jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
That's an interesting post. Minimal BASIC really deserves its name, being quite a bit more limited than even the ZX80s or VIC-20's BASIC variants.

Especially in the educational context, this lead to a lot of languages seemingly forgotten -- BASIC being too little, and the computers not having enough power for Pascal/Algol-W/C. LOGO was quite popular, of course, but anyone remember COMAL? It had line numbers, but mostly for editing interactively. Beyond that, you had full structured programming, a decent enough allowance for variable names and a rather verbose syntax to help you remember where you are. No semicolons required, turtle graphics included in most implementations. Short example:

0100 draw'circle(160,100,100,2)
0110
0120 PROC draw'circle(xc,yc,r,color)
0130 pencolor(color)
0140 circle(xc,yc,r)
0150 paint(xc,yc)
0160 IF r > 10 THEN draw'circle(xc,yc,r-10,color+1)
0170 ENDPROC draw'circle

One of my favorite languages of that era was Elan. Which, like most others, was slightly pascal-ish, too, but introduced refinements, a feature rarely seen since (literate programming preprocessors excepted). Also allowed ample usage of spaces in identifiers.

problem of pascal:
read the maximum;
start with the number 1;
begin with the sum 0;
WHILE number <= max
REP add number to sum;
take the next number;
ENDREP;
show the result.

read the maximum:
INT VAR max;
get(max).

start with the number 1:
INT VAR number:: 1.

start with the sum 0:
INT VAR sum:: 0.

add number to sum:
sum := sum + number.

take the next number:
number := number + 1.

show the result:
line;
put (sum).

We tend to do similar things with (maybe nested) functions and comments, but this puts it all on the language level, which also would make it easy to have the system prompt you for your missing refinements, and of course get by without passing parameters.

Now, replacing all that or more contemporary equivalents (like Scratch or Python) with a didactic approach that's pretty much centered on writing flowcharts beforehand is quite an idea. Which, by the way, is something we shouldn't forget when we compare languages: It's not just about its syntax alone, but how students are taught to construct and revise them. REPLs vs file-based, for example. This would have them draw the general structure and then encode that in GOTOs. I bet Dijkstra would feel torn about this…
The problem with human beings is we are all different.

Half the people might want (and need) summary-only content. But many people do not trust the editorial spin that most news outlets put on their summaries.

I agree to some extent that a subsidized news media has value (though this needs to be entirely divorced from any kind of control, because even if the government tries to be hands-off with it, if there is even the possible threat of pulling funds, the news outlets start pulling their punches and failing to hold the government to account. Governments are very bad at this, and benefit greatly from doing this badly)

The way the current system works though, and I think what you are saying is, currently those summary-only people are being subsidised by those who are willing to read the full articles (and endure the adverts)

This in itself provides incentives for the publishers to provide low-quality summaries (think clickbait, but many other techniques exist) to force users into their site. For those who cannot deal with the full articles (e.g. eyesight impaired, language barriers and attention deficit), this puts them at a disadvantage, and leaves them more susceptible to misinformation and half-stories.

Aggregators, on the other hand, provide competition, which may be enough to ensure some baseline quality.

So I agree that the route you are proposing has merit; but also there is danger in it, and unless the government is going to stipulate fees that are commercially viable for the likes of Google, the net damage outweighs the gains.

Also, I've not seen anything that tells me this is what the government are doing or that it is even part of their game-plan. But then, maybe it's just not included in the summaries?
Anyone trying to understand Michael Saylor’s reasoning should listen to this podcast episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-bitcoin-standard-p...

He goes into great detail his logic and reasoning for doing the purchase, why he thinking it’s a good investment, etc. Going to give you a much richer understanding than the spitballing you’ll find in these comments.
Congratulations! Are the finished-product sites exportable?
You may be overestimating hosting cost. Go with AWS, 75$/month dedicated server.
If you truly think the market for C developers is so favorable to employers that someone who can write the in-place-whitespace-removal function off the top of their heads is easy to find, then by all means, ding candidates for their spelling during interviews. Thanks for making it that much easier for the rest of us to hire.

In the industry I work in --- computer software --- it is ludicrously hard to find people competant in C programming, and I'm inclined to ignore idiosyncratic spelling in source code.
$2000 a month? Find a large quantity of text that isn't on the Web that people might search for, put it online, and put AdSense ads on it.
I bet you commend this poster as well:
http://www.ironstarmovement.com/forum/topics/top-10-reason-w...
I'm sure RiderOfGiraffes doesn't want a third entry from me at this point, so I figure I might as well just post it here:

#define C	char
#define F	for
#define R	condense_by_removing
#define V	void

V R(C*A,C B){F(C*J=A;*J=*A++;J+=*J!=B);}

or without #defines:

void condense_by_removing(char*A,char B){for(char*J=A;*J=*A++;J+=*J!=B);}
I've made a prodigious amount of comments, and I'm sure some of them were quite stupid, and yet my account hasn't been banned. So have most of the people on the leaderboard. I guess it's not "one annoying comment", but a) how bad the comment is, and b) how much contribution that user had made in the past.
Agreed. I think the ability to start posts on HN (the Ask HN variety) suggests that submitting your own content is welcome. If the content is relevant then it gets voted up.
Do a limited (closed) beta, and test your hypothesis, which at this point currently goes something like: "This will be useful for other programmers and they would pay for it." So get some other programmers, privately, ask them to use it. See if they will. If nobody uses it, not even free, it's not useful. Once you have 5 people using it, invite more people and ask them to pay 10$/month. If nobody wants to pay for it, look harder, invite more people. If you do find some people, NOW you've got something.

Now finish and polish the product and release.
How many people are now aware of Krazam LLC that weren't before.

Backfire!
English speakers are quite selfish it seems. Instead of acknowledging and appreciating other languages they're tailoring those languages for themselves.
I had Covid ~a year ago and have had a dramatically reduced sense of smell ever since.

It might not be directly life-threatening (I would like to be able to smell smoke again, though), but blowing off peoples' reports of issues that severely reduce their quality of life is toxic.
I dislike websites that make all the text in a narrow column. might be perfect for some but not perfect for fuckers like me
(Render founder) This is incredible work, and underscores the reason Render exists and is recommended by OP. Everything mentioned in the post is baked into Render already:

* Automatic DNS, SSL, and Load Balancing

* Automated rollouts and rollbacks

* Health checks and zero downtime deploys (let it crash)

* Horizontal autoscaling (in early access!)

* Application data caching (one-click ClickHouse and Redis)

* Built-in cron jobs

* Zero-config secrets and environment variable management

* Managed PostgreSQL

* DNS-based service discovery with private networking

* Infrastructure-as-Code

* Native logging and monitoring and 3rd-party integrations (LogDNA, Datadog, more coming this month!)

* Slack notifications

More at https://render.com.
I have actually spent considerable amounts of time reading math related wikipedia articles in graduate school, though those tend to be well written and researched. More often you find ways that things could be explained more clearly.

No, the thought wouldn't even occur to me. I'd just recognize the mistake and move on to what I was doing at the time.
Most of them seem to compete on picture quality but I’m not sure that we have a consensus on what “quality” means in this case. Buyers often prefer screens where the contrast and saturation are artificially enhanced so that is the default setting for many TVs.
Pretty incredible that you can do this type of work on the BEAM now. Wow!
The overly curse happy programmer speak is so very stale. I'm not offended or anything but it's just not that great. It doesn't make the content more interesting. It doesn't make the author seem any cooler. It's just meh. It reminds me of Epic Meal Time; a facade of coolness based on cursing, alcohol and over the top food.

I love that instead of this style we're getting a new generation of programmers who are genuinely nice, calm and friendly. People such as Bob Nystrom or Andreas Kling, who don't feel the need to curse every few lines.
Are people still buying that Covid19, the China virus of 2019, is still a thing causing all these problems? How long does it take for one to look at all the data and ask some simple questions?
1 How accurate are the covid tests? Why is every postive considered a postive with no false postives, but negatives can be considered false negative.
2. How come the Flu and flu like virus have basically disappeared, but Covid numbers mirror past Flu and flu like viruses numbers?
3. Every governments model for Covid's lethality and spread have be completely wrong and overblown?
4. How does a virus have so many various symptoms? Could doctors be misdiagnosing the problem, especially when being misdiagnose is sadly very common? Could misdiagnosis cause inflated numbers and seriousness?
Finally, why must herd immunity need to be so high? If only 15% of the population is ever going to catch it, if 30 to 40% is immune, would that not cut down the chances of catching a virus to acceptable numbers of everday problems.
Also, risk accessment should be an individual right not controlled by government.
Doesn't this become anti-competitive at a certain point?

You as the customer buy two (or more) services from Company A. They require you agree to stringent terms on one of those services in order to cut back your use of Company B's services.
and that is just the tip of the iceberg on things it doesn't do. bam!
> Show me a better multi-purpose input device that I can use to rotate objects on a screen. Or zoom into a specific object without affecting other objects on a screen.

I agree with you in general, but a trackpad is in fact really, truly horrible for these tasks. As humans we are designed to rotate objects precisely, and that design does not involve using two fingers to slide about arbitrary locations on a flat plane. It involves grasping and rotating with the hand. For rotating and/or zooming, a large knob attached to a high-resolution encoder would be a million times better.
I broadly agree with a lot of the principles here, but there are distinctions that should be drawn.

Firstly, there is the question of uncertainty. I am not certain that donating money will result in lives saved. The charity might be corrupt.

