skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I recently wrote[0] something related about my observations on toolmakers and their craft.

"In life you're a tool maker or a tool user. What we're building at Baqqer[1] is a tool. Here's something I've noticed about tools and the people that make them. There are ultimately two types of tool makers.

The first type of tool maker is an observer and participant of their own craft, and as such can make very insightful decisions on how to devise a tool from the systematic understanding of what explicitly and implicitly goes into the work being shaped by these tools. Typically these tools are utilitarian and without form in excess beyond what is absolutely necessary to accomplish the task. This is the truest form of tool.

The second type of tool maker is an observer, but not a participant in a craft. These tool makers tend to be cloning tools with small changes, or seeing a problem where there might not be one, because they might not truly understand the way makers participate in this task of their craft. This is the weakest form of tool.

To say there is not evidence to support contraries in both statements is false, but I would expect these instances to be outliers. These statements also do not dismiss the contributions made by outsiders of a craft, as there is something to be said about observing outside the traditions of a craft. I would even suspect large leaps of innovation in the craft might be made from the application of knowledge and modes of thinking leveraged from other/disparate pursuits."

[0] https://www.facebook.com/dpgailey/posts/10102604703490186?pn...

[1] https://baqqer.com/
Supportive and great developer environments probably correlates well with companies that pay well and respect(correlated with pay) their developers
Real-time event aggregation at scale using Postgres with Citus
+1, if only for the phrase "Linux conjugate bulldozer".

...which I would ABSOLUTELY build, if there were plans.

OBTW, tangential, but if this kind of thing gets you excited, check out this guy (Doug Jackson, aka "SV Seeker"), building a 70 foot long steel boat in his backyard.

https://www.youtube.com/user/submarineboat/playlists
Ask HN: Are there any high quality non-Apple laptops for development work?
Just because the ancients said something is no reason to take it as gospel.
Yup, one of the things that floored me when I start looking into compact tractors was the concept of heavy machinery that's build to last 30-40 years and tons of abuse.

If you want to know why a compact tractor costs more than a new car that's a large part of the reason. These are things made to be abused day-in and day-out.

We ended up picking up a '81 Ford that has more than 2000 hours and still runs like a champ.
While I think that its Gen-1 form is too expensive to do much to the market, the Surface Studio is as mind blowing as I can remember any PC or Mac being since maybe the first iMac.
Thanks for the responses.
> We have homeopathic "cold pills" available at our local (mainstream) drugstore that visibly reduces a runny nose

It could be something simple like the act of swallowing that briefly clears up the runny nose. Next time you could just try a glass of water and see if that has the same effect.

> I've never _not_ seen these specific pills work in this way on small children.

I think it really could just be the action of swallowing. It could be the placebo effect. Or it could just be the running nose clearing up by itself.

Next time you should try some NyQuil Cold & Flu. It's very safe, and it contains a nasal decongestant (phenylephrine). Homeopathic medicine doesn't contain any medicine, by definition. And even if they did contain some medicine, the active ingredient is supposed to be bad for you! It just makes no sense.

> You just have to try different ones to find what works and what doesn't.

It's good when you find one that works, because then you can use any of them.

> Body chemistry is more complicated than big pharma would have us to believe

Homeopathy chemistry is quite simple, though (H2O).

I'm sorry if that's too harsh.

I should mention that I've actually learned some new things about medicine recently. I always thought that generic drugs were identical to brand-name drugs, and that buying drugs from the original manufacturer was always a waste of money. That belief quickly disappeared after reading this article: http://fortune.com/2013/01/10/are-generics-really-the-same-a...

It's easy to see how a poorly imitated time-release mechanisms can lead to problems when the drug is released too quickly or too slowly. I don't know how something like that slips past the FDA. I also didn't realize that generic companies have to reverse engineer drugs like hackers. I guess I assumed that the whole process would be made open source whenever the patent expires, because hacking together a cheap drug seems a little bit reckless.

