jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
The biggest myth is that any of this matters to anybody but a tiny fraction of niche programmers.

The reason some "app" is slow is not because of cache coherence traffic. It's because somebody chose the wrong data structure, created some stupid architecture, wrote incomprehensible code that the next guy extended in a horribly inefficient way cause they didn't understand the original. My web browsing experience is slow because people include heaps of bloated JS crap and trackers and ad networks so I have to load 15 megabytes of nonsense and wait for JS to render stuff I don't want to see. None of this was any better if anybody involved understood CPU caches better.

Even in the kernel or HPC applications, most code is not in the hot path. Programmers should rather focus on clean architectures and understandable code. How does it help if you hand-optimize some stuff that nobody understands, nobody can fix a bug, nobody can extend it. That's horrible code, even if it's 5% faster than what somebody else wrote.

TL;DR: This is interesting, but likely totally irrelevant to your day job. In the list of things to do to improve your code, it comes so far down that you'll never get there.
Technically, all cars can take 3 car seats (1 in the front, 2 in the back) if they have the mounts for it.
Yup, the controversial scenes in Borat's "home village" were actually shot in rural Romania. But I'm not sure that stereotyping poor, rural Romanians is any better.
Profilers lie all the time. Usually it's not so much a bug, as a known limitation of the profiling approach. E.g. profilers that annotate methods with entry / exit code, inflate the runtime of small methods. Profiles that rely on CPU sampling, can be vulnerable to correlations with the sampling schedule. And so forth. The moral is to always do a reality check on whatever your profiler is telling you.
you're drawing an arbitrary line, that was the point.

We specialize and abstract for a reason. No one understands everything about everything surrounded their code, and that includes other software. Don't tell me you've personally been through the code of every single project your projects touch.

You haven't and that makes you a hypocrite.
I strongly suggest getting a degree. Not having a degree if your alternative plan goes wrong will suck hard. Employers want a degree. Immigration agencies want a degree. The only people who don't care about a degree in most circumstances are customers.

If you were going to take a gap year anyway you could look for an internship gap, or do a bootcamp like general assembly in London or Iron Yard in Madrid/Barcelona and then intern/freelance.

This is not a defence of mass undergraduate education. I believe the social value of that is, and that the credentialism it enables is a cancer. The private returns are great though.

If you never find yourself broke and looking for a job, any job, if your career is basically uninterrupted starting from the tech space, skipping university to go straight into work will be fine. If you save a lot while working you should also be fine. You can go back to school when the economy disappears for three years if you want to.

You are unlikely to be as special as you think you are. Having a degree signals conformity, conscientiousness and intelligence. Employers really like all three. Don't commit to anything. If a gap year works out great keep going but not having a degree turns some jumpable barriers into climbable ones and makes some climbable ones impossible.
Here just to say I am also a former meebo user who liked the experience. I used it till it was no more.
That time was a sort of golden age for text chat. We could have all services unified and easy to use from one single place. Now it is all messed up.
I am not so sure : a bike path with a different color doesn't mean a vehicle is prohibited from entering it. It depends on the line separating the two ( solid vs intermittent ).
There is also bottomless pit poo on my windshield.
I agree and like your style.

Messaging is ideal for decoupling, sending/receiving data and it makes networking parts of the game much easier.

Every game engine or system I use I set it up this way. I always make my components or entities data backed so when people say you can't have data-oriented in GameComponent systems it seems they haven't done much game development. I usually have most of it in JSON and in previous engines INI was popular (Unreal still uses this for some and lots of custom engines). I have always separated data from the objects, lots of people do not and that is why this is a major debate along with all the talk around it due to Unity adding their ECS. Data should always be separate from code and hopefully merged at runtime.

The benefit of ECS is performance alone and usually only really needed for high performance real-time or physics heavy games for parallel performance and essentially pre-optimized for batched mutations or changes, everything else can be done across the same from messaging to data backed entities/objects/components and more.

I do wish engines were better as abstracting these elements away. Lots of the systems start leaking into the engine which is supposed to abstract these elements away in a good pluggable/versioned/atomic game engine.

Like what Garry said about Unity [1], too many things are leaking up to the game developer creating all these debates and issues and incompatibilities. The fact this isn't just a switch or setting to switch from GameComponent to ECS is a problem. Same with incompatible renderers and more, those should be wrapped and pluggable with the same surface level method signatures and objects. Underneath is where all the tech needs to go. Leaky abstractions are a problem across the software world right now.

Atomic systems with facades that wrap complexity and are able to be swapped beneath the surface are fading and making things more complex than needed. The job of engineering is taking complexity and making it simple, not the other way around.

[1] https://garry.tv/unity-2020
> People say companies like American Express are a scam. But I can, and have in these instances just filed a charge back and walked. To the point that if a place won’t take American Express (like Costco) I’ll just move along.

