jkeisling/hacker-news-corpus-2007-2022 huggingface dataset:
Not only do we need an open wireless movement, we need mesh networking amongst mobile internet devices and all wireless routers within reach of each other hooking up to form a carrier-independent infrastructure. There are a few projects working towards the former, however the latter would provide a solid backbone especially if the blank spots can be filled through an internet connection.
It sounds like you're referring to two different large Java projects, though. If you can port it by just stripping out the boilerplate -- if it's at heart just a CRUD UI with 7 frameworks and "enterprise best practices" mixed in -- then this is not the twisted and unmaintainable monster you're talking about afterwards. It's less fun, but I've worked on lots of sprawling & unwieldy Java apps implementing simple requirements, and it's not hard (it's also not easy to justify a rewrite, unfortunately). Bugfixes don't take weeks (or even days), particularly not once you know your way around a bit.

The app with the twisted logic (where bugs take weeks to fix, that has mutated over years and years of hacked-in change requests and quirky tweaks often for specific users' needs) is the one that screams for rewriting, but this is also the app where no-one knows exactly what it does anymore.

And if you don't know what it does, I have no idea how you could claim to know what it should do.

Many of the odd features are there for customers who aren't even customers anymore, but no one knows. Even the code doesn't always help much -- I've seen processing where it fails in the mid-method every time for some foolish reason (and logs an error then returns), but the code after the failure is actually direly broken and must never be executed.

I've tried (failed, actually) rewriting one of these as well as doing lots of refactoring on these kinds of projects.

With the first kind of app, you still understand it, so bugs can be fixed, new features are possible, and there's no clear case to rewrite it. With the second kind of app, you can either do what I mentioned above (and maybe you're talking about this, more than a rewrite?) -- start talking with/watching users, take a lot of notes, and build a new similar application all the way through, which will necessarily start off missing much of the functionality of the existing one.

Refactoring isn't about giving you time; it's about paying off technical debt and forcing the codebase back into a state where you can do progressively larger refactorings. This includes modularizing the existing app so that you can replace it piecemeal. New pieces do not need to operate within the old framework. It's quite possible (and sometimes desirable) to refactor the original codebase completely out of existence.
How does one get these ideas in the first place? Is it something that can be trained?
When will we get our points back?
Joel Spolsky describes mercurial as storing lists of changes, rather than a series of file snapshots.

"And so, when we want to merge our code together, Mercurial actually has a whole lot more information: it knows what each of us changed and can reapply those changes, rather than just looking at the final product and trying to guess how to put it together.

"For example, if I change a function a little bit, and then move it somewhere else, Subversion doesn’t really remember those steps, so when it comes time to merge, it might think that a new function just showed up out of the blue. Whereas Mercurial will remember those things separately: function changed, function moved, which means that if you also changed that function a little bit, it is much more likely that Mercurial will successfully merge our changes."

http://hginit.com/00.html

I'd assumed git and mercurial worked the same way.
Here's a real example, using a test image that has a lot of different alpha values in it, and a 24-bit alpha channel:

Original: 87047 bytes
optipng -o7: 82489 bytes
this tool: 22585 bytes

The main difference, other than size, is that optipng produced an exact copy of the the original, while this tool is lossy, and threw away a bunch of data from the alpha channel. The win is that for the majority of all web cases, 8 bits of alpha is plenty.
IIRC there were two different standard libs at one point. I don't believe that's an issue anymore.
Cannot express how excited I am to hear he is back. Welcome back, Ryan. We missed you!
It's GPU accelerated and fast, scrolling is extremely smooth and it looks better. It's also Wayland-native if that matters to you. I use it with Sway as a tiling manager, it's perfect.
Except that the "users" of a string type are programmers, and a "normal task" for a programmer often requires things like this. I'll give you an example from a project I am currently working on: a spam filter. One of the things my filter does is count the number of Chinese characters in a string. I implement this as n1<=ord(c)<=n2 where n1 and n2 are integers representing the start and end of the range of Unicode Chinese characters. This seems like a "normal task" to me and I don't see how conflating characters and texts-of-length-1 would make this any easier.
We are very aware of each other.
What I understand from his writings is that Scott feels that Nick land has made interesting observations and had novel new thoughts, and has then followed them off a cliff. For example, from Meditations on Moloch: [0]

> But the thing about grail quests is – if you make a wrong turn two blocks away from your house, you end up at the corner store feeling mildly embarrassed. If you do almost everything right and then miss the very last turn, you end up being eaten by the legendary Black Beast of Aaargh whose ichorous stomach acid erodes your very soul into gibbering fragments.

> As far as I can tell from reading his blog, Nick Land is the guy in that terrifying border region where he is smart enough to figure out several important arcane principles about summoning demon gods, but not quite smart enough to figure out the most important such principle, which is NEVER DO THAT.