(I also just realized that this article could have been commissioned by someone in the pharmaceutical industry, since it's sort of encouraging people to buy more expensive drugs. But I don't think so, it looks like the author has a very good reputation and track record: http://katherineeban.com/about/biography/)
I agree with his point, but I think he mischaracterizes JS fatigue. He's right that it's exhausting trying to keep up with all of it, and that's part of JS fatigue, but the other side is the endless hype machine that's internal to the tech community, where our media is an endless stream of "look at my new framework!" and "you're doing react wrong!" and "why functional is making a comeback!"

We do it to ourselves not just by continually stuffing the buffet with every possible option, but also by making our community dialogue an endless infomercial, which has a big influence on trying to keep up with it all. We have conflicting desires to contribute and to self-promote, and the result is an aggressive bazaar in which you need to consciously filter out 90% of the noise so you don't get overwhelmed.
JS fatigue is not a fake problem, it's real and different from other forms of fatigue.

The metaphor used in the article i.e. 'learning another language every 6 months' is not apt - because those are not 'new languages' and they are not 'new and critical parts of the landscape' for any specific vertical.

If any one of those languages were to have the same degree of evolution as JS ... then 'fatigue' would also be an issue.

JS has a pernicious problem for a few reasons:

1) The language is quirky, fragmented, there are still no 'agreed upon' approaches to do many things even outside the context of libraries. There are really no analogues to 'prototype' based languages, which possibly makes it great for some things, but it's not great for those wanting to use more classical ways of thinking about information organization.

2) Runtimes, particularly browser - are highly fragmented, and there's scant documentation. Safari docs for Mac/iOS are literally empty in some spots.

3) JS doesn't come with a lot of things 'baked in' to the language that most others support, so discovering those 'standard libs' has been a painful process.

4) Due to the limitations of the browser, we see a lot of churn in frameworks.

Though there is some advantage to 'community participation' - the pernicious problem is most of the churn is not fully forward. It's 3 steps forward, 2 steps back, and a step sideways.

There's a lot of time and investment in learning something new that won't exist in the future - that's costly.

Learning Lambda's for Java 8 is probably worth investing in for Java programmers ... because Java 9 will surely use them as well.

Taken as a whole - there is an enormous amount of inherent 'reducible complexity' in the JS ecosystem, which any JS developer intuitively senses.

If someone were to have made up their mind about JS right from the start, and had come up with some good standard libs ... and the evolution of the language were to have been more 'version' and less 'pick and chose' (Es6 means something different in each environment) ... then the complaint would be valid.

It is what it is ... but JS fatigue is a real thing.
Like I said, I don't think Fallout 2 had great design in general. Even still, the Temple of Trials only takes about 7-8 minutes and isn't that difficult. It was hardly the worst part of the game (for me at least).

Fallout 1 only had the rat cave in the beginning, though, and that only took a minute.
When approached to work for my current company I met with my future manager and asked:

Will I be able to have a more senior developer act as a mentor?

Will I have direct access to more experienced devs on my team?

What opportunites will there be to try something new and get it reviewed?

Are there any tech stack absolutes I will never be able to stray from?

The answers I received were great and ended up being accurate.

It was the first time I had ever decided to choose a company based primarily on the potential for growth and not money/perks/etc.

Smartest decision ever.
I remember Dell laptops also had speakers permanently damaged, they blamed VLC software for that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7205759
> Nobody is ever going to know everything there is to know about modern web architecture

I think this is the root of the sentiment that is expressed as "JS fatigue" and bullet train rides etc.

I'm torn though. On one hand, this is equivalent to saying: Nobody is ever going to know everything about an operating system and how a machine performs the operations we expression a high level language like, you know, C!

The thing is, we still were able to teach the abstraction of the single-machine computation model that C is abstracting in a single semester to the point of making new coders _operational_.

