jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
This is always going to be a problem with dynamic linking. It happens with dynamic linked libraries. In order to use some function, you have to bundle and depend on a whole library. That library may have functionality you don't need, which may make it reliant on other libraries, and so on. And if two of the libraries you depend on, in turn depend on different versions of some other library, you get dependency hell.

But libraries are just one level of fractal self-similarity. Packages bundle libraries and other supporting tools, so one package depends on others, containing tools and functionality you never use. And packages suffer the same dependency hell.

Then we invent even higher abstractions to make the dependency hell go away. Maybe Docker containers. But then what happens when you need assemblies of those? Pods of Containers?

This is a problem with the dynamic linkage model of code reuse. Not that static linkage solves the problem totally, but it doesn't have the same dependency bloat, and dependency failures occur in the development phase, rather than during deployment (or worse, many months later).

So yeah, Cathedrals are more elegant, and better code.

But, so what? Cathedrals might be nice to go sightseeing at in a new city. But they took years to complete, were funded by government and rich benefactors, and are mostly empty. I'm sure God appreciates them; but they are largely irrelevant to most mortals.

I've been doing this for more than 20 years, and my old self cringes when I download a 4 megabyte package for anything, given what we used to achieve with 4Kb. But I can't deny that I can get a product out much quicker now than I used to. It might not be as elegant, or perhaps as maintainable, but the market doesn't care: I can worry about that when I get revenue. If I spend time building a cathedral, a bunch of others are going to come build a bazaar outside the door and clean up, well before I've put down the foundations.

I agree with everything he writes, but I don't see any practical alternative.
Another sports sim that is incredibly close to real life is Virtual Pool 4. It looks quite dated, but no other game has more realistic billiard physics that I know of.
See also: "The Fall"
I spent quite a bit of time with NASCAR last year (I attended the Daytona 500 and previously visited their HQ and archives). Most of the up and coming drivers are previously accomplished eRacers, but the transition to experiences in a real car are enormously different. Not many make the cut, the tracks rote memory is very useful but real life is exceedingly different
Did not see it mentioned in the article, but I believe Quintus Prolog was the base for Prolog on the Xerox Lisp machine line.

They went to the effort of writing special microcode for the unifier, which meant the basically 16-bit 1100 series workstations were competitive in performance with other Prologs at the time.
"The danger? Well, of course. But you are missing a very important point. I think if any of us imagined - really imagined - what it would be like to go into a tree at 150 miles per hour we would probably never get into the cars at all, none of us. So it has always seemed to me that to do something very dangerous requires a certain absence of imagination."
This is good, right?
The newsworthy bit isn't that intelligence services noted the potential threat. It's that the White House chose to ignore them.
Chrome.exe ,no, srsly.

Specifically, when doing deep infodiving, it's not uncommon to juggle (that is, actually apply ops within 30-min intervals to) 80+ tabs; 2 visual studio in the background; local number crunching: large-ish data / machine learning sandboxes; one-click virtual-machines ("wonder how this looks like in a mac?"); and the occasional steam round. 2x4 vCPU cores usually humming along at ~10-40%, 20-something GB ram usage, no swap.

These reqs bias me towards performance, even at _some_ expense of mobility.
It's a chicken and egg problem. They aren't viewed as complete alternatives, because they aren't in many locations.

For example, you're going to have a hell of a time getting me to depend on my local bus network, which takes an hour to get me to work- a whole 6 miles away- and I still have to walk one mile. That's not complete.

I'm lucky to live in a bike friendly city with more public transit ambition than many other places, but people can't about-face tomorrow and depend on the public transit or bicycle infrastructure that isn't there, which I think you'll find informs policy.
Why would they? It's not needed - '-F', '--retry' and the like are redundant. IMVHO, OpenBSD's '-f' behaviour should have been the default elsewhere, too. How many times in the past have you deliberately followed the file descriptor (coreutils' default '-f' behaviour) instead of its name? Every single time I used it in the past on Linux, this is what I thought:

"For f***** sake! I should have used '-F'! Arghhh...!"

Obviously, I'm paraphrasing ;^)
But it works, so...
Being dutch I think that the roads that share bikes and cars in the Netherlands are actually not by design but by necessity. Especially in Amsterdam where there simply is not enough space. If you look in rural areas if there is room, they are always seperated. In the cases where there is no room, the buildings and/or streets are usually historically protected as monuments and will not be demolish-able to make more room.
There's also employment generated from the services consumed. USD shortages and other problems are similarly ignored.

This is a zero-sum view. I've recently observed it becoming more popular online. True to form, the simple take misses all of the nuance.

On one hand there are people decrying the horrible conditions for housekeepers sending remittance from the Gulf. On the other there are economically troublesome analyses like the above.
"Mafia" seems a strange and prejudicial word to use here.

