skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The examples don't seem to illustrate software rot at all. Rather, I'd say they illustrate software ossification.

I was about to come here to say that there's really no such thing as software rot. If all of the environmental variables remain the same, software doesn't really rot. It's actually the environmental variables which change.

Over time, each example became more rigid and hard to change because things that should have been modularized and isolated in one place instead became idioms pervading the entire codebase.

I can deal with idioms. If 1) the idioms are very consistent and 2) you have a reliable syntax driven code rewrite tool, you can drive idioms into a library and/or otherwise translate them. I've been paid to do both.

Rot would be when a program works less and less over time because its external dependencies vanish or change and the program itself stops adapting.

But what stops a program from adapting? It becomes "ossified." Because the code organization isn't up to the challenge, it becomes too hard to add and change features without introducing bugs.

There is no software "rot." It's all different kinds of ossification.
>If we weren’t there doing that job, Facebook would be so ugly

It would be 4chan, minus the anonymity.
Nope-
Of course they do! "Rely on the mercy of a for-profit (or faux not-for-profit) organization to whom you have already handed a blank check" is a terrible plan, nobody should be surprised that it doesn't work very well, and the people who propose it as anything other than a desperate hail-mary should be ashamed of themselves.

gowld, I'm looking at you.
i think we still have it, with wikipedia and personal blogs for example. it's just been largely subsumed in our minds by web apps and the commercial web. but there are plenty of interconnected hypertext documents that are primarily documents to be read and shared using http(s) without an intermediary organization (like facebook or google).
Thanks, I've missed that
> The power disparity remains whether or not we restrict arbitration. If isn't take it or leave it on that, it'd be take it or leave it on salary or vacation days or whatever else. I don't see how tweaking one, in the grand scheme of things, small available contractual term is doing anything about power imbalances generally.

I didn't specific it earlier, but I think restrictions on binding arbitration would also extend to contractural prohibitions on class action lawsuits, since the two typically go hand in hand.

It doesn't eliminate the power disparity, but eliminates new mechanisms that are used to increase it as well as protecting the mechanisms that have traditionally been used to protect against it.

> The fundamental right here is the parties' ability to form an enforceable agreement under terms they agree to.

I disagree, there are other rights that are at least as important that must be balanced against that.

Also "terms they agree to" is a slippery concept, and it's arguable it doesn't apply to 99% of the contracts "agreed to" today (think click-throughs and other walls of tiny text, which are typically neither actively negotiated, read, nor fully understood by one party as an essential matter of practicality).
DJVU satisfies that requirement perfectly while PDF doesn't. If you don't embed all your fonts into the PDF it will look different on different systems and even if you do: as long as font rendering happens on the target system you will never get 100% pixel perfectly the same output.
"Facts can be a powerful weapon against fear, a gloomy worldview, learned helplessness". This is so true.

However I also notice a frequent and not so helpful use of such data, namely as a way of countering people's legitimate complains about their current state. It is especially concerning when the positive trends are touted as consequences of certain public policies, even when the correlation is questionable. There are heated online debates between the Bill Gates/Pinker/Factfulness camp and the 'left' on the role of the free market vs a strong state in shaping progress during the past 50 years.

How can you avoid any sort of bias creeping in the content of your site?
We Analyzed 13B Access Log Entries – Here’s What We Learned
It is weird that HD are targeting the electric mountain bike market as well. There are already incredible offerings from almost all the incumbent MTB manufacturers. It's a pretty established market, and HD has zero experience in making a good mountain bike whereas the incumbents have almost all had decades of it. It is a very nuanced field of engineering and their prototype looks 10x bulkier than existing products. Most E-MTBs look like normal bikes with a slightly thicker downtube, they are already that refined. I would almost say E-MTBs are the best offering from any range of e-bikes currently.

Maybe they were just dabbling with prototype sketches.