[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Up until now, Facebook made more money with the status quo rather than risking a huge amount of money on a hardware bet.

However, the tables have turned to the point where Facebook's future on iOS appears to be in jeopardy, so a hardware bet might make more sense - as in they might not have a choice if they want to keep growing and maintain/increase their valuation.
Ssshh!
> ...and I feel it's disingenuous.

I think you're probably right. Unfortunately that does accurately sum up the quality of reporting in The Independent pretty well.

Every newspaper in the UK has an axe to grind but, in terms of torturing the facts to suit a particular narrative, The Independent is right up there with The Daily Mail and The Express. All of them are really shoddy publications that thoughtful human beings would do well to avoid.

I also am not a marine biologist but your explanation sounds more plausible to me, especially given the size of the area represented on that map. The whale is covering pretty large distances and it's quite clear that a bunch of those movements, and oddly a lot of those where the motion seems to speed up, may well not be triggered at all by the distant movement of ships, or could just as well be it trying to catch up to ships.
So you're saying there are 4x as many murders in the US? There are definitely lots of problems in the UK: over surveilance and inequality are two of them. But I fail to see how guns would help either of these.
If this were written by an aspiring actor, refusing to live a life of non-fame, putting his family and loved ones through hardship because he refuses to take that steady job, how much differently would this be perceived?
Another japanese named OS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku_(operating_system)
Sometimes there can be an immune response towards the baby. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemolytic_disease_of_the_newbo...
Hey HackerNews,

I am working on an inventory management system as a service.

Currently my friend is also already running an online shop, which is integrated with it and I am planning to provide this as a service to everyone, kind of like shopify.

The guy with whom I started, who was supposed to deal with everything non-technical is too caught up with his job, so I am looking for someone who could replace him. It's probably mostly sales/marketing.

This is the WIP landing page: https://inventhora.com
This has been my workhorse when I needed to load test: https://github.com/processone/tsung, it is still maintained.
While you are right this is still a Nash equilibrium. Nash equilibriums aren't supposed to be "good", they just are equilibriums (ie any actor is worse off by deviating)
I think I'm going to be mostly socially distancing forever now. Not seeing people anymore is an acceptable tradeoff for never getting sick.
You're welcome. I'm glad you took my feedback in the spirit it was intended. I really like what you guys are doing.

I know for myself it's just as helpful to know what people don't like as it is to know what they do like.
The article provides few data points, but I expected the growth of Android activations to be higher.

In the period from June 2010 to December 2010, the number of Android activations per day went from 160k to 300k. In the period from December 2010 to April 2011, the number of activations per day went from 300k to 350k. I would've expected Android activations to be at 400k per day by now, given that the smartphone market is still expanding rapidly.

To compare: Apple went from selling 93k iPhones per day in the spring 2010 quarter to selling 180k iPhones per day in the fall 2010 quarter. For the winter 2011 quarter that ended on March 26, Apple is expected to have sold upwards of 200k iPhones per day. For a company that only releases a new generation of phones once a year, in summer, a slowdown of growth in winter is to be expected. New Android phones are released all the time, so why the slowdown?
My personal definitions, based on my experience in systems and high performance computing research:

Parallelism: simultaneous calculations executing in the service of a single problem, usually with the goal of improved performance.

Concurrency: executions in the same time granularity, but not necessarily simultaneous. Also not necessarily in the service of the same problem, but some form of synchronization is required.

(Admittingly repeating myself: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2387067)
Longwinded but worthwhile read.
In 1994, would you tell Jeff Bezos "people already buy books, just without a website?"
For paying a bounty, yes, assuming it can be arranged in a timely fashion.

For the latter, probably not. Assuming that for whatever reason I cannot write the patch myself, I do not have the time to start a new organization every time I encounter a new bug in some project. And I would guess that most ordinary consumers don't either.

This is not supposed to be a necessarily snarky response. Sometimes, an open source project exists, and it's not for everyone. The people behind the project should realize that every feature they choose not to include cause the software's value proposition to cease to exist for some users. It is up to them what to prioritize, and up to me whether using their software is worth the time of getting a patch committed.

Of course, my operating assumption here is that they want to hear about bugs/feature requests, and so it is worth something to them that I would bring it up in the 1st place. But I rarely ever make new feature requests. Usually this is in response to an evangelist telling me that I should switch to their platform, and my responding that it does not replace a current proprietary solution.
The game you just described is Chutes and Ladders, but with choices.