"Less than 2% of the anonymous ownership accounts that can be tracked on Bitcoin’s blockchain control 95% of the digital asset" - at first I thought this was really astonishing. Now, I'm not so sure. My first interpretation was that 2% of bitcoiners have 95% of the bitcoin - but now I wonder how many addresses a typical person has. e.g. If I create an address every time someone buys illegal drugs from me over the 5 years I sell them on the darknet, and later coalesce all my earnings into some address, does that mean that my X empty addresses are counted in the 98% of have-nots and my one coalesced address in the 2% of haves?

Depending on how many addresses people typically use, and given the multi-year history of bitcoin, it actually seems somewhere between not surprising and incomprehensible to me. Like, I guess that's a percentage it could be, but I don't know how to interpret it. I think a better news article would provide context on stats like this so the reader could understand rather than just leaving the reader to figure out the meaning for themselves.
My main reason is to neuter ad delivery.
Bitcoin is whatever the majority decides... They could also increase the supply if they wanted to, or whatever other change comes to mind? Think of it as Bitcoin 3.0, 4.0, etc...
Arrest Trump. Try for sedition. Goddamn, I'm scared.
At one point in the past, Unity had a legendary commitment to backwards compatibility, but that's gone now (maybe their internal promotion process rewards shipping new features over everything else?).

Old Unity would never have shipped a fiasco like URP. They'd have figured out a way to make incremental migration possible instead of having a global setting... I refuse to believe this would even be particularly difficult.
> employs thousands of people

You made me wonder how many people are actually employed by Uber. I thought thousands sounded like a lot for what they do.

First Google result - 29,000 employees. That blows me away. It sounds like Uber itself is ready for disruption.
I’ve been using WhatsApp a few times a day for the last year, a d infrequently for several years prior, and I had no idea.
For example, they had to pay a terrible platform tax in making it work with Exchange using buggy supplied code. Given the young consumer market they were targeting, that was stark raving mad.
I can't imagine working in an environment like this. If the core idea is that all employees fall on a bell curve in their overall value, what about small sample sizes? In what dimension do you measure them--what is "performance" even? And to do this every six months?

Is there something I'm not seeing here? How is this still considered a viable management strategy?
I just can't believe how or why they are continuing with the system when it is clear this is counter-productive and is hurting the company in many ways. What possible reason can there be? There is no way I would ever want to work in that kind of an environment.

Is there another side of the story? Can someone from Microsoft shed more light on this?
As I said, there are lots of fixes.

But all the fixes depend on completely controlling the environment and the code production process. They work but they add "global control" need that is a bit more extreme than other languages. This qualifies as a "weird fragility" in my mind. Considering how many other levels of any given system might have weird fragilities, why be willing to accept language that guarantees you'll need to deal with such fragility by it's very structure?

I'm sure I over-stated the problem when I first stated it ... but whenever I remember the situation, I feel the terribleness of it so I don't think it's unimportant.
That's not serious, is it?

The real point is, that you cannot be sure that you can identify _your customers_. The providers change, you greet them with "Hey, welcome. What do you want to buy here?" instead of saying "Hey, Groxx. Glad you are back. Feel free to use X, Y and Z that you gave us money for in the past".

I really like OpenID, but insights like this seriously scare me. And they are _not_ customer friendly when they _don't_ work. Understand that you have no control over that "when" though - you rely on someone else to allow your paying customers to use your (purchased) service.
Pixel font's are still _very_ useful in icons, favicons etc.
If you don't like it don't use it. If people are using it, it's addressing a need.
I think that's what the OP is lamenting: That we've traded one problem (remembering which screen name/e-mail address and password you used to log in) with another one (remembering which OpenID you used to sign up, and dealing with the technical repercussions therein), while there is a seemingly superior solution out there (let the browser(s) handle it).
"The collaboration reports success in producing antihydrogen in a so-called Cusp trap, an essential precursor to making a beam."

The article doesn't really say, but why are beams needed? Is it because these (anti-)particles are always moving or have such a short lifespan, or is there some other reason beams are so important?

(The sci-fi nerd in me first thought of weaponizing it, but I hope that never happens)
Hydrogen (and anti-Hydrogen) is diamagnetic.
He is saying that there are HN pages that take minutes to load.
As the community's size grows the content will inevitably get more diverse. The solution is not separate sites where the content is forever fragmented but rather a hash tag solution (ugly but its something we can implement ourselves).
You’re right! Off by one.

> GF(2^8) is the smallest size in practice, because most people's data is organized into 8-bits-at-a-time today.

IIRC GF(2^4) is actually used in practice. Long story short, the CPU overhead of rebuilding data is a real concern.
The original cellular Kindles are popular for shucking and pulling the sim to use elsewhere.
In theory, the lambda combined with the noinline attribute forces the compiler to use a call/ret to a function rather than making a local jump. Since the function usually will have alignment requirements, this often will mean the error handling is in a different 64-byte cache line. If this error never occurs, this cache line will never occupy space in the instruction cache (i-cache), and useful instructions can be held there instead.

