skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Three reasons I think:

(1) The closer you get to the front end (especially GUIs), the further you get from algorithms and other mathematical certainties and the closer you get to something that's more a matter of design and fashion. People get tired of GUIs looking and feeling a certain way and they change, and that often requires a code re-work because changes in GUI look and feel can break previous abstractions.

(2) Form factors and display technologies change. Mobile completely annihilated 30 years of GUI work for example. To a lesser extent high-DPI screens have done a number on some older GUI systems. The stuff under the hood changes too but more slowly and in less fundamental ways e.g. an SSD is mostly a "disk" from an abstraction point of view even though the tech is wildly different. Command lines are fundamentally unchanged since the 1970s. VT emulations have become more advanced but the basic paradigm is incredibly stable.

(3) GUIs look deceptively easy but in reality they're incredibly hard. A modern GUI layer is at the same level of complexity as a modern game engine like Unreal. The list of edge cases and layouts and modes and languages and interaction metaphors and input devices and so on and so on you have to support is very long. Software engineers routinely underestimate this difficulty and try to re-invent GUIs and GUI abstractions in a quest to be clean and small and simple. They're then forced to shoehorn everything a modern GUI requires into these clean and simple abstractions, breaking them and turning them into overloaded monstrosities. Simple clean systems get ugly when you try to extend them too far. A more elegant design could be achieved by starting with the premise that the problem is big and hairy and developing heavier and more flexible abstractions accordingly.
But one's actions are also largely dictated by societal living conditions. Many people are extremely time-constrained due to working + commuting + child caring hours. Finding time to exercise or to prepare healthy food is a challenge. Add to this that healthy food is often less easily available and more expensive than unhealthy choices. There is a degree of individual control, but it is society that controls what is easy or hard for the individual to choose.
If this is true, they probably got details from a spy who told them. They dare not give away any information because that would give away the spy. Thus they only dare to make vague accusations (including some false ones to divert attention from what they really know) to the public. They will know that this leaves accusations of the other two, but there is no alternative.

Of course that is if this is true, I don't know. It could well be a scare tactic.
Edit: link removed, does not work
I also feel like a certain number of those people are carless not by choice but because they cannot afford a car, and are putting up with a pretty extreme level of inconvenience.
The shining moment when Russian revolutionary women reinvented sex
I built a system for filtering my HN feed and one of the first rules I put in was "no links to sites that have pop-ins" and tedium matched that. (Not like I have an automated way to do that but it is not too hard to add sites like that to a block list.)
I’m actually quite fond of SQL, but I disagree that ORMs are not a productivity boost. My experience is in Rails and I think ActiveRecord is a pretty clear win for simple queries. That being said, it is pretty common for less experienced developers to not understand what the ORM is actually doing.
Since they have blocked VPN apps in China, the cat is out of the bag: they have proved to every country that they have the technical means to block a whatever app they like in a given country, and that they'd cave to local regulations to prevent being blocked. That's the cost of doing business anywhere, whether a dictatorship or not.

They might stall for a time, but they'll end up blocking Telegram in Russia as well. And other apps will follow.
Apache or Nginx would give you the same experience with a default install. Path would vary between the 3 of course.
>How did it happen that junior JavaScript developers feel so insecure about using the standard stuff?

Because job postings don't say "Wanted: Junior developer with standard stuff JavaScript experience."
over half of teens identify as “somewhere in between gay and straight

Citation. Needed.

Possibly referring to this poll: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/yougov-poll-...

If you think about it, it's not too surprising. 12-18 is a weird age with lots of weird hormonal things happening, and it's hardly unheard of that otherwise 'straight' teenagers in that age bracket experience some sort of same sex fantasies or experimentation.

It's just that in the past they would identify as "100% totally straight!!! (except for that time...)" but they're now more comfortable to be more fluid in their definitions.
How many letters does the CEO get? If the answer is small the CEO of course handles it: it doesn't really take that long and the PR is worth it. If the answer is many, of course staff handles it, with form responses - even then the "interesting" letters get passed on.
To elaborate on why I declined:

The District Manager left a voicemail for me asking when he could schedule a tour with me. He was 100% polite, but it sounded like he was gritting his teeth.

Maybe I was reading too much into it, but I interpreted it as, "My boss's boss is forcing me to give an idiot like you, someone probably with no experience in retail economics, a tour while I patiently pretend to listen to how you tell me to do my job better than me, a person with decades of experience in selling video games."

If the situation were reversed I wouldn't want some rando customer coming into my job and telling me everything he thinks I'm doing wrong.

Plus, I got the feeling (again, just my perception) that it would just be "here's what's wrong with this store" instead of "here's what's wrong with all of your stores."

Maybe it was all in my head and they would have taken me seriously, I don't know. But that was the impression I got.

