jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
This post has some great lines in it:

* As a revolutionary feminist and anti-imperialist, veganism seemed to be yet another way I could fight the injustices we are facing.

* Capitalism has turned food, and especially grains, into a commodity, a weapon of war, and a way to make a profit, instead of the inalienable right it should be. The way to prevent hunger is not to feed the starving masses the food we currently feed to animals (excess food production and the resulting food dumping is one of the causes of hunger in the first place), but for the chronically hungry people to throw off the shackles of neo-imperialism and to gain back control of their local food systems.

* It was shocking to realize I had been expounding on the need to transform agriculture and farming without even knowing the bare minimum of what it takes to keep an ecosystem healthy.

Really? Was it really shocking? Really? I feel like I'm in a missing scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian.

On the other hand her 3 paragraphs about the 3 kinds of bad people (the frauds, the foolish know-it-alls, and the evidence deniers) sparked instant recognition and made me realize that those are the exact people that irritate me more than just about anyone else in this world.
People aren't willing to pay extra for speed, which makes the planes uneconomical. And now with wifi, internet and an entire office on a plane, there is even less emphasis on getting there faster.
How about disbanding it as a waste of tax money, and as an unnecessary institution ill-suited to being part of a society dedicated to the idea of individual liberties?
Do it before you have enough confidence. Take it from someone who started a business that did okay from the beginning, then miserably failed for about 2 months, then came back and does great now. The times of despair are when you learn the most, because you get practical knowledge on how to make a real business work. You get the confidence to bug the shit out of people until they become your clients, and the audacity to get out there and find opportunity anywhere you can.

My late uncle used to say this over and over again: zamindar nahi banenge jab app kam kisi aur keliye karehe. If that didn't make sense, it's because my Hindi sucks: what I mean is you'll never get rich working for someone else.
Given the asynchronous programming model that node encourages, how have you found integrating with the traditional Java programming model that most of the Java ecosystem uses?
> it's gotten really unreliable in many places these days because the infrastructure is decaying and companies are spending the absolute minimum to keep it going, but they're milking it for profit from all the dinosaurs who refuse to give it up.

Citation? I haven't heard anything about this and I work closely with telecom.

> and is getting older and easier to manipulate into buying stuff.

You know, Slashdot was never quite this toxic back in the day.
>HTTP2 is one of those 'version 2' of an app that some of the legacy genius of it was lost and overlooked in the redesign, like simplicity.

Calling HTTP1/1.1 genius sounds like an "intelligent design" argument (as opposed to "evolution"), and I think detracts from what makes it good.

What makes more sense to me is HTTP1/1.1 was invented and then we hacked/adapted/"evolved" on top of it to get it to do what we want. It wasn't the spec that was genius - it was the effort of countless engineers overtime the crammed a genius, trillion dollar industry into an "okay" spec (The same way it was done for HTML/CSS/JS).

in that vein, the whole binary/plaintext header arguments seem a lot closer to "this is the way my father did it" rather than "this is the most efficient way". To counter your XML/JSON example - I would argue they won over binary formats because there a huge need for humans to write & edit data exchange structures. OTOH, I can't remember the last time I sent/edited/created HTTP Headers by hand. While JSON has tons of uses and is stored in countless places(config, user data, state data), HTTP servers are the only services that seem to care about HTTP headers.
Good point. The government in the propaganda domain at least is bound by high ideals and promises -- "We are for freedom. We represent the people. We don't stiffle expression. (Unlike those other countries out there...)". So doing anything too harsh to a public figure, known internationally, is going to create a big hassle.

At another level you can argue that he is also a token, and thus implicitly somehow part of the system. He is a representative example of how "tollerant and open" the country is. "Hey look, a harsh critic of the system is still alive and still working". So it is important to keep him around but tighten the screw periodically a bit so he stays in check, so to speak.

On the topic of the article. I think the interesting part is how Ai tried to manage the surveilance and how he responded to it. Installing cameras around and basically making his life completely public, for everyone. At some level that mocked and maybe emasculated the watchers. Monitoring, is a power play of course too. This mocking was probably rather infuriating for them. "Oh you want to monitor me, fine I'll monitor myself 10x better than you and will let everyone participate".

But also this is also possible because he is already a public figure. His public image is the only thing that shields and protects him and allows him to do this. He knows it of course.

The other example, is him approaching the undercover officers watching him. Also a great way to mock and in way difuse their power.