In practice, I'd be surprised if you can come up with a case where this makes a significant difference. If you are on a hot enough path for this to matter, on a modern processor you probably are running out of the even lower level decoded µop cache, which doesn't cache µops for branches that are not taken. If you aren't in this cache, your efforts are probably better spent making this happen.

Edit: ot's comment about how this affects the size of the parent function and whether it will be inlined is a good point, and might well make a measurable difference in the cases where it is true.
I love four sides as an alternative to both sides.
I'm a huge Linux enthusiast.

Have you ever tried to put Linux on someone else's computer? Tell them that it's just so much better than Windows, and that they can do everything they currently do with it and that they won't even notice the difference!?

Then you'd be a very dishonest person. Linux is not a drop-in replacement for Windows.

It is far superior, there's no contest there. And in my life, with my skills, I can use my linux systems to do all the things people do with windows, most often more efficiently. But never would I market Linux as a drop-in replacement because then, when I do drop it in, people would tell me they don't like it because it doesn't feel like Windows.

Are you seeing the analogy yet? Let me help you...

I installed Linux on my mom's laptop. I told her it would be very different but that I'm sure she could adapt, and that I'd be able to help her if she runs into trouble. She never had problems with it and only ever needed my help to print things.

By contrast, had I told her it would "all be the same", she'd have been very upset, right?

So why are people trying to get meat-lovers to eat "veggie meat" by telling them it's a replacement for it? Here, just yesterday, in the "What to eat after the apocalypse?" article:

> "You would never know the difference between say, a sausage patty, a veggie sausage patty, and an insect sausage patty. It’s all the same! It’s just the spices."

WTF? Yes, I can taste the difference. Something is wrong with your senses if you can't. That's not to say I dislike the taste, but that you won't get people to eat these things by telling them "close your eyes, pinch your nose, and just imagine you're eating caviar".

I'm finding it very hard to explain my point further. It boggles my mind that people try to sell this stuff by ... lying.
Where are the email chains? I don't see any other emails on the tennessean's website.
Thank you for doing so, this was an enjoyable and interesting read that I probably wouldn't have found otherwise.
this reminds me of when i started to code - find the first solution to the problem that comes to mind and hack it until it works, even if was something as abstruse as manipulating the UI. of course the outcomes were incredibly fragile and broke at the first possible moment, but in the end they still did the job they were supposed to do most of the time.

today i couldn't do that anymore; i've grown too uptight to try any of those inefficient "solutions". i guess i'd rather give up and admit defeat if there were no APIs or passable hacks (i'd say using phantom.js would be a passable hack) i could work with than solve the problems this way.

i'm usually unable to follow the advice given by the xkcd automatisation timetable described here: http://xkcd.com/1205/ "is it worth the time?" - if a dirty hack is destined to run more often than once, i just have to make it passably elegant, readable and efficient. i'm sure nine out of ten times the effort is pretty much wasted.

i guess i've just grown old.
If they were serious about being hindered by a lack of talent, they'd put some effort into finding it where ever it may be. They wouldn't depend on volunteers in the company, they'd assign people to it.
They were expecting it long run, they just weren't expecting it that day. If you'd asked people last week if the peg would still be in place 10 years from now, most people in the market would have said "no". If you'd asked them if would still be in place 10 days from now, most would have said "yes".
"The only way to get a 20 to 25k raise is to find another job. Unless of course you are doing the job of 4 people which in IT 99.9% of the times you are. Don't believe me? Go ask for a 20k raise if their eyebrows shoot up like Mr. Spock then you know how much you are worth. I sure hope you have another job lined up because that's the queue to them you are looking."

I used this technique to get that much of an increase. First found a job that I was actually willing to quit for. Went to my boss with the offer. They made a counter that I accepted. Without that offer I would have gotten probably 2-3% yearly.

People get too caught up in trying not to hurt their employers feelings by threatening to leave. Who cares if they know you were looking for another job. It's a business decision. I've tried to leave more than once at my current position and they don't treat me any differently. The key is to be prepared to actually leave if they call your bluff.

Also this probably means I was severely underpaid to begin with.
Because I am looking at the large scale of things, while you concentrate on the few last years. This is the problem between our arguments. You refuse to see that as society we are doing better than ever before, consistently pointing out how things have gotten bad in the last few years. Yeah, they have - that doesn't change the broad outlook.