In regards to your comments main focus, it's facinating how much they lean on selling their brand versus their product. It almost seems as though they treat their dealerships like gym franchises.
Is it me or are we running out of names for things?
Because he was a curious man and wanted to see every detail?
I upvoted because I like to see popularizations of results from neuroscience, but I would also caution against cherry picking papers and placing interpretations atop them.
Valid concern, but I'm mostly pointing this out in the context of the parent comment. Emphasis on the fact that it's free, and may be a decent stepping stone for those interested in custom domain email.
> There must be existing uses of this encoding, but I’ve been unable to find any or even determine what its name is.

not a tree guru.. but isn't this somewhat related to 'fractal tree indexing':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_tree_index

Each internal node of a B-tree will contain a number of keys that is
one less than its branching factor. The keys act as separation values
which divide its subtrees. Keys in subtrees are stored in search tree order,
that is, all keys in a subtree are between the two bracketing values.
In this regard, they are just like B-trees.

also, thanks for the plan9 stuff :D
Quantifying Uncertainty in Probability Predictions
a "portable computer" in the style of 198x and a "cloud on the go" at the same time - a beefy mini-ITX in the backpack with big battery plus a wimpy notebook (just with great screen and keyboard) as a terminal (with HDMI over air and BT keyboard the "notebook" may not even need CPU/RAM) .
You might find some of the usability testing services useful also

There's a list of some here:

http://www.usefulusability.com/usertesting-alternatives/

and here

https://www.producthunt.com/alternatives/usertesting-2

They give you videos with people's out loud thoughts about for example trying to accomplish specific goals with your sites, which should be really useful.

And for a more guerrilla approach you might find this article useful:

https://medium.com/@leemunroe/how-our-product-design-team-co...
> What happened is that _software_ stopped bloating and inflating like a balloon, as was the norm through the '80s, '90s and early '00s.

And then Electron came out and... well, there went that dream.
It has not, but they say that it's on their near-term roadmap.
You can only have one user with Alzo which makes it tough if you have accountants/ tax people or other people in co that need access. They def need to solve this- they've said it was on the way but I've heard nothing.
You probably can't see shit with those goggles.
I wonder whether pushing accessibility is another way forwards. Maybe the simple-browser should present itself as a screen reader for the blind, and automatically send threats of ADA lawsuits if a site isn't usable.

I know for instance that UK govt. websites are designed for such use first, which just means sticking close to the original spirit of hypertext. Bank websites I have little hope of... and anyway I trust my bank quite a lot! But commerce would be great.
Maybe I'm super naive and if so please educate me, but honestly why are we even considered conscious?

Can't basically everything we do be just explained by the brain reacting to its environment? Even the derivative thoughts and actions and stuff you perform is just the brain reacting to itself as well. It's not like the brain is disconnected from itself, it's connected to sensing organs and everything everywhere inside.

Other observations: The older you get, the more robotic people seem, especially younger people and the mentally ill. It's like you can exactly see why they would say or do something based on what you know about their life or situation or even just the contexts beforehand.
Yikes. I think I like to see the browser warning.
nice info
I don't really understand how we've all been shocked by this. From https://www.maketecheasier.com/why-cpu-clock-speed-isnt-incr...:

> "Thanks to the limitations of physics and the current transistor material designs, increasing clock speed is not currently the best way to increase computational power."

In around 2006, the CPU industry became a commodity industry & innovation has since come in the form of Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP) rather than the engineering of faster CPUs. That shift is responsible for your 10+ year old laptop still being viable.
I'm sure there are simpler ways to explain it, I'm new to the topic, sorry if you didn't like it.
As this type of technology becomes more advanced and widely adopted, it has the ability to promote global financial diversity that ultimately allows everybody to profit. In this sense, therefore, DeFi is essential in creating a truly autonomous financial economy in which everybody has the same opportunity to unlock the value of their assets and invest accordingly.
Currently, there are companies like Nuts, which provides an accessible, distributed ledger that secures non-standardized trading and provides the transparency needed to safeguard every transaction.
I bought the X1 Carbon Extreme. The classic 7 row keyboard layout is great, but the latest keyboard isn't as bad as I thought. The keys are fine, and I adapted to the layout: delete/home/end are independent from the f keys and easy to reach, page up/down are better than the old previous/next page keys in the classic layout.
Not to mention Linux Mint.
OpenBSD i386 supports "all CPUs compatible with the Intel 80486 or better, with Intel-compatible hardware floating point"

https://www.openbsd.org/i386.html

NetBSD i386 says "Any i486 or better CPU should work - genuine Intel or a compatible such as Cyrix, AMD, or NexGen."

https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/i386/
I am with fiblye in that I believe you have vastly overestimated the costs of living in Japan and therefore the relative benefit of a higher salary in the US.
> Feeling heart-broken? Feeling angry and frustrated? Feeling sunken and collapsed? Feeling energized and happy? All of these feelings will have had their origin as sensations from vagus nerve.

