skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Read the history of JavaScript sometime. It's not his fault that the language has so many flaws. He had 10 days to create it [0]! If he'd been given a normal budget and schedule and free license to design the language, we might've​ had something more like Scheme [1].

[0] https://www.w3.org/community/webed/wiki/A_Short_History_of_J...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript
I can't speak across the board, but I'm a software engineer for a small-medium tech company (~100 employees/~15 devs). We don't have any kind of bonuses for engineers here, typically just 3-5% raises every 6-12 months. I do know of people working for some of the big name tech companies who receive annual bonuses that are quite large. But it doesn't feel like something all that standard for the majority of tech companies.
His hazing and firing from Mozilla really sounded like a concession favoring discrimination.
Colorido.JS
Not all authenticated messages need to be encrypted, or encrypted using the same key, etc.

For AWS, you authenticate calls to the API by authenticating each message with an HMAC. The call is encrypted over TLS, but TLS is only used to authenticate Amazon to the client, it's not used to authenticate the client to Amazon. There are some use cases where you wouldn't be able to just use client-side certificates anyway--for example, I can create a signature for a single S3 upload to a specific URI with an expiration date, and then send the signature to you, and then you can upload a file directly to my S3 account before the signature expires. (I suspect a big reason client-side certificates aren't used for AWS is because nobody knows how to use them, but they're also less flexible.)

Technically you could also do this using an authentication-only variant of authenticated ciphers, like GMAC, but at that point it would still be classified as a MAC.
Rail is a special case because land issues and near zero indigenous maglev tech in the US. Think roads, airports, train stations, bridges, dams, etc. And, as importantly, the US doesn't export subsidize infrastructure companies and projects as does France or Japan. The exception is energy infrastructure.
I learned to program with Ruby on Rails, which is a probably a terrible way to learn how to program, but I think there is a lot of value to having a working, useful application up and running in a few minutes and then tweaking it to see how it changes.

I'd never have made it through any of the bottom up approaches, because I'd have gotten frustrated with how much there was to learn before I could do anything useful.
>campaign finance reform, perhaps?

Abso-fucking-lutely. I think in order to run at any levels of office, you should be using public money. For simplification, let's say if one wants to run for president, they can only use whatever is in the FEC public coffers. In return, we levy a federal FEC tax to boost it way higher than its current rates. We replicate a similar tax at state and local levels. Completely remove private donations and PACs and all that shit from the lawbooks. A fuckload of people want to run for president? Well, you better get creative with your tiny slice of the pie. Show us how fiscally responsible you really are.

People would scream and holler about it not being American, but it's one of the only ways, I think, to really take a large stab at our chronic corruption.
They got most of the physics right AFAIR, and that was portrayed in a very visually beautiful way. They screwed up stage setup though (like positions of the telescope, ISS and Chinese space station relative to one another) - which is a departure from realism, but not from physics per se.
McDonald's delivery to be available in 3,500 restaurants by the end of June
Great article. I'd like to add that while `PUT` can be used for updating data, you should only ever use this if you are updating the entire object. It's more "replacing" the object with new values than updating it - i.e. what you `PUT` to the endpoint is the new object. Therefore, if you don't provide the entire object in the request, you can lose data.

In most cases, even when updating entire objects, I prefer `PATCH` because of this - by design, it only overwrites what you specify.
I'm always interested to know how long these infrastructure changes took from project initiation to launch, and whether it was a dedicated project team or something completed alongside BAU tasks.

These details are almost never included in these write-ups. Anyone have any guesses?
9 Μεγάλα Google Updates Και Πως Να Γλιτώσετε – WEB DESIGN|SEO|PARAMARKETING.GR
1. This is called "shared hosting". I sympathize with that desire. k8s is a way to roll your own shared host. Disinterested application developers who resent having to look at a command line do really like k8s because they treat it like a shared host platform, but they fail to appreciate the middle layer of complication that it entails, or the stickier elements of its architecture. A lot of ignorant app developers don't realize that you don't really get most of k8s's promises unless your application is already specifically designed to handle a transient, disappear-at-a-moment's-notice lifecycle, and most existing software is not built around these assumptions. It can't all be shoehorned in at the infrastructure level. Database servers are a fine example of an application architecture that is antithetical to this.

2. This is called "static linking". I also sympathize with static linking, but again this comes with implications that are not well understood by many of its advocates. In 4 years, I expect that some fad will emerge to repopularize dynamic linking under some new name, like "securable containerized orchestrated hypothalmized applicationators". Everyone will say "Dude, I can't imagine nobody using securable containerized orchestrated hypothamlmized applicatorness in 4 years". Rinse and repeat.

3. Yes, Docker sucks. We agree.

4. Sure, but you don't need to roll your own. Much of trendy devops is a reinvention of old things that we've already had and tried over the last several decades. For the most part, these come with the same old problems, and there are reasons they fell out of favor.