I have never heard anyone say companies like AmEx are a scam in my 20 years as an adult.

And Visa/MasterCard/Discover all offer the same chargeback mechanisms AmEx does, so there is nothing special about AmEx.

And the craziest thing to me is thinking Costco’s extremely liberal return policies are inferior to a credit card network’s chargeback policies. You can get a refund for fruit at Costco if you don’t like the way it tastes. You can’t do that with AmEx.

I accidentally bought the wrong type of cheese, and they gave me a refund even though they had to throw it away due to the law not allowing them to resell returned perishable food items. (I didn’t find out they were throwing it away until the cashier already refunded to the card...otherwise I would have just kept the cheese).
> Mining gold is wildly destructive to the environment and energy intensive

Yes, I'm not denying this. As I said, the cost is mostly fixed and amortized over time. Meanwhile Bitcoin's transactional energy cost is skyrocketing. The energy impact of holding already mined Bitcoin is equivalent to the entire energy consumption of the network, because the network must remain operational to ensure the value remains. This is not true of gold. This is mostly irrelevant anyway, as modern money is not based on a gold standard.

> by organizing people at scale through mutually agreed upon protocols.

You just described organization through democratic law and governance. My point remains on that topic: anarchism can only exist as a transient state of non-equilibrium. In the end, some organization will end up with majority power.

> It allows you to store money without any middlemen; it's permission-less.

Governments still exist, it's not permissionless. You can store cash or gold without any middlemen, but most people don't because it's inconvenient. That's why banks exist and will continue to exist.

> Therefore it empowers the individual over the state.

Nothing screams empowerment like total auditability and transparency for the existing institutions to monitor an analyze. Far more likely that the government audit's your Bitcoin transaction history and throw you in jail for illegal activity than torture you for your money. You know what is legitimately anonymous? Cash.
Kiddie porn is OK?
Calling your pizza joint "piz^2a" could either get extra geek points, or be one geekiness too far.
Would you have to actually redirect them to Safari or could you do something like load a hidden webview? (not quite sure of the right terminology here)

I was thinking the iOS equivalent of a webpage with a hidden iFrame.
Having read the full article I noticed that this advise as given specifically in response to a tweet KS got from someone that 'had an opportunity to start over' in his life.

also 'being a programmer' is not the same thing as 'being a programmer for something you really want to be apart of'.

I was a 'filmmaker' for years and I was MISERABLE working at local industrial film houses then I got a job working on a TV show with a passionate crew and I literally sprang out of bed (at 4am) everyday completely stoked to be going to work.

tl;dr context for what you are passionate about is important. A talent/skill/interest isn't a passion; how that talent/skill/interest is applied, is.
design nice, product name not so...
I just figured out a good amount of info myself, by using a $50 coupon from them. Their ads way under perform google ads for me as well, but in the last two weeks I was almost able to squeeze an equivalent CTR, even if my conversion rate (signup for free account) through FB ads has been dramatically lower. I can pull a 15-20% conversion rate from google ads, but FB is only 5.7% right now. My CPC is about $0.15, which is down from $1.00 when I started.

The biggest difference I am seeing in performance between adwords and FB ads is that adwords works well for exploratory searches (obviously), whereas the only FB ads that are performing worth a damn are the ones calling out our competitors. My slew of ads have crap performance except the two titled "Tired of Map My Ride?" and "Tired of Garmin Connect?", with map my ride and garmin connect being our two big competitors.

So, to wrap up a long winded reply, I agree with Patrick. For most, it's probably equivalent to lighting money on fire.
You are totally right, I was paraphrasing somewhat flippantly, and I should have been more clear about this.

Doug is definitely high up on the list of my most respected programmers, everyone should definitely take notice of what he says. Any person who is putting out that much good information will eventually lay themselves open to some criticism, its the inevitable consequence of doing so much work.
But the good arising from a fountain of youth really is negligible if there are a hundred other identical fountains right next to it. It's only outrageously useful if you make the additional assumption that it's hard to replace.
I recently discovered this stack and I haven’t had this much fun in years!
I like to think of it as cynical naivete. You don't actually know, nor are you curious enough to find out, but you want to appear wise and full of hard-earned real world experience. So you just assume the worst intent on everyone's part.
Here are the stats for Steam, for upcoming games:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HzJWXOvWhyH0hTaARD5-...

Top 1% varies greatly, responsible for about 30-80% of customer interest, depending on the week.
If you're learning the basics, a laptop is great, because you're not number crunching for days at a time.