And I was legitimately busy. Writing a letter takes 10 minutes, a tour and presentation of my ideas would obviously take a lot longer.
How to Talk About Vaccines on Television
They absolutely are helpful. This website doesn’t need racists to try to recruit new people here by attempting to engage in “debate.” Look up Stormfront, what they believe, and how they try to “recruit”
I think of it like outlawing chemical pollution of rivers.

Yes, a Corporation that manages not to dump toxic waste in rivers is going to have a moat against smaller companies that do dump toxic waste in rivers.

But I'd rather it be illegal than have companies competing for who can externalize their costs more effectively by passing their problem of waste management to the state / local area.
7 innovative biomedical technologies made possible by your tax dollars
There are a lot of roadblocks put in the way to controlling your weight. In the US that on the intake, junk food is readily available while healthy food is a luxury. Conversely, the US working environment suffers from increasingly medieval labor laws[+], limiting one's ability to exercise or live a well balanced lifestyle.

I wouldn't be so eager to say "being obese is dictated by one's actions". It's an equal mix of self-control and an unhealthy environment.

[+]: "Independent contractors", arbitration, union stigma/busting
The worst case is that there would not be an ISO C for such machines. As they are very unusual, this does not strike me as a big deal, and definitely less of an issue than making it easier to avoid invoking undefined behavior.

I take your point about the possible motives behind this proposal, which seem quite plausible.
This would make for a good IFTTT applet.

~ Khayri R.R. Woulfe
Assuming it is the case that quality schools will only work for the subset of kids with engaged parents, that is still a huge net positive.

We should make every school high quality. I'm not sure why anyone is opposed to this idea.

>Secondly, not having disruptive kids in class.

If that turns out to be the 2nd order thing we can make that happen with sufficient effort too.
That's only true for certain workloads and applications.
Another commenter has mentioned Python's urwid [0], which is precisely that.

[0] http://urwid.org
This is pretty cool! I've thought about putting something like this together for building (web) front-end sources from markdown. It's probably a terrible idea, but I thought it'd be helpful for writing e.g. a programming book that was itself executable.
It saddens me a bit that this may become the new norm for the internet.
Do you have a link to that? So much for self-hosting.
Yes. This, exactly.
>Apple has been positioning as a champion of privacy

I wonder who has anything to gain from this position of Apple outside of Apple itself? No one in their right mind can both know Apple's history and believe they are a bastion of privacy. I'd be surprised if they aren't worse than Facebook.
Agreed. That was my perception of the offer.
I know it’s gotten better this year but keep in mind they were promising this for a long time, it wasn’t there first try at the problem. Regardless, I don’t want my kid getting asthma, so we really had no choice but to leave, even given the current improvement it would have still been a problem. The air might be clean for the next generation or the one after that, but it’s not going to be for us.

I’m tired of reading headlines like “Beijing to have clean air by 2015” wait no “2020” ok maybe “2025.” Glad that they’ve made progress but the government has lost all credebility otherwise.
Discussion from a couple of weeks ago - 489 comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17075489

Of course, if you want to add something new you can't do so there any more, so this is the place for new comments, ideas, thoughts, connections, etc.
Fuck off Nazi
I hear you. I hate package managers. Package managers are introduced by misguided people not in order to solve a development problem, but a language popularity problem.

Newbie programmers don't know enough to pull individual libraries that they need and put them into their project in a sensible way that they then understand. This causes a newbie language to lag behind popularity against other newbie languages that have package management, or else have needed features built-in. Solution: cave in and make a package manager here too.

However, the package management eventually causes problems such as depicted by https://xkcd.com/1987/

Package management, other than at the OS distro level, is an antipattern. Language packages should be installed by the OS distribution's package manager. E.g. on Debian or Ubuntu it should be "apt-get install whatever". Not "apt-get install idiotic-manager" followed by "idio install whatever".
Thanks, that's clearer than making the text change colour.
No I do not count military bases and it's not just a semantic difference. The result of previous annexation in Europe was WWII.
Didn't the EU legislate cookie walls themselves?

Once that behavior got normalized it seems every site pops up ads, pleas for money, pleas to enable desktop notifications, sign up newsletters, etc.

It is just poison for the mind and particular for the mobile web cause you often can't close out the window on a phone or tablet. People cannot see the site and the owners do not know or do not care.
Sounds very interesting. Very much like to see other languages starting to take this stuff seriously. Do you know where Pony is used in industry?
Does anyone on Heroku want similar functionality — a shared auth layer for many apps?

I have an addon that puts CloudFront in front of you Heroku app with one click:

https://elements.heroku.com/addons/edge

I have been thinking about adding auth via Lambda@Edge...

Now I have a nice implementation to copy...
Mandates javascript though. Who knows what it's doing.
this doesn't make sense - what about all the chinese software in, well, everything including cell all phones (ie tiny embedded OS running on wifi/4G antenna).