As for the food banks - fantastic! That means that the system is working - if you are hungry, you will not starve because the economy can afford to feed hungry people even if they don't have a job! Don't you think that this is a success?
Not sure how yyyymmdd is unambiguous. 10111012 do you mean 10th Nov 1012 or 1011 Oct 12th
COBOL failed epically at its goal of making programming easy for everybody by creating an "English"-esque syntax that everybody could understand. It failed so epically that it has apparently destroyed the idea so thoroughly that you don't remember/realize that it was a first-class goal of the language.

If you go back and read what I said, notice that nobody could sensibly call Java a generalized "failure" either. It specifically failed to create a language that would be something that could be used by large groups of people easily, and to the extent it succeeded it did so with incredibly grit, perseverance, and tons of third-party tools and terribly abortive efforts over the years, and it also did it so badly that people entirely stopped talking about even trying it. This despite the fact that "how do we write programs in companies with hundreds of programmers working on tons of discrete projects" is by any measure a very large use case for programming languages, and that only Go is directly addressing this use case directly is in some sense a travesty. (Others address it indirectly, by claiming that their features that are really intended for code safety or power may also as a side effect have the ability to make big programming teams function well, if they even claim that.)
Yes, like I say, the class system, and the typical engineer's strongly expressed desire to dress scruffily and generally nonconfom, disregard hierarchy and so on. There's no reason that software professionals shouldn't be on a par with lawyers and accountants, the work is similar enough (describing the current and desired states of complex systems in very precise terms, and creating finely detailed plans for getting from here to there).
The artist's account on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/ivorjetski/status/1238063321015889921

I too am eager to read a blog post on the technique.
Its not that it sucks, its that Apple is being misleading about HTML5.
You made $1300 the first month you offered the product. how much time did it take to develop it.
I think people are reacting to the game theoretical aspects of this. Sure, if one firm uses SEO, it gives them a chance to get a leg up on the competition and put their product out in front of people. But if everybody uses SEO, nobody else is better off than they were before, and yet a huge amount of time has been wasted on SEO. And unfortunately everyone will be using SEO, because they'll get left behind if they don't.

Many developers are developers precisely because they didn't want to get into these zero-sum games. Think of the other professions where smart, logical, creative people can end up. Finance, law, and advertising. Most of these pay better than software engineering does. If we wanted to go into them, we would've. But it's precisely the constructive, innovative part of software development that appeals to us.

The question was "Why do developers not want to go into SEO?", not "Why do salespeople and marketers not want to get into SEO?" It's because the question is already self-selecting for the people that don't want to do that. If we liked gaming the system for personal gain, we'd work for Goldman Sachs.
He sold all that stock later in 1997 as a gambit, though.
The problem is that they block Chrome 5 too, which is more advanced than Safari 4 (newer version of webkit).
Wait! According to that it was on the very first Apple II (as Bill said)!

> [The Apple II] also came with Microsoft's Basic interpreter, dubbed "Applesoft Basic", on cassette tape.

BTW: Sculley seems villainous in that, too. Then again, what about that story Woz tells, of Jobs lying to him about how much he'd get for their project, so that Woz's "half" was less.

You know, I tend to see business as a partly adversarial/competitive game. That's not something I cope with well personally, but that's how I see it. From that perspective, Bill's opportunistic exploitation seems well-done, even talented.

Personal story: in one deal I negotiated, with a very cool and impressive biotech company that I admired greatly, was with their lawyers. I was warned about them by other members of the company, but I have a law degree myself, so I thought ha ha I'll be fine. But what they did was to smother the contract with typographical changes, so that in the diff, the genuine changes were hidden - and they made a substantive change that they didn't tell me about, and that we hadn't discussed. I was outraged, so I cut off the negotiations. I felt seriously unsettled that I was destroying the value that the transaction would have created, but my key realization was that in dealing with people like that, sooner or later they'd catch me out.

So I guess I'm not really OK with Bill's approach at all.

I draft my contracts very defensively, but most people aren't like that company (or like Bill), so it's quite possible I miss out on fruitful collaboration because of my "safe" approach.
> This sets a very poor example for Apple supporting standards.

Can you, or any of the dozens of upvoters, explain the logic behind that criticism? It literally seems to make no sense to me, so I must be missing something. The page talks about emerging web standards and talks about Safari and Apple's support for them. It mentions that not all browsers support all of the latest standards, and then it gives examples of some of the latest standards that Safari supports. So, huh?
"Copyleft hardware is not nearly as widespread as copyleft software"

The core premiss is still true. And it's a huge factor difference. Even if you can cite counter examples, or things they missed the amount of software development happening on Github/Google Code/Sourceforge eclipses open hardware hacking.

It's awesome that early adopters like you are there, but remember that open programable hardware is still uncommon.
Zwift has done well with a fitness gaming product oriented around bike races and challenges. But the graphics are cheesy. And the whole game experience is mostly just about power output in a straight line with maybe some drafting tactics; it only even supports steering in a very limited way.