I thought emotions can from the limbic system?
Yeah, Apple services work but very few 3rd party apps(i.e facebook doesn't work)
> So it seems hard to create glass that doesn't block UVB.

Ok, so what is the glass in tanning-booths made of? Or the glass of UVB fluorescent lamps?
I bet if somebody held a gun to my head, and I was at least allowed to dial in via modem to a *nix server with node.js on it - I could probably do my current job, to a certain bare-bones level...

...using my TRS-80 Model 100.

Don't get me wrong - it would be a nightmare and no fun, and some things just wouldn't be possible.

Though that's definitely not what the author had in mind...
There are a number of fantasy computers around now. I have played around with Pico-8 and TIC-80 [1] so far. Very much fun. The TIC-80 is opensource and can be found compiled for most stuff, even the Pandora handheld console for those that managed to get hold of one. Hopefully someone makes a port for the new DragonBox Pyra [2] when that one is out, that would be really cool :-)

[1] https://tic.computer/

[2] https://www.dragonbox.de/en/45-pyra
For the price of the 2017, 13 inch, non-touchbar with 16GB ram and 1TB SSD you can get the base model 15 inch, with 3x as many cores and DDR4, not LPDDR3 ram. Doesn't really make sense.
T420 daily here too. I love it's keyboard. Not sure what I'm going to do in the future when I'm forced to upgrade. I hear you can install a classic keyboard on newer gen Lenovo laptops, but I'd really prefer a solution that didn't require mods.
what if there is no longer run, because survival in the short term requires otherwise?

island mamnal populations can take wild periodic swings of explosion and collapse. not necessarily the ideal way of going about it.

in any case we shouldn't confusebindividual fitness with group level fitness
Native English speaker, from England, and we were explicitly taught to use Brooks' rather than Brooks's.

However that didn't stop the Beatles from using "In an Octopus's Garden" as a song title. (Note that the song is about a single Octopus). I would suggest that it depends on whether you intend to explicitly repeat the 's' when speaking.

Plurals of words ending with an 's' are an occasional minefield. You sometimes hear people smugly insist that the plural of Octopus should be Octopi, only to have someone even more smugly point out that Octopus is from Greek, not Latin, and so it should be Octopodes. Meanwhile the rest of us just continue to use Octopuses....
I don't think the vertical ordering contains information.
Hospitals in CA have had to publish chargemasters for a decade already. This law would set the price at the larger of either the medicare cost, or the insurance negotiated cost
PureBoot, the High Security Boot Process
As a company you can decide where to fall on this scale, I applaud you for -Wall'ing but for most it's too much, the important thing is to make sure that everyone has agreed which warnings are acceptable and you refuse code that violates that.

We're using PHP (so runtime warnings, instead of compiler issues) but we have a zero-error policy, if anything raises a warning or error we refuse to merge (or ticketize fixing since a bunch of stuff is legacy and we're still paying it down).
I'm not sure if that solves the core issue of long term mental effects, even on the "hardest" people.

Stepdad is a retired firefighter, has kind of that old-timey tough guy thing going on (although deep down he's a real softy) - he rarely likes talking about the hardest parts of the job, but the few times it has come up he mentions seeing some things that haunt him.

I remember one time him mentioning seeing something so grotesque when he pulled up to the scene that he started laughing at the absurdity. Sort of in a way that he could do nothing but throw his hands up and say "well fuck this."

He jokes about some of that stuff, but I can sense pain beneath the humor.
I saw a terrible example of this just yesterday, at what is essentially a business card of a website. A friend, who has a 100-Mbit internet connection, asked, "Why is this image loading like I'm on dial-up?"

http://www.velofeet.com/

It's a 1.7 MB PNG image scaled to 385px x 446px, and an 85% JPEG at the proper dimensions is under 50 kB.
This is a pretty good anecdote that supports why I don't go to doctors.
I got excited about erasure codes a while ago and tried my best to give an accessible intro at https://www.akalin.com/intro-erasure-codes (with HN discussion at
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18702843 ).