But I can't imagine trying to construct a course to teach "modern web architecture" in a single semester.

On the flip side, a lone developer who can chose their battles wisely has more leverage to produce something of value today than was ever freaking possible, ever!

I'm betting on the the new "OS" abstraction as cloud-native services (DB as a service, event streams as a service, mobile syncing as a service, heck, everything but your core logic as a service).

But by it's nature this world is redundant, competitive, multi-vendor, fractal-specialized and I only see that trend increasing.

So yes, one person will never know everything there is to know, the new skill will not be learning every framework, platform or service, but being able to grok the core nature and characteristics of your problem so you can apply the closest matching tool with the maximum leverage.

Essentially, the new skill will be to optimize for laziness :)
Javascript in particular? Yes, it's less likely to force a jump. It has to stay compatible with the web as it exists today and has existed for the last 20 years. Idiomatic JS will certainly change, but that doesn't force old code to change.

Ruby and Go live on the server side, so do not have nearly as harsh a backwards compatibility constraint.

Come to think of it, I wonder if JS's backcompat story is precisely what has resulted in the intense rate of churn in the libraries and frameworks written in it. Maybe if the language forced periodic change, then that would both reduce the frameworks' evolutionary pressure to change, and increase frameworks' evolutionary pressure to paper over JS's changes. As it is now, the architecture seems to be that you have an unchanging language layer so you put all of the change into the next layer up. (Well, that and the client-side delivery and execution means that framework updates are far far easier than with any server-side language/framework.)
See, I'm the opposite. I always wanted the headphone jack on the bottom because that's where it needs to be for the phone to go properly in my pocket.
> It’s like walking into a restaurant and finding out that they have all your favorite dishes and every one of them is free and complaining about how long it’s going to take you to read over the menu and make up your mind about it.

I suppose it's a matter of perspective. For me, it's more like walking into used car lot. Most of the cars have lost (or voided) their warranties. Some are certified pre-owned. That one in the corner looks nice, but I don't know how to drive stick, and am not really interested in learning. At least it's not a custom gear box, like this other one.

I can look at the new car lot across the street, but I'm not sure I want to be the first to use one of those self-driving electric smart cars. It's neat, but I'd rather stick to proven standards, and gas stations are more common than charge stations, anyway.

And I could probably get to where I'm going with just a bicycle.
Yup. Whatever replaces twitter will be an open-source decentralized system that ends at the API layer with multiple competing client implementations. So, not Gab.

But I do like to see a bit of momentum in the tech world against neoliberalism, I think it's healthy for everyone. The "censor all competing ideologies" cultural authoritarian nonsense has gotten out of hand.
Exactly. And there are lots of things that are more important than learning how to code at ages 6, and before (and, heck, after). How about exposure to different (human) languages? Appreciating and creating art. The scientific process, and evaluating hypotheses. Reading. Cooking. Fire safety. So many things!

I've used Scratch, through volunteering in the engineering department at my local science museum. It's okay, although I'm not convinced it will turn 6 year olds into brilliant programmers later in life, any more than "creating things" in any other context would.

I don't know. I'm divided. Sentiments like "I'm teaching my <very young child> to code and you should too" leave a bad taste in my mouth, though.
Keep in mind this is built in Unity. It's difficult to make even trivial native apps in Unity in less than 25 megs.
You can always compare a skateboard to a car if you want to make that kind of point, I guess.
I'm a prototyper, so people often come to me first to vet new ideas. Often times this means implementing a feature on an existing product platform. When I started doing this 5 years ago, I was working with a new language every month. It was ruby one day, C# the next, and I'd go to sleep every night praying next week wouldn't be PHP.

These days everyone is using javascript. In the last year I've done countless javascript projects and one project in java. I can't tell you how refreshing it is to not have to brush up on syntax and install a suite of tools every time I want to work on a new product. Nowadays it's just clone the repo, do a npm install, and you're up and running for the most part. It's lovely.
Were JS and browsers to have been designed 'properly' (or better) with hindsight, 'jQuery' would have never needed to come into existence.

