touch-type at the time. So, it was pecking with two fingers. With all that said... three words per minute isn't a lot. At all. By the time I was finished typing, I could probably do better than that.

To me, this quote describes someone who rather hates / struggles with technology. I had a bunch of math professors like this: they couldn't draw diagrams to save their lives, they couldn't write formulas in any editor, and so often we'd have very poorly hand-drawn formulas photographed and inserted as images into MS Word documents or similar incomprehensible junk.

This doesn't necessarily mean they are bad at the very narrow field they specialized in, but it usually means they are very bad at virtually everything else adjacent to that field. Also, this often means that they've made their career in academia by being the first person in that narrow field they specialize in.

This is also my impression of Dijkstra: he had some novel, but also kind of low-hanging fruit ideas... at the time when he was almost alone in that field. Had he started today, he'd be very lucky to get a tenured position, but most likely would end up being a TA / dropped out and just do something else. Even though there's still a lot of politics and all sorts of un-meritocratic ways of getting into prestigious positions in academia, you need to be very good. A lot of the times it's being very good at cheating, but there isn't really any more room for greenfield academics who instantaneously propel themselves to the top of the academic hierarchy.
Apple Takes Messaging Crackdown to Customers Macs
Makes no difference. It's a temporary status, not permanent residency.

It potentially helps you slightly for EB-1 (permanent residency for "extraordinary people") since it has similar requirements, and EB-1 has slightly better quotas than EB-2 (because fewer folks qualify ; EB-2 is for skilled workers like your typical tech employee).

If you're from India it's still a very long way out.
While true, why would it miss something so glaring?

Minor rant but if trillion dollar companies can't get it right then what hope does anybody else have?
I think this fits the intent of EU regulators. The DMA is essentially a tariff on American tech companies. A European company could now fork android and have a locked down App Store with large fees, without complying with DMA (as it only applies to certain companies the EU does not like).
> This would just be a new revenue stream for Apple for doing something that they would have done for free anyway.

A little off topic but this line of reasoning scares me.
The end result of this kind of thought is "demonstrated need".
I sincerely believe there should be an end to means-testing and anyone should be eligible for public benefits regardless of income or assets.
There is a huge distance in between "my opinions and worldview is informed, to an extent, by the political climate" and "I live and breathe politics all the time, and it is front and center of every discussion I have with everyone"

I have friends on every corner of the political spectrum. My wife is a lot more conservative than I am. This was never an issue. There is a huge amount of topics where our interests intersect anyway. "There is so much more in the universe".
This ‘official organization’ sounds pretty bad, but at least they don’t auto play unrelated videos when I try to read an article on their website that takes up half the screen on mobile.
I must not be the first person to think that government sponsorship can play a positive role with funding and promoting critical software projects. Just as basic science research is funded by agencies such as the NSF, NIH, DARPA, DoD, and so on. Even the Arts have the NEA. Where is the National Institute of Critical Software?

People working on software projects could apply for grants, which would be reviewed by a panel of peers and experts, then funded, and the impact of the software project can be reviewed. I would think that judging the value of a software project would be easier than many basic science research, because the impact of software is more immediate and easier to measure. Yes, any system that involves money will be susceptible to some amount of fraud, waste, and deception. But most people still support funding science and medical research.
What about all the entertainment we gave up since gladiators fights were outlawed? ;o
If you read the article most of the categories end up being burned as fuel.
The more impressive one is where he's matched up against 10 Harvard Law students simultaneously, and is blindfolded. He won all of the games handily.

Even more impressive, one of the students asked Magnus if he could sign a chess board. Not only did Magnus sign an autograph, he literally annotated the entire game from memory. That is insane to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1Rr4Uq1R-I
I enjoy the PoE vs PoE+ selector being labeled simply “Lorem ipsum”
And EB-1 has quotas. So even if you qualify it may take many many years for Indians/Chinese folks.
Sure, but this is the past half dozen models of the phone made by the same company who makes the OS. You'd think these would be the easiest possible test cases for them to do up front.
Air to air heat pumps are a pretty straightforward retrofit there. (Including central units with reversing capability; heat pumps don’t have to be per-room minis.)