There are definitely times when the tradeoffs will fall such that Kubernetes makes sense. Those times are much rarer than most people who are running k8s want to admit. That's because they're subconsciously running k8s as a status symbol, and lying to themselves about its necessity and value in their use case.

I'm not saying the way we were doing things before k8s came around was exactly right. For example, going back to shared hosting is probably not a bad idea for the vast majority of things, and stuff like logging into your FTP server and copying your files have been gussied up as "cloud object storage" (and costs a lot more money now). So it's really just a general oscillation of trends, I guess.
Maybe not, but better battery life and eventually cheaper hardware on mobile and low power devices, expanding the range of usefulness in the developing world especially, is no small thing.
Not a libertarian, but Japan apparently has 16 private railway companies, most of which are profitable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Japan#Major_...
I wouldn't go so far as to call it benevolent. Just because it's not Idi Amin or Pol Pot doesn't mean it's benevolent. In fact, there is a valid question as to whether any regime, anywhere is benevolent[1].

But rather than getting bogged down in quantifying the exact degree of its benevolence, it's key not to let your larger and more important point get lost alongside that red herring, and it's one that gets little press here: China and SE Asia have shown, over a period of decades, that heavy-handed state-guided development alongside market forces is a credible third alternative to the One True neoliberal agenda the West has pushed since the 1980s.

Japan and South Korea also "grew up" in a heavily state-sponsored manner and with closed private economies. Despite its visible lack of conformity to official American prescriptions about how to do things, the US tolerated it during the Cold War as part of the general bargain with those countries, in which they were allowed to develop as they saw fit and to have unrestricted and preferential access to America's bottomless consumer market. In return, they paid in unwavering anticommunist allegiance.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005GPSLHI/
Purchasing shares is much more than betting on a company. It's giving them money for a percent ownership of the company. Share ownership gives you voting rights on the company direction, a claim to the company's assets and profits, the potential for dividends payments, the right to sue directors for acting against the interest of the company, the right to recover losses from misleading statements and actions by corporate directors. These coins entitle you to nothing, and allow these companies to sidestep regulations that protect investors from scams. All these things were put in place because your average person doesn't know what they're doing, and they think stock ownership is just gambling. In fact, for many investors with little to no cash to invest, it is gambling. Can you afford a lawsuit to recover your $35,000, should your investment disappear into the ether because of malicious executives running a scam? Probably not. There is a very good reason why millionaires and high income individuals can become registered investors and can be solicited for funds by risky startups and nanocaps. The SEC doesn't want people who can't afford to recover from a scam to be solicited for investments. That's why publicly traded companies must file regular financial statements while non-listed companies must have investors go to them of their own free will.
> Free time has filled up. I still get more stuff done, but personal development still requires proper scheduling and planning. The allure of "I'll have time for everything" has gone.

Yes: it's not the working for 8 hours, but rather the limited time left after the 8 hours is over. There is so much more in my life than what others will pay me to do, and I'd have so much more energy for work if I was given more of my time back to pursue it...
Trolled in what sense? Thanks for the feedback : )
Don't use deep learning when your data isn't that big
$35M in 30 Seconds: Token Sale for Internet Browser Brave Sells Out
Marriage, divorce, your first child, death of a family member, professional success, getting fired, etc., etc. Life is quite a ride.
Twitter is changing
I can confirm that the code size of BoringSSL is something that we worry about for mobile apps. A 50KB increase (which wouldn't be much for an optimised SHA-3) would raise questions.

I admit that when I see the 100MB+ size of apps that I have to download, I do wonder why. But I assume that it would be even worse were people not worrying about this stuff.
Haha right
When Mt. Fox failed, nobody called for more regulation of bitcoin exchanges.

I think many people have decided that regulation just ends up benefitting the established players at this point.
> BLAKE2 was a SHA-3 finalist

I think you mean BLAKE. BLAKE2 was not part of the SHA3 competition.
FireFox vs. Chrome Privacy?
Which browser should we use to protect our privacy and freedom as FireFox and Chrome both saves our browsing data/bookmarks and passwords in their cloud.
I like the Ideas.

I believe that it can exist in a world dominated by entirely different architectures when I see it build into something.

Maybe with the decline of ever smaller processes and less new fabs being build the current ones become cheap enough to make wildly alternative chip designs viable.
We'll see.
I'm pretty sure we're so far invested in being crappy at government that we can't feasibly turn back without inflicting a lot of pain.