JS evolution is perniciously different than the evolution of most other languages.
A good fraction of these in service or development missiles still use them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramjet#Missiles_using_ramjets

And the no longer in service Sea Dart was really put to the test in the Falkland Islands war, preformed pretty well and made a material difference. And the somewhat related earlier RIM-8 Talos got 4 MIGs in 3 firings, including "the first downing of a hostile aircraft by a missile fired from a ship" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-8_Talos).
I was imagining this was going to be about Leonhard Euler.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(mathematical_constant)
Our most detailed view of Earth across space and time
Ansible: human readable Git diff for vault encrypted files
Do you have any links to resources or know what name(s) people use when talking about this strategy? I'd be interested to know which URL Debian attempts to fetch, but I'm not sure how I'd even begin to search for the answer.
Yeah, there were some pretty bad ones in 90s. If they were not as contentious, it's only because people's expectations for Apple were far lower back then.

Consider, for example, the original Power Mac G4 release. There were three levels available: 400MHz, 450MHz, and 500MHz. Turns out Apple had overreached with the 500MHz speed, so they had to roll it back to 350/400/450. Quite an embarrassment at a time when Apple was struggling to convince people that their PowerPC chips outperformed Intel and were therefore worth a bunch of extra money.

The new MacBook Pro is a pretty decent machine. It has some typical first-generation hardware problems, and the design certainly doesn't make everybody happy, but it's not bad. And Apple has released outright bad machines in the past.
I was able to put YouTube URLs into VLC to achieve this until recently, for the last few months that feature has developed a bug in 3.0.
> It is now unfortunately defunct or at least the website says they're on hold indefinitely.

> It turns out their website is now live (it wasn't the previous time I checked) and appears open for business.

So in the 1 hour between your first and second comments, they brought the site back online and started taking orders? You understand how that might be hard for people to believe right?
Querying Data in Amazon S3 Directly with User-Space Page Fault Handling
Texas Death Case Tests Standards for Defining Intellectual Disability
BreakSafe Magnetic USB-C Power Cable
System76 makes some pretty sweet Linux compatible dev laptops (movable workstations) : https://system76.com/laptops
Yes, formal with the paperwork and everything.

It wasn't my manager who "brought HR in", though. Performance evaluation at my company isn't just the manager's discretion, and low performance will eventually get you a PIP.
Bearing in mind that they have been supposedly working on it for almost 2 years.

I know there is a perfect misalignement of stars between Apple release plan and Intel roadmap. But that is still scary for the future of the Mac line. It looks like half-assed effort to give a last kick in the laptop area before slowing things down like with the Mac Pro.

2016 is really not living up to its expectations.
We use Grafana for our own internal usage (albeit we do have customer viewable analytics but it is proprietary hardcoded panes).

I suppose you are confused because of my mentioning building product based on shindig. That was a previous employment many moons ago. I now am a many hat wearing owner of a SaaS.

While I'm speaking of Grafana I find Kibana for more useful probably because we have a lower level of traffic than big boys but still produce an atrocious amount of logging. Logs are damn useful. In some ways metrics are actually a subset of event aggregation (ie logs) so I think Kibana is more useful at first.
HiFive1: Open-Source, Arduino-Compatible RISC-V Dev Kit
Age of Decadence and UnderRail are two modern games that were pretty heavily influenced by Fallout. AoD in particular has a lot of content that you won't see in a single playthrough.
The amount of daily work this strategy requires to be useful makes it untenable.

I don't want to update my one blog weekly and here you're saying that to be secure you need to maintain 12.
Yes, very much so. I work for a company making hardware products, and I can't tell you how many hardware screw-ups I've had to work around in software. Hardware is hard to fix: boards are expensive to respin and the cycle time is long. Software is just a recompile.
Agreed, and I appreciate the comment. I've developed the same appreciation for anarchism.