In some ways, that style of central heat pump is less talked about because it’s usually a straightforward replacement.

Ducts may need to be enlarged in heating-dominated climates though.
Ask HN: What's the Latest with Canonical?
I remember reading that Canonical was heading for an IPO. What's the news about the company? Anyone knows?
EB-1 is not a visa. It's a category for permanent residence application.

It's not an Einstein "visa" by any means.
https://www.uscis.gov/green-card/green-card-eligibility/gree...

You can have extraordinary abilities or you can be a manager at bigcorp. Yes, being a manager will most times qualify you for an EB-1 bracket.
I've been following HTMX for quite a while but never noticed the haiku in the footer before. It feels like it accurately reflects the spirit of HTMX. It is making me think I should add haikus to my projects' README.md.

javascript fatigue:
longing for a hypertext
already in hand
There are literally five live examples, along with ground truth, linked in the article, formatted as a bullet list. What more could you want?
The long goodbye: Working through the queue
make them slightly richer than regular society and they'll do it themselves
> That's not so important now, so who cares about that whole mechanism anymore?

It's not so important on desktops or larger machines, but it's still very important for many smaller platforms.

It's also extremely useful to be able to easily add/remove kernel modules for certain debugging tasks.
Yes, that's what I was referring to. If you have an edge flickering at a high frequency and perform a saccade (fast eye movement) over the edge, your retina will be exposed to the edge at regularly spaced intervals. So the motion will not appear smooth. That's what they call a 'flicker artifact' and I called a 'stroboscope-like effect'.

Importantly though, this is not us humans detecting 500 Hz flicker itself, quite the opposite -- the reason the artifact is visible is that our retina is not sensitive to fast motion, it integrates over a period of time in which the edge appears to be in multiple locations.
Thanks and agreed!
I could argue EB-1 is easier. Become a manager at FANG -> apply for EB1.
The maintenance is mostly based around reaching certain numbers of flying hours, so the costs are mostly based on how much you fly it, which also includes the high costs of fuel. Having a couple of A380 rated captains to call on isn't cheap either. Since making a profit per flight on an A380 is difficult on the vast majority of routes for the vast majority of airlines, that means it's basically spare parts.

Wouldn't cost anything to maintain as a garden ornament though
but, like, holding things for the long term is the point of LTSE, taking market share by daily trading volume as a measure of succcess is exactly the sort of attitude the LTSE is trying to fight against lol
Strawberries – Dyson Farming
(Edit: never mind, I thought I remembered my Apple TV+ trial continuing after cancelling, but I must have misremembered.)
Discussed at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24942671 - Oct 30, 2020 with 196 comments

A lot of good discussion in there.
You might have cold-induced asthma?
Author here. I settled on the haproxy/varnish/nginx sandwich through an accretive process that started back in 2012 with wanting to speed up nginx by taking advantage of scads of extra RAM on the box I was hosting with at the time (and also being entranced by all the cool header games one can play with Varnish). Fast forward to 2015 as LetsEncrypt started to be a thing, and HTTPS started the mainstream push from a nice-to-have to an ought-to-have feature. I was comfy with Varnish + Nginx and I wanted to keep my cache layer, but Varnish has no SSL termination capabilities. I looked at a few options, including Hitch, but decided on HAProxy because it was more widely used and therefore easier to google answers to questions. Everything worked, so I never re-evaluated until 2022 when I got curious about OLS.

As to why Varnish + Nginx versus just Nginx + FastCGI or proxy cache, I was chasing the performance dragon. AIUI, Nginx's fastcgi and proxy caches just store the static-ified versions of dynamic content in flat files, and those files are accessed via the file system, which means they get cached into RAM whenever the file system decides they get cached into RAM. I had the free RAM, and Varnish's RAM-first approach felt like it would be faster. Plus, this was all for personal hosting, and playing with Varnish was fun. (Or at least "fun.")
Pixel owner here. Lately my phone been very slow or acting out. That explains it.
Last year or few years ago, Google released update that broke Bluetooth on Pixels. Google's team released the update, broke things, went out for extended Christmas break and fixed things a few months later.
I'm not fan of the Apple phones and the fact that they cost a fortune, but I don't recall them putting out hardware breaking updates.
Seems typical for Apple. Gouge customers with ridiculous hardware prices. Gouge developers with a percentage of theirs earnings for holding the monopoly on software distribution for their hardware. If regulators come calling gouge even more money from developers protected by said regulator with bad faith rules.
baremetal or vps and ansible playbooks with OVH. Easy and cheaper.