Secondly, there is the donation-vs-useful-work. Someone like Bill Gates is a fantastic example - the more money he donated pre-becoming-a-billionaire, the more less helpful he'd have been. It was better that he focused on making more money so he has more to give away.

Thirdly, there are complicated but powerful arguments that people have to privilege their own life beyond what the trolley problem answer suggests.

- Practically, people are going to do that.

- An individual can be much more certain that they exist and benefit from living than others (maybe they are surrounded by philosophical zombies?).

- If moral people make choices to weed themselves out of the gene/social pool then society will become less moral over time.

Cynical, self serving, but true.
I'm working on the complex UIs now, and it is a challenge. Fortunately, I can focus on gaming designs which is less complicated.

I think the key thing here is figuring out how the UI can be made mostly declarative and a stateless function of the state. I'm drawing some inspiration from

https://flutter.dev/docs/development/data-and-backend/state-...

and the challenge is the polish to make products great. My strategy is that I'm going to make a UI editor so I can make faster progress on designing the board game UI and then build a minimal set of controls to do data binding. The key is to get into the fight about what is the polish needed, and what reasonable escape hatches are needed.

> I wonder if there's some aspect of board games that pushes one towards that line of thinking.

There is, they are exceptionally complicated!!! SO COMPLICATED! The key is the implicit state machine between all the players, and you just can't quickly model it with traditional tools and databases. All it takes is a single card or game piece (which changes rules) to invalidate EVERYTHING. Games are exceptionally messy!
The idea of having one aircraft be able to become any of the other variants isn't actually that great. Air Force planes don't operate from carriers, and Navy planes don't need to operate from very small fields.

The common bits are actually really useful to have in common. The radar is expensive to develop. The optical sensors are too. Engines are expensive, and the F135 engine is like 1/6 of the aircraft's cost.

Development is a bit more expensive, because you have 3 airframes with slightly different characteristics, but much of it the same between the three as far as systems that go inside.

It's definitely not 3x the price to develop the 3 different variants.

And they're buying new F-35s for cheaper than a new F-16.
I don't want to start a food truck, but I would like to electrify them and make them into a fleet of leasable UberEats/DoorDash/Prime delivery vehicles
You get an idea how long someone has the page open yes.
Yup. And DHTML over a Java applet before XMLHttpRequest. 1999 at least, iirc.
Original discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5671088
Use your thumbs. The track pad is right below the space bar.

Or, it's close enough that with hovering hands you can move back and forth between keys without looking. It's much faster to navigate a code base that way, I think, than trying to jump in vim lines at a time. A smooth, continuous scroll at easily controllable, different speeds does wonders for keeping continuity of a file in mind.
am I the only one that doesn't care about working for a FAANG? The only intrigue from these companies is that they offer golden handcuffs. I occasionally go through the interview cycle at these companies just to get offers I could use to leverage other companies.

there's probably a limited number of projects that interest me at these companies and knowing my luck I would get assigned to some maintenance project doing "plumbing" (internal use only libs for example) or assigned to cleanup shitty code from a nearly dying project.

if you are graduating college and get into these companies, don't drink the koolaid. keep your eyes open and don't waste your potential on these companies. Save up your $$$, and build something that people will use.
So kind :)

Thank you.-

Right on the dot ...

(I found it fascinating, when I first saw it :)
What this means is that we will need to plan for a lander on Europa. This will be very tricky to land due to a lack of atmosphere and the need to avoid contamination.
I am against this. This is not a good standard. It's a response to Google 's Microsoft-like protocol hack.
I'm not sure how an oversimplified popular science article is relevant to HN
Cutes. Is this some sort of early april fools joke?

The CIA's big hacking tool is vi? Really?
I guess "good for the economy" here means it increased GDP for the affected area.

This is a common critique of GDP as a measure of economic health. And it's a fair one. But in the bigger picture, GDP remains the best measure I know of.

Accidents and disasters will happen, but their rate is fairly constant, and the noise they add to the measurement is far from invalidating it.
Actually there's been evidence that repeatedly hearing certain types of news makes people less sensitive to them. In other words, if people constantly hear about GOOG or MSFT being privacy concerns in the 21st century, those people will think of it as the new norm. Sad, but true.
Download a copy of the original Apple II disk for an emulator https://archive.org/details/wozaday_Prince_of_Persia You can kinda play it in the browser but the sound was a little odd and I couldn't figure out the controls.
> Are they that profitable or state sponsored?

The world now ships ~1.2B Smartphone every year, most of them Fabbed on TSMC. That is Apple, Huawei, Qualcomm, Mediatek. These four along is likely 80%+ of the market. Along with Modem, WiFi and dozen of other smaller components. That is excluding BitCoin, ASIC, FPGA, Gaming GPU, GPGPU, Network Processors etc all these market have exploded in the past 10 years and requires leading edge Fab all coming from TSMC. ( Well at least most part of it ). The market is so much bigger than Intel's 200M+ PC market and Server Market in unit volume, TSMC has been able to benefit from it.