I think its a retaliation for discovering stuxnet and bans of US software in russia
> I don't have an opinion about China, but just in general, I'm sure they don't have data from the future :-)

Well then all studies are ‘backward looking’ then and it’s a stupid criticism, and why mention it since it’s obvious and there’s no other way they could have done it.
why the fuck does it have a bamboo plugin but not a jenkins one?
If all you do is developing applications that don't need to be maintained for 10 years or longer (as many business applications do), then you are fine.

Otherwise you are horribly screwed if you try to buy in into the current HTML-based fronted development.
Listen, I get what you are saying. But the fact that Russian wants it off means they are not easily able to get the data they want, so that must mean that Telegram is sort of doing something right even tho those in crypto circles are not confident on their implementation of cryptography.
>The only alternative is to recognize the people who start at a disadvantage and offer them compensation for that.

I don't know exactly what you mean there. Do you mean - let the kid develop sub-optimally and then when they grow up, give them a job even though they are less qualified?

Because that is an idiotic alternative. Much better to do our best to get kids as close to equality of chance as possible by providing everyone with a high quality education and health care.
It's better to be wrong and functional than correct and complicated?

PS: This is the approach PHP took in the early days too.
The Elegant Simplicity of ERC20
While GDPR in itself has accomplished the goal of raising awareness on data security and transparency, probably only temporarily, the mind numbingly idiotic push-button based consent model is an utter failure.

99% of people don't read anything before they push yes. Most people get increasingly annoyed at the mountain of e-mails, and the hundreds of pages they in principle have to read through.

It's an extension of the already existing kafkaesque "press yes to allow cookies" that everyday has to be pressed multiple times with no real benefits other than wasting peoples time (at least in the EU).

People are already completely over encumbered with information.
The more people have to do the same thing the less they give-a-f.

This carpet bombing of legal jargon makes people hate services, especially the smaller ones i am sure. "oh i don't want to deal with lots of legal contracts again".

I completely agree that something has to be done about the data-mining and fingerprinting monster, but the way all of this is implemented only further exacerbates the mega-corp gardens because they can afford to hire armies of lawyers, and because people get tired of clicking "i consent" after the bare minimum has been done - which off course means only saying yes to companies highest on the Alexa ranking.

Ironically these global conglomorates are the worst offenders and the original data-disaster culprit.
Or to borrow from Doctorow, a pebble in the shoe.
Unless you have pulled a muscle somewhere, and your are limping..
I'm not saying GDPR isn't good for privacy (we need it); it just makes competition harder.

If easy competition is being paid for through shady practices, then it should never have been that easy. It’s a no-brainer that a large, established business has certain advantages over up-and-comers; GDPR didn’t make that the case either. It’s easier for a large, rich company to do almost anything, including respecting our privacy as enforced by regulation or law.
I don't see what's so "leaky" about going from 2-4.
> already be easily picked up on by human analysts

How?
Exactly. This is common on many programming language sites. You shouldn’t have to dig deep before finding code examples.

Fortunately Rust doesn’t do this and has a big example right at the top of its front page.
Do you know that saying: "Don't ask me how I made my first million?"

Many of the wealthy people became rich at first through business practices that either were in a grey area from the beginning, outright illegal, or they were made illegal later on.

However, they got to keep their money, either because laws tend not to be retroactive, or because nobody caught them, etc.

I agree there is an element true in "regulations will have the monopolists even more to entrench themselves in their markets," but mostly because they got their wealth through practices that are now made illegal, and they get to keep all of that wealth when nobody else can do the same anymore.

That's really the problem here.
> We are not 20 years ago

We both know that, but if you tried to say that people's needs have radically changed in that time then I fail to see how.

> can be useful to a lot of people

It sounds to me more like an excuse product managers have come up with to explain away why one would plausibly use an invasive feature most people wouldn't give informed consent for. And a lot of people isn't most people or most informed people. I would think most people would be satisfied with offline location bookmarking just as they were with sharpie scribbling 20 years ago. And if they were properly informed they probably wouldn't agree to 24/7 tracking with a chance of loan or job denial on the off chance that it will help them find a place they've forgot to bookmark and couldn't possibly find it via google no matter how hard they tried.

> GDPR is a good start in regulating Evil corps

Yes, evil corps are evil but GDPR is completely mindbogglingly shit start. And it makes things worse. Ask yourself, how do you authenticate a person who emailed you GDPR data request? How do you know you aren't talking with your user's spouse or a hacker and are make things worse for that user by dumping data to requester?
Advanced materials: processing glass like a polymer
Building an E-learning App for Fast Paced Ed Tech Industry
Have you ever looked into Clojure/ClojureScript? The Clojure ecosystem seems to favor your approach. They embrace the dynamic nature of this kind of programming, are data-oriented, shun ORMs, and generally have solid principles (in my opinion). I found it was well worth working through the (somewhat steep) onboarding curve.
At what point do we just say why not 'install a modern GUI'?
Do you actually understand the nature of the “mistake” they made here?