If you're doing anything process intensive, gpu or cpu, you'll want a desktop or cloud. Sure, some laptops are fast, but they head up, so there isn't much of a way around it.
>>consensus in the media

There is a reason for this, the American media is laregly Anti-American today. They believe in idea of "American Imperialism" and that America is the cause of most of the worlds problem. Thus they believed anything was better than "Corrupt American Control" over the internet.

There were many many people that predicted bad outcomes from this transfer, most are starting to come true
One doesn’t have to be exponentially smarter than others in given moment – by compounding smart ideas and decisions one can get exponentially better outcomes in time.
Follow up question: is there an “electrical” inertia? Why does gravity have only one relevant quantity but electromagnetic forces need two?
That was the introductory blog post to which I referred - note the similar discussion in the comments.
They have close ties with AGP a company that specializes in high tech glass, the model X windshield is one of the most complex in the industry. AGP also specializes in bullet resistant glass and use many of their techniques in regular glass as well. I believe what musk said, they threw wrenches, a kitchen sink, just about Avery thing and it didn’t break. A metal ball is probably the worst case scenario. A solid ball will be very heavy, but even worse, there is only ONE point of contact. All the kinematic energy has to be stopped at ONE incredibly small point. What is the area of contact? It’s infinitesimally small! Even a bullet would have more contact area, and suffer plastic deformation. A metal sphere? Worst case scenario.
Developers is ploral, it means they need to fix it, rather than leave it for someone else to fix further down the line.

I'm sure when Werner Vogels said "you build it, you run it", he wasn't talking about just individuals but teams.

The whole essence is that you are taking responsibility rather than handing it off.
Here is what I suggest — Just loose yourself in a dense forest in the early morning for an hour. Walk and reflect on your journey so far. The alone time will help you loosen yourself and know where you stand for real.
Reminds me to the car from the opening sequence of Another World: http://firsthour.net/screenshots/another-world/another-world...
Helm charts are just templated k8s manifests, you can have it spit out the final manifest and use it manually.
Indeed, I refuse to use closed communication software.

Also text = async.
Use the phone when sync is needed.
No wasted “fuel” for an electric car, especially if it comes from 100% solar power...
IMO, the ability to solve business problems without over complicating things.
This might just mean that you've been overly conditioned to expect bad interview questions that do rely on a "trick". But if so, I'm sure you're far from the only person in that position. Would you be less frustrated if it came with a disclaimer, along the lines of "this is not a trick question"?

(I realize this might sound sarcastic, but I'm serious. I think the way interview questions are presented is very important, and often overlooked.)
Reply I've just received, can't fault them for responding to this so quick, even if the initial response was to say nothing could be done.

> We really appreciate your feedback, and we hear your frustration. We're sorry for the impact this is having on your ability to communicate with your team and on your overall productivity. We made a mistake by forcing everyone into this feature without providing an opt-out for customers like you: people for whom the existing behaviour was working just fine.

> We've started working on a preference that will let you return to the previous message composer. We don't have a specific release date to share right now — it's this team's top and only priority, however, and we expect to have it available on the desktop within a couple of weeks, with Android following shortly thereafter.
>We will follow up with another note when this option is available to you, and we'll include instructions on how to enable it.

> Again, we're sorry for the disruption and we're grateful for the feedback. We missed the mark on this feature! We will do our best to learn from this and avoid similar mistakes in the future.
I’m not even sure what to think of the term “algorithmic sorting.” Is quicksort considered as algorithmic sorting ... ?
As I said in a sibling comment, bill by the hour, and they start calling you a consultant, and suddenly this isn't an issue anymore :)
A great intro is Sean Carroll's youtube series "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe". https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrxfgDEc2NxZJcWcrxH3j...
This is great advice. I have several friends who are lawyers, and they are just utter and completely non-technical. If you can find a place like this that allows you to work from home, it would be a great job for someone like OP's profile.
"Free as in free puppy" is my other favorite metaphor. Free software is a gift to the word, but IMO it's important not to undervalue the time and expertise of operationalizing it.
When I was in management, I can’t think of many cases where a quiet, moderate positive performer was commented upon much. They were mostly not discussed, with most of managements energy occupied by the highest or lowest performers.

I suspect you can get by in most orgs with the least energy being moderately productive. You get there by letting go and accepting dysfunction and poor quality you can’t change. You just ride with it, shrug a bit, and decide there’s more important things in life.

Actively working to be unproductive is hard. Many poor performers work hard to create a lot of theater around poor performance to make it not look as bad. It’s also a lot of stress to have managements eyes engaged on you all the time.

So I’d find a company where you can efficiently achieve moderate productivity in the least amount of effort with the maximal acceptance from the org. This means a company that:

- is very people friendly, seems to value employees work life balance

- is big enough to make a career out of one place, so you gain efficiency from all the tribal knowledge you’ve acquired

- lets you specialize in one thing, and you just do that thing. Again more work efficiency.