Could easily be implemented by having two dice, a "safe" die and a "risky" die. On your turn you only roll one die (you choose which one) - the risky die you move ONLY when the number would land you on a chute or ladder, otherwise you stay put. The safe die you move no matter what, and chutes/ladders do not apply to you wherever you land.
There'll be no more cheap second books to purchase if e-books go mainstream. For example, secondhand Dale Carnegie for $2.00 is a steal.
One could argue the qualities of a soldier or officer (individuals) transcend their organisational context (groups) and time. In other words: politics, technology or best practices change, not the responsabilities. The ability (necessity, even) to adapt to that fact defines a fit-for-service soldier/officer.

So, I contend you find remarkable soldiers even in terrible groups, and that they (individuals) should not be judged on their group but on their own qualities of service.

Whether you find those parameters noble is entirely subjective and not mine to question but I do believe anyone who sincerely understands and accepts these obligations deserves respect, as an individual.
A well-designed future email system prohibits tracking.
I see the parallels, but I don't do those either, fuck that, there's no reward for that. It's a subculture that a small percentage of people are able to follow, and often only while they're young.
But in terms of viability, it is also a matter of degrees: do more than half of your users feel sick after using your product, or only very small percentage?
It's simple: because the richer you are, the more you can replace storing items with just-in-time throwaway purchases or services. You can easily throw away stuff you haven't used in 6 or even 3 months, if you can afford buying them on the spot when needed. You don't need tools or appliances if you can afford paying for a service. Etc.
you mean you can compile code into a separate module, right? Which could then access the original module only via marshaled calls through the javascript layer? I guess anything can be compiled into anything but I wouldn't prefer to target lisp to such an environment.
Google Play Music IS shutting down. Anyday now ... probably in a year max.

They say they won't until YouTube music has feature parity but I don't believe it.

I may sound bitter ...
Launching in China was a stupid, shamelessly greedy and ultimately embarrassing decision to begin with, but it's good that they've changed course.

To those who have been living under a rock for the past thirty years: The PRC is a genocidal, expansionist ethnostate that tortures and kills those it deems enemies, which is everybody who isn't ethnically Han and supportive of the leader of the Communist Party. YC knew this when it opened an office there.

My real question is - now that you've invited them in and shown them around, will they create a state-owned YCombinator of their own? It'll be interesting to see how elite state-owned venture capital will work.
What do you think the word 'poor' means when referring to quality? Might be kinder to say 'less advanced' or 'simpler' or 'earlier'.
> maintaining it after

This is the real elephant in the room. Despite all their other flaws Microsoft has an excellent record of maintaining their software well after release. Particularly when it comes to their core products like Office or Windows. WIN32 programs or XLS files from 30 years ago still work on the latest versions.

If Microsoft didn't have this commitment, then porting Office to Linux as an experiment might be worth it. Even if there's a 10% chance it takes root, that's good revenue. But even if only a small base of users bought Office Linux it, Microsoft's reputation would require them keep maintaining it for decades.
Shocking to hear them be so responsive, given their track record. It took them five (!) years to implement dark mode from when people started publicly asking for it. I guess a walk-back is different from a new feature, but still, this isn't the first change they've made that's upset people who they've then proceeded to ignore.
They should be permitting OTA only if the website they download from over TLS has a cert signed by the developer/manufacturer or at least a public CA with a CN matching the host name...so you'd have to physically access each device and not just MITM them.
Interesting disclosure, though I'm not sure I'd characterize that as "spying". I think Google has a right to investigate possible cases of abuse, as well as a right to do that without initially tipping off the webmaster.
That's very interesting! What country are you in? What kind of pumps do people use now?

I imagine that for applications in town, the theft problem will be less. If you have ten or twenty houses clustered together, you can probably leave one rifle home with one of the women in case someone tries to steal the solar panels. I mean, that's the same problem as someone trying to steal a motor scooter or whatever, right?
Who cares who owns what, as long as it isn't stolen from others, indeed.

But there are conflicting opinions about how predatory the current economic system is. How much wealth is stolen? It's not easy to answer unless you are an ideological zealot.
Reading "Programming Collective Intelligence".
I have about $90,000 in student loans and credit cards and I am struggling to deal with it all. Even with several of these in default status (slowly working on setting up payments here and there), do you think anyone would risk giving me a consolidation loan?
The craft of software manufacture is still very much undeveloped. We are still in the days of snake oil and alchemy. Worse yet, so few developers seem to appreciate this.
> Usually, I think the opposite is the case: generally, the DoJ is more careful in high-profile cases, not more cavalier.

I'm not sure Rittenhouse would have been charged at all and, based on how the trial went and how weak the evidence was, he should have, at best, been charged with something much more minor. But that's just one example.

I somewhat agree with you, they are more careful but I think they are more careful in their own process. To make sure their ducks are all in a row. But, when it comes to actually pressing charges or agreeing to plea deals, I think they are much more likely to overcharge or not negotiate so that the case is no longer on their desk and they can say "I did my part".

