skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It may seem quaint now, but Apple Pascal was a serious tool. I took AP Computer Science in 1985 and the language taught was UCSD Pascal on the Apple ][+. (In the 80's, C on an Apple ][ was impossible. The only C compiler you could get was for a card that went in the expansion slot that included a Z80 processor.)

When I went to college in 1986, Pascal was the primary language used in all entry-level courses at Virginia Tech. (Turbo Pascal on an IBM PC -- $5 at the student stores, if you brought your own floppy. I'm the weirdo who brought a Mac Plus to school and used Lightspeed/Think Pascal.)

All of the classic Mac APIs used pascal calling conventions. Pascal continued to be the language used for serious Mac development for a long time.

I can't find any references via Google, but Apple had an internal language called "Classcal" which I was told was "pascal with classes". Eventually Think Pascal adopted this object-oriented Pascal syntax.

Just today I was thinking about how great it was coding in Lightspeed Pascal, when I was trying to get VS Code to display ligatures. Lightspeed Pascal parsed the AST and auto-formatted all your code for you. Tabs became tab stops, like a word processor. I still miss that; hard to believe today we're still fighting about tabs v. spaces.
I have a hunch that you've never worked at a growing mid-sized or large company that is clinging to its startup roots and is averse to any sort of process at all.

Being unwilling to adopt a necessary amount of structure and process is just as much of a hindrance once you hit a certain size.

That may be a newer or less common problem, but it's a very real one.
I have no idea why this is even an argument. T-mobiles coverage outside of metropolitan areas is worse than Verizon and AT&T. I'm a big fan on T-mobile but I rarely travel outside of metro areas except by plane. If I did have to drive a lot in rural areas, I would definitely be on Verizon.
Risk is the enemy of establishment and profit. You _will not_ convince a powerful train to change direction simply because there's no tracks ahead.
Later on in the story it's become apparent that the line that the CEO is touting is the exact same one that the author told him 20 years ago, so I'd say that part is pretty relevant :)
Briar is also e2e and open source. It also has a ton of mesh networking features that Tox doesn't have.
I'd like to remind people that large companies are the only ones capable of hiring junior engineers who might not be at full productivity at day 0. This is especially true of the C++ ecosystem.
But sadly it also means redundancy with every message sent, which must carrying this self-description.
In a way I agree: machine learning should not (try to) replace human art.

However, I think it has its place if it's part of the artistic process. Many artists put the emphasis not on the end product, but on the process itself. We can perfectly imagine an artist creating an entire collection using AI, find something wicked in it and expose it as a criticism of our times. (sounds hipster yeah… I'm not an artist.)
Individuals have private knowledge about their local environment that can inform purchases of these micro shares. Combined with automated analysis tools, it can allow quick effective decision-making on small purchases to build one's personal portfolio.
There is a fairly big, incrementally growing memory leak in firefox that has been fixed in recent nightlies and uplifted to beta 5 days ago. So it'll probably be in the next beta build.

https://bugzil.la/1377738
I really enjoyed Laracon (US: http://laracon.us/ EU: https://laracon.eu/2017/ )

Even as someone who had never written a line of Laravel in my life when my company sent me, I was welcomed and found that I could understand many of the talks. Some, of course, sent over my head, but there were others there who really got alot of of those as well.
I wonder what percentage of that is actually poorly written scrapers/spiders.
New report: Massive collusion amongst German automakers
>What is the use case here?

Clicking through on the link that says "more discussion here" [1] the OP does at least explain the original problem with Excel that he was trying to address:

>Mesh was started because I couldn't find a way in Excel to output the results of a formula across an arbitrary number of cells. ...

This is definitely on the right lines.

But it's a very difficult problem, both from a UI design point of view and actually producing a performant implementation in Javascript.

[1] http://chrispsn.com/mesh-preview.html
you did not mention something in this article. check again and re-post.
That really makes me feel old - I used to work for another gaming company at that time that was pals with Rocket Science. It was not exactly a model of how to run a business - and where I worked was hardly GE. :)