Yes, they fixed it.

No, you can’t accidentally write code that pulls DH nonces from your server.

>The flaw itself is of a kind common to a home-brewed crypto

You can’t say things like this and then proceed to accuse others of making up shit.
Why not adopt the legal profession's approach and have grad students operate the journals? I.e. Harvard Law Review?
I do JWT token auth for apps as documented here:

https://github.com/nzoschke/gofaas/blob/master/docs/security...

In dev I run the same exact code and copy the JWT cookie from my production site.

Both dev and prod have the same secret to validate the cookie.
hack/zaraina/Hopson
BTW, this is the same approach taken by the Coq, Isabelle and Lean theorem provers. In all of them, 1/0 = 0. It is certainly unconventional, but whether this is wrong is a matter of philosophy. Basically, division by zero is undefined, but you can define it to be zero and so extend the definition. This is consistent with the rest of arithmetic. You get more theorems (like for all a, b and c, a/c = b/c), but no inconsistencies.
That’s not how the real world works at all virtually all proper regulation has set of benchmarks and a defined compliance validation process.
That stuff works fine if your client-side needs are simple, but if you actually want a single-page application, or just an application with a lot of rich JS functionality, it quickly becomes unwieldy.
If your application mostly reads from the DB then don't use a ORM. I think ORMs shine when you need to save/update a domain model to a relational DB.
In the CQRS world, a fairly typical choice when using a relational DB is to use a ORM for the write side and raw SQL for the read side.
99% of people don't read anything before they push yes. Most people get increasingly annoyed at the mountain of e-mails, and the hundreds of pages they in principle has to read through.

No offense, but this feels like a “99%” and “most” that is something less than rigorous. I don’t think sound arguments for or against GDPR can come from the “Ah Reckon” space. Throwing out made-up numbers that just represent personal assumptions and anecdote is an impediment to real discussion of these issues.

I’d add that GDPR explicitly forbids just the kind of “press yes to forfeit all of your rights” crap we’ve seen before. I realize that some sites are still trying to get away with it, it it’s non-compliant.
You don't, but at least you know they might not be.
I don't know what you're talking about. People keep trying to replace all of those things.
i don’t think taxpayer provided medical etc care is any different than getting it from parents’ employer-provided (tax-code-subsidized) insurance or from inherited wealth from generations ago. in all cases it’s manna from heaven as far as young kids know. is there some problem with european or canadian children who get these things from a single-payer government scheme?
> I've learned that there's often an inverse correlation between how good a programmer is and how likely you are to have heard of them.

Yep. I second this. The best programmers on my radar are terrible at self-promotion, and are quite content to be terrible at it.
Android uses the Unix permission model heavily - sandboxing is achieved by creating a new user per app, and filesystem, network, etc permissions are managed via user and group IDs just like with Unix.

So how is it "very different" (in implementation, not surface appearance)?
my fav ELF binaries document / howto is Alexander Bartolich's (RiP) Virus writing howto: http://www.linuxsecurity.com/resource_files/documentation/vi...
> I agree with GP that it takes a wacky moral compass to willingly engage in mass surveillance but feel strongly enough about weapons to quit over them. It's either very naive, hypocritical, or both.

I don't see why it's inconsistent. They don't want to be complicit in physical violence and death, but surveillance leads to neither.
The CMU Advanced Database Systems lectures are also really good:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSE8ODhjZXjYplQRUlrgQ...
A must have plugin for any Magento store to remove the multi-step checkout process. It helps in increasing the sale and ultimately conversion rate too. It also reduces the abandoned cart rate of the website.
I think some people at some points in their life think that it's okay to judge others, because they think they will never be what they judge.

But we always are that, generally, we experience those emotions eventually, in some shape or form. We judge we get judged. Til the end of time, eventually we die, we are alone, with only our thoughts, and a question of what we will become next. And all we have is everything we have ever known and thought, on a deathbed. And all we have ever known and thought are, how we know ourselves and how we know others.

And all of that is in the mind, at the moment of death.

So I think while living, it's important to let go of whatever causes the cycle of wanting to judge and wanting to hurt, people hurt when they feel hurt.

When we feel judged, we judge. But generally, we can never really know if we are being judged or hurt. Because life is an experience, of coming and going, of interacting with a self we think we are not, but we are.

Zen koans can be good to think about (to me), when one dwells too much on what a self means, when one has to interact with other selves in real life. People need a sense of self, because sometimes we are with other selves, sometimes we are with our self.

https://www.ibiblio.org/zen/cgi-bin/koan-index.pl
I don't think "startups" should be able to get away with just doing a "deleted=1" with my personal data, or to not know where my data is ending up, just because they are "startups".