- has solid non salary benefits that enhance quality of life: healthcare, vacation, etc

Finally, in this job, I would:

- never volunteer for anything. Just do your work.

- almost never put in extra hours, make the conscious choice to do your time, that’s it

- avoid high engagement (empowered to fix everything!) and low engagement (complaining and hating everything). Just accept!

- remember your power in the relationship: tech is a field where there’s never enough people to do the work. If you’re performing OKish, not making huge waves positive or negative, you should be able to get another job easily enough. So don’t think you need to bend over backwards or stress at too hard about deadlines, etc if you really don’t want to.
Indeed, I don't really consider personal projects, and niche pdfs I want to sync between devices that important. Also, I didn't want to spend ~£400 on something like an Intel NUC
The idea of expiring money is more than a century old, and has been tried on a small scale in a few municipalities ("stamped money").

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/08/27/754323652/the-...
> Additionally, your address book is continuously synced to Telegram servers.

It doesn't even need access to contacts to run, and it happily runs on machines that don't even have address books (and, might I add, has the best UX there as well).

What you do need, at least for initial signup, is the ability to receive SMS, like you do with Signal. I wish all of them would just stop that nonsense.
> Did you try just... Not getting outraged?

Yes, they did it by leaving Facebook and Twitter.

That seems like the most obvious strategy for effecting this change.

I don't really understand the line of thinking that somehow you have to will yourself into things rather than changing your environment. I think it misses how predictable peoples' reactions to things really are.
But even postal longhaul trucking is private contracted, even if it's not to one giant entity.

Same for rural route carriers.
1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25669864

Signal wins there, but in my opinion, another walled garden is a wrong choice. Matrix solves this problem.

2) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25673441
I do not think the numbers are cooked. I think you are interpreting them incorrectly, or disingenuously.

We have had 399,857 deaths over the average expectation, and 328k over the upper bound. Are you saying that every single one of those excess deaths are from COVID infections? How many of those are from deaths of despair, lack of preventative healthcare due to closures, abuse, murders, aggravation of Alzheimer's etc.

The simple fact, that I would love to hear a reasonable refutation of, is that a majority of the people who have died from COVID would have died this year from another cause. However, those who have died from the impact of our response would NOT have died this year.

All in all, we reduced the number of life years due to our response. That is the problem.

Edit: Lets look at state data.

Florida has been widely criticized for their lax restrictions, while California has been widely celebrated for their lockdown. So which performed better?

Florida has 18,000 excess deaths and a population of 21.48 million.

California has had 37,000 excess deaths and a population of 39 millions.

So about the fucking same. Notice also that a lot of the excess deaths in California came throughout the Summer, where there wasn't as big a spike as there is now.
Do stock buy backs count as profits or are they taken out before that calculation?
I'm pretty happy that they've started allowing a little more customization — I've changed up the colors on mine for the change of scenery. Hopefully, they'll roll out some additional features as well.
https://www.hongkongwatch.org/protest-prosecution
Yeah, but at the time (1600, 1700) there were something like 1-2-10 corporations per country, if that. 95% of the countries of the world didn't have any corporations.

England had some, the Netherlands had some, probably France and maybe a handful of countries.

They weren't really relevant to the day-to-day lives of 99% of the people living back then.

You need to also present some perspective when making a claim.
Interesting. I’m not sure if I don’t understand or if I disagree.

Let’s imagine it’s 2005, I’m TiVo, and the Linux kernel was licensed under “v2 or later”* and GPL v2 is the latest version of the license that exists.

I ship a product using the Linux kernel complying with the GPLv2. FSF dislikes what I’ve done and releases a v3 license in 2006. I claim that in 2007, I’m still allowed to ship my product, by electing to “follow the terms and conditions” of the v2 version of the license and only if Linux relicenses itself as “v3 or later” could I not ship such later licensed versions but I could keep shipping my product as-was with a “v2 or later” kernel, even though my product is compliant with the v2 distribution terms but not with the v3 terms.

Q1. Do you see it differently?

Further, someone else could start a ViTo company in 2008 and ship a same conditions product without violating the GPL “v2 or later” (that there isn’t anything special about TiVo doing it before v3 was released). Q2. Does that change anything?

* - I know Linux kernel is “v2 exactly”, but this was the simplest readily understandable example I could think of, so let’s use that incorrect hypothetical here.
I suspect you might have gotten more specific responses if you put an email in your profile.
Chrome has the Payments API and the most recent betas have the Digital Goods API which allows Play Store billing.
> Results to the society don't matter when people get things done

If the results to the society are negative, I prefer if you dont get things done. Because it would negatively harm me too.
so you have more respect for google if they don't care about ethics of AI?