Also, my own in-house servers if I don’t need so much availability.
Despite the jury returning a verdict of 11 to 1 that his life should be spared, but the judge applied a since-repealed Alabama statute to override the jury, which was found to be unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court.

Seriously, the US system is a mess that this was allowed to happen. Along with the US only a few counties still have the death penalty, and many of them haven't done one for >20 years, meaning it is effectively gone.
Efficient waste management is probably one of the hardest classification and allocation problems (the domain of data is "pretty much everything and everyone"). Every day we throw away tons of useful items and materials, because it is not economical to find an appropriate home for them. I wonder if the future "landfill" could be a robotic factory that attempts to solve this problem.
Hearing your description really makes me want to visit and experience the...dread? Similarly was a motorcycle ride I took through the Searles Valley and the town of Trona, much further north of there and near Death Valley. What an unreal setting that place is.
horizontal is Real Scaling™, vertical is just preparing a bigger and brighter sacrifice on the altar of SPoF.

(note, comparing a 2 node active-passive hot-spare setup with a bazillion node horizontal hellscape is not in scope.)
TrueUSD Wobbles Towards $1 Peg Amid Reported Redemption Issues
I know GCC has section attributes, but I don't think there's any standard C23 attribute equivalent.
I call this absolute bullshit. I'm working in the tech sector in Germany and I'm _far_ from not being able to afford a vacation in the US. As a matter of fact for the last 15 years I've spend at least one three week vacation in the US per year - a couple of times even a second one for a week or two. I've also heard similar statements from a couple of colleagues.

Are we being paid (a lot) less than our colleagues in the US? Oh yes and personally I wouldn't mind getting a US software engineering salary. But a good job in the tech sector still puts you very far towards the top in the salary pyramid in Europe.
“To develop apps for distribution.” It doesn’t say the fee covers distribution - only development.
But how else am I supposed to get to my house in Jackson Hole?
oh thats nice of you! tip of the hat
Not if you play videogames, but yeah, for writing code keyboard speed doesn't make a difference.
A Mini Moon Rover from the Toy Company That Created Transformers (2022)
That thing being listening to the citizens living within EU borders who don't want gatekeepers like Apple & Google fucking them over with no recourse? Y'know, the market you've mentioned.

If Apple doesn't like it they can just close up shop in Europe, nobody's forcing them to operate there. Such a shame for them that the Brussels effect is a thing :)
I've been using Android since 2010 and don't remember having any stability issues for the last 6-8 years at least. Maybe it's a Pixel-thing? I've mostly owned Sony and Moto devices. They're often 1-2 versions behind on Android which could explain why they're more stable maybe.

(I like to customize my phones a lot (minimalist launcher, Termux software, Firefox with extensions) which I would hate to give up for iOS).
Doesn't Android use A/B updates these days? How hard would it be to revert to the previous working version?

https://source.android.com/docs/core/ota/ab
I've tried OLS before, but it's always slower than my nginx setups for general page load times.

nginx + cache is a nice simple solution that just works well.
I'm the Social Media Manager at the Auschwitz Memorial
Because most test devices are likely constantly factory reset and aren't given the chance to live with multiple user profiles on them for a long period of time where cruft can build up and people can notice that using using external storage is broken.
The job market is full of market makers. For example contractor companies, any business providing services, etc
I got a micro 4/3 (panasonic gx85) that I quite like some years ago, but I'm not sure I would recommend it today.
I think the battery you are referring to is the 6V Sanyo 2CR1/3N which is the "backup battery" in that laptop. It's still widely available.
The car speedometer will estimates the vehicle's speed by measuring the number of revolutions per minute of one of the wheel or its transmission.