From dubious acorns doth startup management gurus grow.
Yes! I did this today =) it's a lot easier for me to switch tasks if I work my side project first thing in the morning, but it takes quite a bit of effort to get going for me as I'm not a morning person.
Square was never located in Palo Alto (although there is/was a small South Bay office where people could work one day a week) and is not, as far as I know, moving to the East Bay.
This attitude of "you really have to want to work here or you ought to leave" justifies a lot of insanity. I've heard it from companies who make potential employees jump through ridiculous hoops to even get a chance at a job. Here's reality for people who suffer from this delusion: most people don't give a fuck and are just looking for a job. They're applying to dozens or hundreds of jobs (yes, even in software), and expecting them to know everything there is to know about your company just to apply (like providing a detailed cover letter) is downright insane. This is how companies with such an attitude problem attract "yes-people," suckups and other undesirables and miss out on real talent that isn't going to stand on its head just to get a chance at an interview. Likewise, as the article points out, this toxic attitude is just as bad at retaining employees as it is at getting them in the first place. What I'd like to see is the second part of this story. How these people then hired another 50 software engineers with actual talent in the bay area. Most companies I speak to have trouble finding one or two, let alone 50. And all because of an incredibly naive and stupid attitude of the company's execs. This is indeed a case where the founders should have been replaced with proper executives, though I'm not sure 'proper' executives would have made a better decision.

As an aside, one shortcut to weeding out shitty companies is to simply filter out companies that say shit like, "we are on a mission to change the world." That's a guaranteed bad time.
"Emphasize that the most important part of software development is moving fast."

No, that is not the case most times. The most important part of software development is, as with any other part of the company, to maximize the value of the company. That may be speed, but if you have 1m users the most important thing may be to preserve trust, to acquire new customers, to automate existing infrastructure, etc. etc. Speed of software development is not a goal in many environments. Thoughtful execution may be hindered by a cowboy attitude in development. I'm not saying that speed in development is not sometimes the goal (maybe in startups within an enterprise trying to test an idea), but often it's not the most important thing.
Is Clascal the language you're thinking of?:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clascal
See my other comment[1] in this thread, and the one by sheeshkebab[2].

There are no shortage of instances where Excel plays a depressingly crucial role in critical LOB operations (including shops that you'd expect to know better). Essentially what happens is places like big manufacturing corps pour all their engineering budget into staffing themselves with folks who have domain-specific knowledge, but no idea how to build something resembling sane IT infrastructure, let alone focus on rolling out anything that could scale. So they all fall back to what they know from school, which are terrible (terrible!) hand-crafted spreadsheets that get passed around through email or thrown on a network store that everyone gets write access to. As in: this is literally how things run at the fab that produced the chips in your phone or the silicon in your big name desktop GPU.

Occasionally, someone comes along who knows how to do pivot tables or use VBA to create basic macros and is revered as a wizard. Even in the best cases they end up being unmaintainable messes.

Heck, a quick and dirty TiddlyWiki-like tool that just lets average people make basic tables would go far in dislodging Excel from places where it's burrowed down and is screaming "wrong tool for the job"[3].

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14824563

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14824946

3. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2012/01/06/how-trello-is-diff...
Yes this too. Someone I know was interviewing at google (his first choice, he did a few rounds), and then later at some other places. Google took three months to get back to him and gave him a really good offer, but by that time he had already accepted somewhere else.
Box.com terror tactics sales model. Is there an alternative?
>But the problem is, if you accept THE SPECTRE OF UTTER POVERTY into your incentive package, then you also incent INTERGENERATIONAL POVERTY, where children are born into homes of people who, despite all those helpful incentives, just sucked at not being poor.

This idea that the free market doesn't address intergenerational poverty is unfounded in my opinion. Poverty declines precipitously anywhere in the world that adopts a market economy [1].

In the US, poverty was declining decade over decade, until the War on Poverty began, at which point it remained steady, despite spending on subsidies for the poor increasing decade after decade. While UBI doesn't have incentives that are as harmful as those of traditional welfare, it still reduces the need to be self-sufficient, and thus teaches the wrong behaviours.

>So you created this world where you have this super strong YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE, THERE IS NO NANNY STATE culture, then what really makes sense for that kid to do is say you know what, I am going to take matters into my own hands. I am responsible for my destiny. I am going to drive these kids over to this house and get a lot of money.

It's important to remember that the role of a financial market is to provide capital to individuals and enterprises that can make good use of it. If this kid is the next Elon Musk, as you suggest he could be, then it's in the interest of profit-motivated investors to identify him, and provide him with a substantial student loan, in exchange for the future interest payments he will easily be able to pay off once he's finished school and started his Tesla.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-pol...
This functionality exists with bookmarks.

FF allows you to bookmark all the tabs you have open into a bookmarks folder.

It also provides a button at the bottom of the folder "open all in tabs"

This works well enough for my taste, but I also use pinned tabs for stuff like fb messenger
I didn't take that away from the article at all. This wasn't an argument against formal process. It was more a story about acting like you're a big company, while pretending you're a small company, and the pitfalls of doing this. Where "acting" encompasses pay, stock incentives, other kinds of talent motivation, recruiting, leadership style, innovation, and yes formal process.