Extrapolating to how we (in US) are watched and monitored by Apple, Google, NSA, not sure how and what can be learned here. The difference that it is rather impersonal and mocking doesn't work in the same way. You know people insert signatures with [al-Qaeda, bomb, president, blah blah] in their emails. Not sure what that does. We might never know.
That still goes away when you close emacs/slime. I think a sketchbook would be more like an ipython notebook or a mathematica page, etc.
I think that he means that there's no storytelling cruft that just fills paragraphs and wastes time. It's short, concise and rich in information.
Most companies are sweat and hard work without a doubt. That said there are occasional stories, Groupme comes to mind, where you build a product, work hard on it for a year or so and get bought out by a bigger company with no serious plans for your product. Then you just ride out the golden handcuff period and collect your cash. By no means should anyone expect starting a company to be that sort of experience but it happens and some people believe they can be that company.
I really like this article. It shows that we don't need inferiority syndrom and instead can create the next Bash or zsh, etc. I personally think that small unix tools and shells will never cease to feel a bit like magic
To me "tap to pay" encodes immediate-term incidentality and proximity.

It's three syllables, it rolls off the tongue when you say it, it takes maybe 450ms to speak, and the brain can encode it using similar (or maybe the same?) mechanisms to how brand names and word combinations are captured without parsing/questioning when very young. This is one of many factors that contributes to a sort of "flow" that combats the "oooooooooh that sounds complicated"-of-death that stands to kill new complex digital products that need to be adopted en mass to function.

"Tap" also encodes "move near reader" but does so by suggesting that you move too close. Thus you'll either have people moving well within the active area (at which point the transaction may even be able to start and complete by the time it's been tapped). It's also physically easier for me to physically execute "tap object against other object" than "hover object 1cm in front of other object", especially when moving.

If you want something to scale, you need fail-safe design. My local bus transit system has a giant (but featureless) NFC pad with a screen saying "Tap here " above it. The number of people I see tapping the screen is... the screen should obviously say "below", the active area should have a ring of LEDs around it, etc etc etc; it's broken design. However, I've also seen people doing the same thing (tapping the screen) with payment terminals. In situations like this, you're designing the system to be viable for the dumbest user.
> I'm curious what you mean by 'geopolitical vulnerability'. How are they vulnerable?

Zoom's China links have put it in hot water before [1][2][3]. If tensions flared, it could find itself cut off from some combination of a large section of its customers and/or large section of its workforce.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/china-based-executive-u...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/technology/zoom-tiananmen...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52200507
Probably trying to ransom if I had to guess.
> Not saying that's for sure going to happen

It’s not going to happen. What financial incentive does a gaming company have to keep the item they sold you effective? They made money selling the item, and will not receive further money from it. They will have already moved on to selling the next, more effective item.
Teams have managed to deliver products in also sorts of languages, Cobol for example.
Did the choice of language benefit the delivery, maintenance and TCO is my question.
If I choose Haskell/Scala over Java (FYI as a programmer I'm not a fan of Java) what benefit will it actually bring the business, and does it out weight the negatives, over what time frame and how much risk?
To be clear, the US has contactless payments all over and probably has had them since ~2015, it just took some time for people to "discover" them.
I find that the live captions also help me when I'm tired or distracted; and sometimes it does a better job that I do of decoding thick accents.
Thank you for the thoughtful response.
Switching to medicine is something I've been contemplating for a couple of months and though about all pros & cons, best-, worst-, average-, expected outcomes extensively, yet I still feel at a lock. To put it shortly, my best case is better staying at my current program and my worst case is worse. The average case is too difficult to determine as the probabilities I assign to each case are speculative.

As for a PhD in medicine being easier, I don't mean that doing the actual PhD is easier but rather the entrance requirements are. The medical school in my country is good so I can just do my PhD there which would be quite easy. On the other hand, the technical school I'm in doesn't have that much research in machine learning so I'd have to apply abroad which would make things much harder. Not to mention that machine learning is a hot area and perhaps the most competitive of all PhD-subjects.
The ICFP programming contest, usually.
Depending on what you're doing its still frequently better than Win32 (which has an extremely broad range of API and documentation quality), or linux (which is just downright screwy at times).

Although all bets are off if you're including headers from within mach. You're better off finding what you need in POSIX at that point, or, failing that, an external library.
>>>Yeah, Amazon is actually the worst at this because of their e-book DRM.

iBookstore, Nookbook store, and Kobo -- the other three big players also have eBook DRM (via Adobe). Kindle is no "worse" than them.
Contrary to what the headline implies, dual-lens smartphones came a long time ago. I had an HTC EVO 3D (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_EVO_3D) for more than a year. It came with two lenses, which allowed it to take 3D stills and video. It also came with a special articulated screen that allowed you to view those 3D images/movies right on your smartphone.

Sounds great, right? Well, I used the dual lenses to take a 3D still or video maybe, oh, half a dozen times. Why? One reason was that the screen hurt my eyes when in 3D mode. Another reason was that unless someone else had a 3D screen, I wouldn't be able to share the files with them. And another reason was that except for some gimmicky action effects in the movies, 3D isn't really all that spectacular.