But the original comment I responded to seemed to imply that the libertarian theory would allow this "free market" behavior, which is not the way libertarians see it.
4) economies of scale

5) lower costs of living relative to the west

6) less barriers to entry and less middlemen sucking out money
You get the users you're willing to tolerate. If you advertise your site as an uncensored paradise, don't be surprised when it becomes overrun with assholes. Look no farther than Voat to see how poorly this will go.

That said, some of the fixes they are implementing would be nice to see in mainstream networks. More transparency about how the products and algorithms work would be wonderful, especially with regards to FB's News Feed and Twitter's Trending.
I agree with you. IMHO I see it as good thing. Maybe 6 projects bring so little innovation comparing to project they're trying to replace. But then somebody will take the good parts of all those projects and create something that is significantly better. Innovation does not grow on trees, there is slow and bumpy road to it. :-)
Because is largely exaggerated. All killing is immoral and I don't like utilitarian arguments myself but those dictatorships killed a fraction of the people than most think. Example, in Argentina where I was born, for decades it was believed that there where 30000 missing, but now the official number turns out to be a bit less 7000. Even people coming from the left-wing that, in an exemplary way did a self revision and lived their mature days trying to recover intellectual honesty have recognised that the 30K was a fabrication to amplify marxist propaganda https://vimeo.com/95210051
If you have a fusion power plant, you also have plenty of spent fuel to use as reaction mass.
Market Where You Have No Competition
I mostly agree on this, but I can also see how they got to a design that has this flaw. You can do better (more transparent, more adaptive, etc.) limiting in DSP than with a simple hardware circuit. Doing the limiting in the driver also saves you hardware components and PCB layout space.

It's a slippery slope of optimization that only works when you control the OS (or drivers at least) and the hardware together, but one slip-up can be catastrophic.
Goodness-of-fit tests: A cautionary tale for large and small samples
> I'm always curious when I see these websites if these tools are created by well-intentioned people that don't know the industry, or actual workers in that industry.

For what it is worth, as a farmer myself, I'm under the impression that a lot of these projects were created for someone's garden/backyard project, not a farm. That doesn't diminish their utility in that application, but the usefulness may not translate to farm-scale.

But it's always fun to see what other people are doing, even if it isn't necessarily useful on my own farm. I wish discovery was a little better though. The site makes it difficult to segment the tools that are designed for the garden and those that would fit in on a larger farm.
> The "pro" market is not big, its probably not growing

Not sure I agree with that, when we're teaching everybody and their grandparents how to program, in order to compete in the "new economy."

Doubly-so for developing countries.

I would hope that the proportion of developers in the world should be increasing.
That was three year old post. What is the status now? I know VLC allows playing 400% of original volume, and their cheap speakers cannot handle it.

But Macbook Pro is an premium laptop. It should not be happening.
> At least with JS, if it leaks or has security breach, the browser's developer can fix it

In modern OSes, you could slap a sandbox or container-ish construction around Flash. If it had a bug, it would be contained.

In principle, a minimal browser that defers to isolated plugins would be the more secure design. In practice, the plugins were buggy and insecure of course, but this was accidental.

If Flash were open source, and/or had just as much effort put into it as current browsers, it would be at least as secure.

The only reason the monolithic kitchen sink that a modern browser is is secure (and fast) is that so many brilliant people have been putting so much hard work into it (and Google and Apple so much money).
Visual Dialog
Their methodology (not having actual access to PINs and trying to infer from numbers in passwords) may be flawed.

I work for a company that, a long time ago, used 4-digit PINs for account security. Our historical data (covering millions of accounts) shows that, overwhelmingly, the least-common PINs are those that start with the digit "0", which makes sense to me as a counter-intuitive PIN selection.

Their comments about the most-common PINs do seem generally accurate, based on my data.