If the car has different-sized tires than the ones it was originally designed for, there may be some discrepancies between the actual speed vs the speedometer readings, which is why there is some leeway in the speed limit to account for that margin of error.
We pushed hard for geothermal. But the quotes for the wells we needed were around $40,000-$75,000, and all of the installers seemed highly uncertain and preferred air-based units. So that's what we eventually went with.
you're allowed to disagree with the message of the piece
> Under these conditions, I don't understand why it matters how big the car is. Teach your children not to cross the road.

Cars cross the sidewalk.
oh I wasn't aware of far2l - I'll have to try it! Thanks!!!
Would Dijkstra have tolerated the expression "amour-propre" better than "ego"?
Reminds me back in the early 2000s I had a miniDV camcorder. There was a linux package which allowed you to write archives to the miniDV tapes over firewire, I think each small tape could hold about 12-13Gb which was quite impressive. The only downside is that it takes ~1hr to record and restore.

In the end I never stored any critical archives on that thing, as I suspected (correctly) that a number of years later I'd have no way to read them back.
You can only acquire billions of dollars if you cut corners and cheat as much as possible.
This is curious to me. As a Westerner and speaker of a non-tonal language that started learning Chinese already being an adult, I never had any difficulty telling the difference between the tones. I did have difficulty with other sounds of the language (e.g. telling "x" from "sh" or "q" from "ch") - hell, I even have difficulty with English sounds, for example, to this day I need to pay an inordinate amount of attention to tell "eyes" from "ice" and there's no way I'll successfully pronounce them differently in regular real-time conversation. But the Mandarin tones? I find the difference obvious.

I wonder if being a music aficionado, having played an instrument, etc. helps with the tones.
Please refurb it or find it a home. I used the Apple Lisa way back then and it was a lovely (if unloved) machine. Way too expensive but a real vision of what was to come.
I was unable to register new fingerprints or use existing registered fingerprints and my screen would randomly become unresponsive... I think it was software related because it appear to be working as expected now. (Pixel 7a)

I don't auto-update apps though, just manually update the OS.

I think it was the last time I bought a Pixel... but I am not sure because I don't know what else to buy.
It's more 3 than anything else. The used market for an A380 is non-existent. This thing is a white elephant.
It's always a compromise. With Android you can get actually good typing experience in non-English languages, voice typing in non-English, proper desktop view in browsers and really good call quality or better PWM in some cases.

It depends on what is important for you. iOS is not a panacea either.

By they way, with Android, just use Samsung. Despite the duplicated apps it's just a better experience.
Most of the material from the book (and possibly more?) seems also to be available at Andy Hertzfeld's excellent:

https://folklore.org

One of my favorite bits is Bill Atkinson's remarkable Polaroid photos of the Lisa/Mac UI evolution from 1978 to 1982:

https://www.folklore.org/Busy_Being_Born.html
Laundering calls through non-compliant and/or overseas carriers, SS7 and friends not actually having any way to verify/enforce, etc, etc?
'Taliban ambassador told me I'd be the first woman to enter Afghanistan alone'
Tesla owner here. Many stories of that with them, and the latest autosteer update was a major downgrade.
In this case was there any "insider information", that could have actually helped her decide in late December that Nvidia call options were a good bet?

I don't think anything changed in regulation, it was just the rise and boom of AI
They're not going to let they're family have green bubbles. If you cared about those around you then you would do the same.
FYI, my pixel 5a phone has also been really slow and acting out in the last month. Crashes and extreme sluggishness in apps. Sometimes when I pull up the app-switcher, I can't get out of it without rebooting the phone.

I however am not on the Jan 2024 Google Play update detailed by this article. I am still on the recommended Nov 2023 one.
Some of these studies report what people say they're going to do and some report what people actually do.

And of course your typical twitter journalists report them as being one and the same.

They're not.
I'm sure they test those to some extent.

I assume it's just a fraction of users affected, so it could be something like a service reading third-party app data and crashing due to a bug. The kind of thing that should be caught in code review, because comprehensive testing is next to impossible.
Mine is running hot and draining its battery fast. They sure messed up this patch.
I work in an open floor plan with music on in the background. I find it immensely distracting but 80% of my office are basically hourly phone support staff. I'd find that job so monotonous that I empathize with them wanting music.

My solution was a pair of noise cancelling headphones and either really ambient music or brown noise like you mentioned. I've found it to be very effective with helping maintaining deep focus.