Admittedly anecdotal, but after having lived near two major DOE national laboratories (where >40% of my neighbors worked at the lab), I wouldn't be surprised if 60-80% of the workers at these labs could be eliminated under a combination of audit-based reform, regulatory reform, and management changes. Without any change in output or results. I've listened to descriptions of what people do at these labs, and it blows me away how low productivity they are compared to the private sector. I've known people who work entire workweeks that could be consolidated into 3-5 hours of work, and they're willing to admit it. In fact, those that would try to change from within have told me they would feel vulnerable to retaliation if they went through with it.

And that's before we get into the shitshow that is federal contract work. We've turned federal contract work into a goldmine for whoever has enough lawyers to win a bid. And we don't even know how many people are employed doing that contract work [0]!

At this point, meaningful reform means taking 10's of millions of people and forcing productivity on them to the point where most of them are unnecessary. We could probably double the unemployment rate with the right reforms. That's why it won't happen.

[0] http://www.govexec.com/contracting/2015/03/even-cbo-stumped-...
Ask HN: Feature/product to group sentences/notes/ideas by similarity?
I'd like to feed in a long list of ideas and notes separated by newlines, and have the output be these ideas and notes grouped by computer-perceived categories/similarity.
Wow, that is amazing. As much as I do hate Flash, it certainly made it easy for people to make interactive craziness on the web.
I use Brave on Android almost exclusively. Its built on Chromium with built in ad blocking.
Yeah but the bureaucracy makes a lot of money for itself and grows ever larger. Basically you want to treat the people executing the plan as smart adaptable agents rather than dumb robots.
Yes, we need technology that increases CPU clock speed above the current plateau.
I said "You haven't replied to the majority of what I wrote." You still haven't, but instead are nitpicking on whether LEDs affect the subjective beauty of Xmas lights (which I disagree with but whatever.) This further shows your argumentation in this thread is baseless and going nowhere.

"It's not - comparing market cap (a total value measure) to GDP (a per-year measure) is dishonest"

Yes it is. It says "it would have probably directly or indirectly increased the world's GDP by at least 0.74%" This is a percentage that relatively compares Bitcoin's production (0.74%) to the world production (100%). Bitcoin's market cap is mentioned in passing, but not part of the core argument.

RTGS: of course the 2 banks part of a transaction can agree to any transaction. What I meant is the central bank or other authority (not part of the initial transaction) can reverse it at will. Most RTGS systems are operated by central banks. If a fraudulent transfer from bank A to B is made, then of course the central bank would step in and reverse it. As I said, again, irreversible digital transactions outside of cryptocurrencies don't exist.
Related to what we might label "modern" infrastructure, I just got back from a trip visiting the outskirts of Illinois.

The towns there are small, but full of people hungry for opportunities and good work.

Yet everywhere you go there is no work to be done. Businesses—even big box stores like Walmart or Target—are closed down. Homes lay vacant despite their reasonably cheap (at least for someone living in Silicon Valley) $20,000 price tag. Even churches in the area have to close their doors but leave their steeples standing, unable to draw in an audience or—and most importantly—any money to maintain things.

This isn't Detroit I'm talking about, it's a fairly typical suburb of a larger metropolitan area in the midwest.

The answer for many of these people has largely and loudly been: "Bring back jobs from overseas! Stop outsourcing work to China!"

But of course that's not a valid answer, since the problem is that the jobs these towns once knew now belong to machines which can work tens of times harder and longer at a fraction of the cost of their former human counterparts. Yes, some of the work has gone overseas, but much of it has just become "modernized" by technology.

And here's the thing: the infrastructure for things as simple as Internet access in these parts of the US just isn't there.

So nobody goes to school to learn programming or design or how to be a modern entrepreneur because they (the individuals and schools) just don't have any connection to those parts of the landscape. And when they do, their model is wildly out of date.

One of the Universities I visited and, later, a high school had each just opened a computer lab for students in which the goal wasn't to help students learn programming, or design, or anything like that, but merely how to type.

This of course added on top of the decrepit roads, buildings, etc. The state is wildly out of money because it can't put people to work, and the people can't work because the infrastructure just isn't there. It's depressing to see, really. I want to know how we can improve this, and what someone living on the other side of the country might do to help.
Using sed to make indexes for books
Even a country that has completed their industrialization such as the US stands to gain massive ROI from infrastructure projects.

Driving through the Holland Tunnel into or out of NYC during rush hour its not hard to quantify the cost to the economy in terms of lost productivity.
But in a way that's worse, because the engaging content and discussion on HN makes it that much harder to put the phone down and get back to work.

At least with Facebook I know there's almost nothing of value and with the news it's almost always bad, so I'm otherwise not missing much.
I think the notion of accredited investor is very discriminatory to small investors. It's basically says - if you already wealthy then you have an access to attractive investment opportunities with huge upside (and of course, huge risk), if you are just a middle class man then stay where you are (since your investment options with huge upside are severely limited and you don't have enough capital to make sense from investing in index).