And once you spread the R&D over a much larger volume of products, your unit cost economics drops. Hence benefiting everyone in the industry.
This situation makes me more pessimistic about solving global climate change.

The economic damage caused by "shelter in place" falls disproportionately on the poor and the lower middle class, who work in fields where working from home is not possible.

Emission regulations and fuel taxes also fall disproportionately on the same people, because they can't afford newer cars which are more efficient.

When the French government raised fuel taxes in order to ameliorate climate change, there were mass street protests. What started as a protest against fuel taxes developed into a widespread expression of grievance against inequality.

We can expect a lot more of that if we do what it really takes to make a big impact on climate change.

If climate policy is not balanced against economic inequality, there is a real risk that such anger will channel into support for populist political parties, who would roll back climate policy when elected.
Pretty much. I like to say there is a thin line between Steve Jobs and Elizabeth Holmes
I actually started with Svelte, partly because I wanted to learn it. I couldn't figure out a good way to tie its reactivity to my needs so I ended up dropping it in favor of Vue.js.

As for things to show, it's still quite early as I want to nail down the rendering engine. I've yet to create drawing tools which will allow me to more easily create complex visualizations.

Here's something I pretty quickly rigged up though which I think is fairly mesmerizing: https://imgur.com/a/ELhwWo5
Bonus hilarity is presence of the Jump to Conclusions Mat guy.
Pretty alarmist writing. "I therefore can’t resist showing a new piece of Google technology: the military robot ‘WildCat’ made by Boston Dynamics which was bought by Google in December 2013". And goes on to show a video of something that was funded by DARPA well before Google purchased Boston Dynamics. Google has already said multiple times that it won't be pursuing any military contracts.
Carousell | https://carousell.com | Singapore | Backend (Python/Django/Flask), iOS, Android, Frontend web

Carousell is Southeast Asia's largest and fastest growing mobile marketplace, and a highly-rated iPhone & Android app that makes selling as simple as taking a photo. Backed by Sequoia Capital, Rakuten, Golden Gate Ventures, 500 Startups and other internationally renowned investors, the Carousell mission is to inspire millions worldwide to start selling.

With millions of chat messages and hundreds of thousands of transactions and growing happening at Carousell every month, we are solving many of the technical challenges that eBay faced back in the early days. Pushing out new code, crafting the product and scaling the infrastructure to millions of people worldwide are challenging yet incredibly rewarding at the same time.

We are on the lookout for passionate and talented team members across a variety of technical roles to join our family and be part of our mission. You will be playing a key role in building elegant product and laying the actual ground work for millions of buyers and sellers worldwide.

Location: Singapore

Open Positions (full time):

1) Backend engineers (experience in building Django/Flask projects in production)

2) Frontend web engineer

3) iOS engineer

4) Android engineer

To apply, email your resume (+ Github/code links if you have) to jobs@carousell.com (please mention that you saw this on HN).
I am highly skeptical that this is a legit posting. Of course, the poster has not answered much of anything anyway, so it doesn't matter too much anyway.
I guess an important question is whether this test bank is supposed to be accessible only to instructors. Presumably a test bank would contain enough questions for several tests, so it isn't necessary that there were any repeats from previous semesters.
I'm pretty sure opera has had this for a while.
So, at least where I went to school (Georgia Tech) it is well known and accepted that students have word of basically every question that's ever been asked for any given course. Professors also commonly post previous exams as study guides for courses.

Is this not common elsewhere?
That’s how you do that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1926525
As the price came down on LEDs, so did the quality. I have a dozen or so Philips bulbs from 2012 and 2013 that have had no issues and good quality dimming. Could not find same quality when looking for more a few years later.
It has been like that for the long time, actually. I've seen examples where somewhat political search clause (in Russian) yields completely different results on Google & Yandex (it's actually hard to tell which one "tweaks" the results, and what tweaking even really means, when you think about it — my guess would be both, but differently). But in a sense of intentionally hiding something "neutral" that I know perfectly well must be there, but isn't (and it seems like you can guess why) — I've never actually noticed in on Yandex, while on Google it has been like that for the whole decade already. (I don't find is that surprising, really. To me, it's perfectly logical, but I won't elaborate, because it would be political and extremely unpopular on HN, which seems like a worthless flamewar topic to me.)

But in my experience Yandex just isn't as good at searching things in English, as DDG/Bing. At least, I always preferred them for most use-cases except from some really specific ones. So it's a pity that this thing with DDG happened. I guess, I'll still continue to use it for now, because I don't want to hurt my productivity other that thing (and switching to a search engine I would have to adapt to most certainly would do that). But we'll see.
I had this same experience with For Hims. Super shady business practice that made me recommend against them ever since