But it sounds like what's going on here, with the different focal lens stuff, is a lot different than just a 3D gimmick, and I'm interested to see what can be made of it.

Actually, one thing mentioned in the article -- depth analysis, to generate blurred backgrounds -- would, in principle, work on the HTC EVO 3D. Actually, I'm kind of bummed now that I didn't look into whether any existing software could do it. I would have liked to have been able to generate 2D stills that have an algorithmically generated shallow depth of field, sort of like what the Lytro (https://www.lytro.com) light field camera does.

BTW, in case anyone's interested, I broke the EVO 3D about a month ago and got a Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom (http://www.samsung.com/global/microsite/galaxycamera/s4zoom/) to replace it. The camera on this thing is amazing! It's got a 10x optical zoom and a Xenon flash, just like a regular point-and-shoot. Of course, when I'm talking on it in public, I end up looking like a dorkwad, because it appears as if I'm talking into a camera, not a cellphone, but it's totally worth it.
GNU/Linux users are not in their business interests. And you can't fix that problem because the software is proprietary. The only acceptable option is to stop using Netflix.
There's lots more to be said about the late 80s collapse of AI (ES) applications and expectations

On that subject, Richard Gabriel [1] writes about his experiences as a founder of Lucid, which produced Common Lisp for regular Unix workstations, in the "Into the Ground: Lisp" chapter of his book, "Patterns of Software", which is available as a free PDF from his web site [2].

(Lucid's pivot to developing a C++ environment is covered in the "Into the Ground: C++" chapter).

There's some interesting history there (and the rest of the book is probably worth reading as well for a variety of reasons).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_P._Gabriel

[2] http://dreamsongs.net/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf
>You don't think Apple's software quality has dropped? Guess you havn't had a hanging Safari or Chrome tab take down the entire OS.

No, I haven't.
Neither was I. I was a teenager in Denmark with internet access in the 90's. My family was poor, and I bought a modem with money I earned from my paper route. By most metrics, I was decidedly unprivileged.
Wow I never thought of doing animations that way. Great stuff!
I ran into a buch of similar problems in the past personally, so much that I ended up writing my own library.

The home page is a bit ugly, but it contains a range of examples that are commonly awkward to implement in other UI libraries:

http://www.react4s.org/
Yes, I feel pay for developers is going to become more bimodal as time goes on; similar to lawyer compensation.
If we had "benevolent monarchs" (riches, people of power) who have always our best interest in mind, I would agree with you. But these "monarchs" aren't benevolent they simply do not care about us other than manipulating us as "dumb sheep".

And I still believe that the majority of people (us) are decent. Yes we can be like sheeple, but the best cure for that is education and/or political prevention mechanisms against our ills (lobbying, populism and gullibleness).
Hey, where are you sourcing these? Reach out to me: reverse ('ef7sirc') on outlook
Not all of them are funded by those companies.
That is wildly interesting. Every SaaS startup doing some 100k of $$$ in ARR will probably have long testing suites. AAA games making possibly tens of millions. 0 tests.
You can still write a fully working page with a body but without a head, and a parent can do whatever it wants with their children, destroy them if necessary... It's not that bad...
Yeah, I don't see why it's so bad to point out that the site is completely illegible. Reminds me a bit of Wired magazine circa 1997.
It wasn't specific to just the north. Ireland slashed the corporate tax rate, set up a global tax evasion hub, and lured thousands of very large companies to their shores, drastically boosting employment and skill development, which took their per capita income from half of Britain's to greater than Britain's in ~20 years. That significantly reduced the number of disgruntled persons, reducing the supply of terrorist-willing types and reducing the native support for such behavior.
Choose a job because you hunk you'll learn something from it (tech skills or soft skills.) Leave when you begin to stagnate. That doesn't mean leave as soon as you've got a handle on the hot new technology you applied because you wanted on your resume. Almost every company or code awe has something to teach you about process or architecture or politics or people or business or an industry. But there will also come a point where everything is rote and there are no longer any significant challenges for you, even if you seek them out. If you can't then get a promotion or transfer into a new and more challenging role, that's when it's time to move on.

Hiring and training represent a major investment of time and energy (and sometimes money). If your job history shows you rarely stick around even for one year, a lot of companies will be wary because they get a much greater return on that investment from an employee who sticks around for at least a couple years. If you leave after 6-9 months, the ROI may even be negative.

This goes double for small startups, for which a month or two of resume reading and interviewing by the CTO, for instance, followed by a few weeks of training and onboarding and a few months in which the new hire is at <100% productivity while they get up to speed on the existing codebase and tooling/processes, can put a major dent in software development progress. (Note: we're talking about knowledge work here - the economics are a bit different for pizza delivery staff.)

That doesn't mean you should stay in a job that you quickly determine is a poor fit. A short stay or two on an otherwise solid resume isn't a big deal. It's just that a pattern of them signals high risk.