To use the Rittenhouse example, I think the public expectations of charges impacted the charges because the ones bringing charges are often elected officials (or appointed by them) so there's an incentive to not look at what can be proven with the evidence and instead charge with what the public thinks is "right". The incentive for an elected official is to appease the public with charges, convictions be damned because that's someone else's problem. That's how Rittenhouse's case played out too. Outside of conservative media, there was a lot of attention paid to the judge and the lawyers not being able to prove their case rather than floating the idea that maybe a lesser charge and a conviction was the right thing to do.

On the other hand, I think you saw the same course of events with the George Floyd case but with a different result. The investigation was drawn out and meticulous and charges were brought. That resulted in a conviction but the implication I'm making is that those charges would have been brought regardless of evidence because of the public nature of the case.
I'm surprised they weren't relying on internal HPC resources. Here Stanford has centralized almost everything to use Sherlock[0], and apparently it's quite a nice environment.

[0] https://www.sherlock.stanford.edu/docs/
That looks more likely to be made into a set than this (since it's self contained, not just a part of a plane). Very cool and beautifully well done.
The ideal thing would be if you have multiple phones and can store one offsite at a friend's house. But that requires more complicated software and assumes people have multiple old Android phones laying around. I think more likely you'd pay a cloud service to handle backups for you. You just need to provide them with a read-only key then they can access the same way you do.
That’s a fair critique. Not anticipating the interest that this comment would produce I didn’t do some basic hygiene.

I should have said: “In my anecdotal experience: X.”

I said “X.”

I screwed that up.
Because I can somewhat trust the Square terminal will show the correct amount? If I swipe some random persons iPhone, whats stopping them from showing a $10 total and charging $1000?

Is the iPhone gonna print a receipt?
The current Activision and Atari each have nothing to do with the companies from the early 1980s - each shut down and ceased operations long ago, and the name was just bought out by successors.
Hi, I'm the author of the blog post being promoted here.

No, this is not possible. Cloudflare Tunnel focuses mainly on HTTP traffic but also supports SSH, VNC and generic TCP only in situations where the client also uses the cloudflared client to proxy it back to their localhost. Hosting a mail server with these restrictions is not possible I'm afraid.
>People just don't trust authorities anymore, because authorities time and time again have misled them.

In some cases this is intentional. Less credibility/belief in experts allows for authoritarian governments to more easily ignore the truth.

I found the book "Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible" [0] was an entertaining read that did a good job showing how information jamming is working. Though this is about the Russian experience it is a global issue.

>Astroturfing and fake grassroots campaigns further undermine people's trust in what they hear and read.

One of the more fascinating approaches was how opposition groups are funded secretly and then later intentionally exposed to create a credibility crisis.

[0] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21413849-nothing-is-true...
This gets worse in India where IT cells are the ones tweeting!
I'd to understand a couple of terms here and there, sure, but if you're willing to read [0] documentation Hugo has clear explanations.

[0]: A key requirement of being a developer
Significant correction about Austin, TX - it is not city removing them, it is Abbot (state's governor) disliked his home city attracting too many homeless people, and decided to override policies Austin's residents voted for. I don't think it is a good solution to base off.
I did something similar back when NaCl wasn't dead, by running the full qemu (bellards other project) in Chrome. Here's a Screencast (8MB) of it booting Kolibri OS. Needless to say it was slow, but that's mainly down to not having done any optimizations.

https://vod-edge.turbo.run/Halite%20Origins.mp4
I don't know if everybody understands the Costco 1.50 hot dog. It's the great dane of hot dogs. It's a meal by itself.
Any project building against HEAD deserves it. Use a tag, in a config file. Not make's fault.
If such a grand unified theory exists (analogously, if there is a “logical” function that generates the sequence rather than (pseudo)-random numbers) then gravity and electromagnetism couldn’t be more similar, right?
Is it really complete if it ends with "-> GPU"?
Why does it seem so difficult?

For example, currently human intelligence accomplishes much more with much less resource usage (many many orders of magnitude) than any AI algorithm we've developed. Someone could look at the trend, and get an idea of the extent of improvement we'd have to reach parity with human intelligence, and see if it seems at all feasible. A simple quantitative analysis of what we know so far.

At any rate, I'm unaware of any sort of significant effort at #1.
I remember sitting in a RadioShack as a kid poking at Xenix on a Model 16 and trying to figure out how to use it. I never made any progress as it took a long time to boot whereas the adjacent Color Computers and most other TRS-80 models booted instantly into BASIC.
There's definitely something unsettling about the establishment departing from the pretty conventional and sensible idea that someone who's recovered from a disease doesn't need to be vaccinated against it.