There's nothing wrong with process and best practices. Process is often scar tissue left behind after critical mistakes in the past. A company without some formal process is a company young enough to not have made disastrous mistakes yet.

I've worked in a company of more than 50 that was basically without a trace of software development process. It was a clown circus. Nothing could be released on time reliably, quality was a joke, there was no documentation, no code review, and no plan or roadmap. Sure, they moved fast, but it didn't matter.
2.8x increase over 16 years is a CAGR of 6.6%, not 10%.

(1.066 ^ 16 = 2.8)
More "Darknet". I almost passed this by.

I'm glad I took a peek. This is actually interesting to me.

...Briar is a secure messaging app for Android.

Unlike other popular apps, Briar does not require servers to work. It connects users directly using a peer-to-peer network. This makes it resistant to censorship and allows it to work even without internet access.

The app encrypts all data end-to-end and also hides metadata about who is communicating. This is the next step in the evolution of secure messaging. No communication ever enters the public internet. Everything is sent via the Tor anonymity network or local networks.
Just VSCode with the ESLint plugin and this theme: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=jdinhlif...
Yes, this is so important and yet I see many EHR companies relax on it since its not heavily mandated.
Yes this is a good option but an expensive one.
that's really not true. i build systems using full on OOP, actor framework, custom OOP UI controls, many user interfaces, distributed, etc. all in labview

labview has some great libraries for developing complex systems. thiugh i a, the first to say it isn't close to end game.
Seems like a good opportunity for someone to register disparage.org and start recording complaints against the uncomplainables.
I think BGI graphics will still work in DOSBox. I remember having a setup a couple of years ago where I shared a directory between Windows and DOSBox. I'd edit the code in Windows using Sublime Text, and then pop in to DOSBox to build/run it.

So although it doesn't quite make BGI graphics based apps run directly on Windows...it's still quick and easy enough to have some fun. I did it specifically to give myself a way to make programming fun again at a time when I was feeling a bit burned out from working on massive, overly complex C# and JavaScript code all day at the office.
How large is large? Hiring junior engineers or developers definitely happens in companies smaller than FB or GOOG.

Perhaps you mean something specific by "capable"?

I won't disagree that c++ (as a technology) can be a minefield, but this also holds for many technologies and markets (civil aviation being a great example).

I may have missed an implicit /s, for which I apologize in adavance...
I regularly feel that way. But when I stop working on side projects, I feel worthless. I'm sure it's not a healthy place to be. I don't see how side projects could get anywhere without a little irrationality - it's inherently unhealthy to take on what amounts to a second job.
Ditto re: battery capacity. Using all 35 Amp-Hours repeatedly will destroy the battery. Anode terminals dissolve during discharging. They are electrolytically plated (thickened) during charging. So repeated full-discharging can reduce their solid volume to such an extent that they cannot be fully restored during charging.

In general, "deep-cycle" lead-acid batteries shouldn't be discharged to less than 50% of their rated capacity to ensure a healthy, long life in an off-grid solar setup like this one.

So more like 17 yrs to repayment - as long as he hasn't already bricked his battery.
>Seriously? You realize that's delusional, right?

Comments of this nature aren't constructive. It's better to restrain the urge to tell your correspondent that their belief is delusional, and simply explain why you disagree with it.

>Most people -- even most right wing folks! -- aren't libertarians.

I think most people don't think deeply about the policies they support, and the implications of those policies. Most people don't think much about the nature of the law, for example. [1]

The complexity of the political system results in people supporting policies that if they had the time to closely examine, they would not. Our political system is geared toward decision making based on shallow assessments and emotional gut-reactions, because it does not give the average person the ability to meaningful analyze the issues that they base their vote on.

But in any case, I already said that for the sake our debate, let's accept your claim as correct. There's no need to try to expand this debate more than is necessary.

>I don't think that we'll ever have occasion to even test this claim, because no sovereign state in its right mind would ever adopt a legal or financial system in which a computer bug or Chinese supercomputer could result in constitutional crisis.

I have no idea where this suggestion that a sovereign state would replace its Constitution with a smart contract came from. Can you please go back to my comment and re-read what I suggested would happen?