The better version of requirements for accredited investors would be some sort of exam (hard enough to make sure you have solid knowledge about financial markets, financial instruments and risk/return relationship).
Most 9 to 5 programmers can stick with the mainstream languages then. I'll be doubling my productivity by learning idioms that don't come in the Java/C# book.

Productivity isn't always measured by direct output. If I write something with 20% overhead that is 3x more robust, then it's worth it. This is what I see F#/Clojure/Haskell providing.
When they built the Hover Dam people lived in tents. In the desert. Without air conditioning. And, there was during the height of construction, (from memory so forgive inexactness) one day off a year. Christmas Day. And that was optional.

And people were happy to be working because they were in many cases about half starved. So they put up with it.

Contrast that with now. Medium articles about toxic passive aggressive workplaces from people making $120K/year and who spend a lot of that screwing around and in meetings. In air conditioned offices. And that's just the start!

Not suggesting we return to the bad old days, but that is one of the major differences. Nicotine is an extremely minor one.
Why do you feel the need to point this out, when he mentions mostly privatized and socialized in the same sentence? You may as well have said that it IS NOT a valid argument for mostly privatized medicine.
> Logo is pretty close to Lisp in its functionality.

Is it? Quote from the Logo Manual, 1974:

All complete LOGO statements are imperatives, so that an operation cannot stand by itself. If you type SUM 17 26, Logo responds with the error message YOU DON'T SAY WHAT TO DO WITH 43. In contrast PRINT SUM 17 26 is a complete statement. The computer will print 43.
Americans generally have an aversion to public transit for anything beyond a air travel. Just look at the current mess NJ Transit & Amtrak find themselves in with regards to the Hudson River crossing -- some century-old tunnels and an almost-as-old drawbridge that are beyond capacity. Replacements had been funded and ground had been broken, but that money was then diverted for surface roads and highways.
I (actually not only me but also a few other guys) wrote an open source GUI dictionary for Linux [1] (it uses Qt selection features that don't work the same way on other platforms, so although it compiles on, say, Mac, it doesn't fully work). It was started with Qt4 10 years ago, then it was ported to Qt5. So I think I can share my perception of Qt.

The framework is very solid, the components are easy to combine and in general, once you get used to it, it becomes quite easy to work with them. The resulting app is very performant and has low memory consumption in comparison to JS-based apps. Also, adding asynchronicity is actually not hard, at least for things like HTTP requests, as you can use Qt signal/slot system to receive events asynchronously so that in simple cases it is not necessary to mess up with threads.

However, the developer productivity is, in my perception, is a somewhat less than with modern JS frameworks. Not 10x less, but a bit less. I think one of the issues is C++ itself: after changes in the code, it is necessary to not only rebuild but rerun the app, and in general writing C++ code is something that requires some attention as otherwise, it is possible to have SEGFAULT somewhere in your app and then spend time looking for the place in your new code that causes this SEGFAULT.

Note that I'm talking here only about classical QtWidget/C++ apps, not QtQuick ones. I think productivity with the second ones should be better. However, one might argue that if you started to write your code in Javascript, it's better to do it in a way that allows you to have the same code running natively in browser (QtQuick experimentally runs in it, but it is experimental and not mainstream), so that you can share components and code for example between your site and your desktop app.

[1] http://qstardict.ylsoftware.com
So much money wasted on lawsuits and acquiring companies from former employees. The same tech should not have to cost this much to develop and be made available to people. The consumers will pay for all this. The inefficiencies of capitalism.
Technology getting cheaper allows to apply this technology to problems where it was not economically sustainable previously.

IMO it's a good thing.
I tried the top-down method but I figured out that I was a type of person who should learn the basics first and then develop knowledge from that.

I think that the Bottom-up method is better overall.
I have a curious thing: When I can't concentrate distractions sometimes help me.

For example I watch twitch (I find it kinda booring, which is good) when I can't concentrate on work. It helps me getting started, stick to the more booring repetetive work and when a chellange arises, I just loose track of the twitch stream completely and focus on work.

Now here my theory: I can't focus if something is too boring (e.g. waiting for compile times or doing something repetetive). I need to stimulate my brain enough not to drift off, but light enough so I can still focus on demand.

This theory goes will together with my habit to listen to podcasts at 2x speed. Lower and my mind wanders off and I miss whole passages and have to skip back.

It even kinda forms a hierarchy:

- reading difficult texts: absolute silence

- writing: music only

- programing: twitch

Interruptions from outside though are always horrible. My phone is usually completely silent (not even vibrations) and I hate people for calling when they could have used async communication.
Tackling Architectural Debt: How We Replaced a Production Elasticsearch Cluster
Yep, the same commands should still work. There's some additional commands now for CPU/memory profiles. But that's the biggest difference - hopefully.