That said, staying somewhere (other than as a founder) for more than about 5 years is also a red flag for anyone who began their career after about 1995. Not only is that sort of employee loyalty rare these days, it can suggest stagnation, since few employers invest in developing their employees any more. Although that can be mitigated by demonstrating a series of significant promotions, changes in role, and assumption of greater responsibility.

As a hiring manager, I expect a resume to reflect a mix of tenures ranging from ~18 months to 3 or 4 years. If you have more than one <9 month stay for every two places you stuck around for at least 18 months, I'll probably give you a pass. It's not worth my while to hire for the same position twice in one year.

Edited for typos.
Look at the arguments PG makes for MSFT being dead: because he doesn't invite them to demo days (seriously, afaict that's 100% of the evidence he presents). Look at the arguments you make (it will be hard to reverse death, it will be hard to sustain constant revenue). The premise of both is ridiculous, because again, there is nothing to reverse, and their revenues are not constant.

Are any of these arguments actually supported by the data?

Sort of: MSFT had a hard time around the year 2000 due to the bubble, as you pointed out. But their growth since then has been pretty respectable, especially in the last 5-10 years, and if you compare their growth rates with GOOGs they really aren't far off despite MSFT being a much bigger company during that time.

Overall I feel like you are asking the question "How will MSFT ever recover" and I reject the premise of that question. Recover from what? What evidence do you give that MSFT is not doing well right now?

PG wrote that essay 7 years ago. Take a look at MSFTs numbers for the last 7 years. FWIW I suspect I am the younger half as I was only 18 when he wrote that essay and I don't think it's 'old news' or news at all because it's simply not true. And that PG anticipated this counter-argument doesn't make it incorrect.
What does this offer on top of Legifrance?

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/n-lex/info/info_fr/index_en.htm

(I don't know any French and don't know the particulars of French legal system that much, so I cannot really assess quickly based on what I can find in the net).
Oh, I understand now. Though I would argue in your sister's case she would explicitly not want to sync. But other people might. I'm actually highly in favor of Signal allowing multiple devices and their platform to be expanded (it'd be nice for IOT bots). Or even allowing for decentralization while maintaining the core official node.
I am not sure I want a simple "forget" button. Maybe a "pause" button, or an "ease up on this pain point" button.

I wasted a lot of emotional energy after a divorce trying to forget it ever happened. When I was finally "over it" IE accepted it, I realised that I didn't want it all "to be forgotten", there were good times too.

Nostalgia is a weird thing.
For the humanity, the publication of the von Neumann report was certainly a very positive thing because it launched a large number of research projects with the purpose of building electronic computers, both in USA and in many other countries.

There is absolutely no doubt that without this publication and with a patent claiming the design of a computer with stored program, the evolution of the computers would have been much slower.

Whoever pushed the report to be published did a huge service to everybody else but Eckert and Mauchly.

Also, Eckert and his coworkers were deluded if they thought they could have gained anything by having a patent on the stored-program computer.

Nobody prevented them to build good computers even without a patent, but they did not have the intellectual and financial resources to do much until they were bought by Remington Rand, which lead to the introduction of UNIVAC in 1951.

If they had a patent, the result would have been that Remington Rand would have had a monopoly on the computer market, with inferior products, and all the great advances in computers that have been done in other places, like NIST, MIT or IBM, would have happened only many years later.

I have read both the von Neumann report, which is a model of clarity, and all the early documents that remain from Eckert, Mauchly et al.

It is likely that they already had some ideas about stored-program computers, but there is no doubt that their ideas were very confused.

Von Neumann distinguished what was right from what was wrong in their ideas, then clarified, organized and completed all those concepts and synthesized them in a coherent theory that could be easily understood and used by anyone else.

The contribution of von Neumann is much more important than Eckert tries to imply.

Moreover, while Eckert and al. were upset that their own contributions were not acknowledged as well as they should have been, they also failed to acknowledge the important ideas about electronic computers that they themselves have taken from Atanasoff, without ever mentioning him.

Unlike Eckert and al., but like von Neumann, Atanasoff was also someone able to express very clearly his concepts, so you could easily learn from him. For example a report about the classification of computer memories, written by Atanasoff at the beginning of WWII, was extremely advanced for those days (Atanasoff invented what is now called DRAM).
Given that the overall share of US accounts on Facebook is in the same range (FB has 2.6 billion users in total), I would say the US is represented exactly as expected.
That's how North Korea was founded. The Communists put this big red box symbol just north of the 38th parallel, and said, "You must high-five here or die, capitalist pig dogs!"

The South refused to high-five.
Ubuntu connects you to the Internet in seconds

Seconds from when? From a few seconds before you connect to the Internet? I'm impressed.
Great, good concept and nice job on the site!