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/enforci...
Most of them are preferring VS Code as their IDE, Firefox as their web browser and VLC for playing media
Speaking of few differences from C and busted string semantics: my least favorite thing about Pascal is that strings and some types are 1-indexed, but dynamic arrays are 0-indexed.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4083356/array-begin-from...
Why do parents think that being in the middle of nowhere is good for children? It might be good for small children, but as they get to their teenage years, many will undoubtedly hate it. Will these same parents move when their children get older or just leave them to suffer and ignore them even more with the convenient excuse of their super-commutes? It truly boggles the mind that parents don't realize that as their children get older, they will want to interact with others outside of their family and that their choices will severely limit this. Not only that, but being in the middle of nowhere severly limits their children's future job prospects. As one of the people quoted in the article says, “When the kids graduate from school around here, they leave.” Gee, I wonder why.
I don't believe such hard forks will be practical when the ecosystem is larger and more diverse. The DAO happened in a unique point in Ethereum's history, when the community was very small (and thus cohesive) and activity on the network was very little.
Agreed. I've often found that those who are resistant to any amount of (reasonable) formal process are those (usually long timers) who were most empowered by the implicit process and rules. In the end, they're also saying "nothing should change unless I say so".
Alphabay admin used personal Hotmail account for site, unsecured data on laptop
I do that myself too, so even for a small numbers of users, it still is a valid use case. Firefox has a bug report here about this with interesting info https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=855930
I left a large tech company for very similar reasons.
We’ve long blamed carbs for making us fat. What if that's wrong?
>Some, but not all anti-miscegenation laws banned interracial cohabitation and sex. In some states only attempting to get married was punishable. The same was true for same-sex marriage, which would've required lying on a form and thus perjury

There are no state laws that say 'homosexual marriage is a felony', while there were laws that said so with respect to interracial marriage. The criminalisation that you allege is happening, on the basis that there are laws against perjury combined with non-recognition of same-sex marriage, is not the same as the direct criminalisation of interracial marriage.
There are expert storytellers, of course. However, a thorough online discussion may reveal inconsistencies in one side’s story or make it more solid. (Non-linear, too solid a story may be a flag in itself, etc.)

The nature of the subject appears to be such that disclosing any meaningful detail involves putting a lot on the line, which is quite frustrating.
They could indeed, but which users and companies would switch to that forked chain knowing that it's worthless? Having a lot of hashing power doesn't let you control the software that other people are running.
Hey, I don't mind - you can believe what ever you want. I'm just pointing out that the surveys showing a decent proportion of contemporary scientists (including physicists) have deistic or theistic beliefs renders much of what you are saying empirically incorrect.
Back in my day we bolded letters by hand
I don't always get mobile visitors, but when I do I use 750k images.
"Maximising company value" isn't a useful end goal you can give to anyone but the CxO team. For everyone else, it's a motherhood statement. Trotting it out as though it's some kind of engineering compass isn't helpful.

To this you've appended the hackneyed conflation between "speed" and "cowboy attitude". It's a common category error, but in truth, rapid iteration is one of the enablers of high quality and is a huge effectiveness multiplier for top shelf dev teams. Slow development merely enables lazy programmers (since it conceals their apathy) and gives us waterfall disasters. "Thoughtful execution" is possible in any context, and most thought processes are greatly enhanced by evidential techniques such as rapid prototyping / feature spiking.

Fast+incompetent = cowboy attitude, sure, but the problem there isn't the fast bit.
I just learned about Hegel so now everything is a nail, but...

You really can't make categorical statements like "formal process is the enemy". You put formal process into place, and that creates a dialectic where you're waiting for someone to come in and champion the antithesis: "formal process is the enemy". Then that works for a bit until it doesn't and someone synthesizes: "sometimes formal is better sometimes informal is better". Then that becomes the thesis.

Then there's a new dialectic in place. Someone will come in and say "the character of our company is such that we're generally better with formal processes". Then someone synthesizes that, and suggests that all processes are on a trajectory from formal to informal and the company is good at expediting that.

Then someone realizes we need a process for regular deformalization.

This continues forever. None of these ideas are really that much more generically true than any other.

So to embrace Hegel, the goal is just to question yourself as far as you reasonably can, so as to get the best view on the current situation and only the current situation. Make a choice and move on, knowing the next situation is likely to be different.

Edit: I should add this is the process by which we hurry into The Future, which some people might point out means turning our backs on Everything That Is Holy and is therefore a tool of Satan, but I'll leave you to explore that with the rapidly growing universe of anti-Hegelian YouTubers.
You can probably tweak a couple numbers in parameters.toml or something. I made my own weight in between normal and medium, for example.
na the usual reasoning is "use vertical tab bar and tab groups and dont put your monitor n portrait mode"
Are you able to put any actual dollar or % amounts against this?
That's exactly why I left Apple engineering, and I've not regretted it, somewhat sadly, somewhat happily.