Glad to see other people getting excited by them too!
"It struck a deal with Google to safeguard client data" xD!
> Here's the trap: if you don't have insurance, you are not just hit with the high bill that represents what the hospital would pay an HMO, you're hit with he wildly inflated bill they send to an HMO in anticipation of being paid much less.

I spent years working in medical billing. You can negotiate these down to prices as much as 10% of the bill. Typically, you go: "I don't have insurance, but I'm willing to pay 50% now."

The vast majority of the time, they'll accept, because that's more than they expected.

DON'T give them the option to distribute the payments. Explain, you're willing to pay now at X% AND that you don't have insurance. The person on the other end is usually a human and can accept that (somewhere in the billing chain).

If they offer to distribute payments, explain financially, that may put more burden on you. If you actually can't pay or are living pay-check-to-paycheck, explain it may bankrupt you. At that point, they get nothing, so negotiations can ensue.

Another thing to do is debate billing codes, as the error rate is relatively high. For reference, even a 1% error rate means out of 10 visits you're likely to get one, because you'll have multiple billing items every visit.
> As a long-time pthreads programmer, these systems feel like skittish concurrency.

I interpreted "fearless" to mean the opposite of "defensive programming." You have to be pathologically defensive when coding with basic synchronization primitives. These languages provide an alternative that frees you from that mindset. I only have experience with Erlang/OTP but it has been mind expanding when it comes to writing complex, robust, concurrent code. In fact one of the core Erlang style principles is "do not program defensively." Try that with pthreads!
I don't think anything you wrote is wrong!

I have a background in error codes - hamming, and luby and raptor and, and, and. Reed-Solomon is particularly "beautiful" from a mathematics perspective (more so than Raptor) - something I can usually explain to anyone and get them interested.
While I have qualms about the name since this is like the 20th Mint I've heard of now, I'm incredibly excited as to what this has to offer. The control over the underlying process is key to creating beautifully asynchronous applications, and it gives me a lot of node-got vibes in terms of how easy it is to use.

And thank god, HTTPS support built in... it never ceases to amaze me why some HTTP libs don't have TLS as a given.
If you are in CA and have an HMO plan you do not have to worry about in network or out of network, or with a contract, or spend any time negotiating the bill for emergency services.
is vs ought is the distinction that needs to be made. the perogatives of natural selection needn't concord with moral behavior.
Gotta recoup those cloud hosting costs somehow!
> In theory the regulation is the same.

It's not though. Canada, for instance, has far more lax work time limits on its pilots. Guess who else has had problems at SFO? If you guessed Air Canada you'd be correct. There are plenty of regulations that are different for foreign carriers operating on American soil (it probably comes down to mutually agreed ICAO rules).
I frickin' love my 2010 ThinkPad T510. It was my workhorse for about eight years, until I got a desktop PC to use as a daily driver. The ThinkPad is still a secondary machine, and it runs NetBSD now.
Everyone liked BASIC for 2 reasons, if they did not have much prior exposure to a Unix-like or VAX-like multiuser/multitasking environment in the 80's:

- BASiC was a very interactive environment. This new and awesome in the 80s. You could enter programs, run them immediately, edit, run, repeat without having to go through a compilation step.

- BASIC worked without any planning whatsoever. You don't need to declare variables, or even arrays if you only use subscripts 1-10. Strings handled automatically.

So it was really fun to play with. You could make your new computer do something rather quickly, and refine it over time.

Line numbers were needed on the old 8-bit systems that didn't have full screen text editors with copy/paste built in. It's how you told BASIC where to put new lines in the program.

Admittedly it was certainly getting long in the tooth in the 90's though.
We Wrote a Self-Hacking Game in C++
Amazon, Dell, Google, IBM, Microsoft Among Thousands Gathering for GTC
Did you just describe Australia as a ‘tinpot pseudo democracy’?

Not that this is a high point in Australian politics with the game of musical chairs that is going on.
I’ve just never heard someone living there be so down on it.
I'm using Gnome shell since the early days and, so far, I'm very happy with it. But, then, I also use macOS on my Macs and I'm very happy with them too. All of them run everything I throw at them just fine.

I find the lack of options to customize GNOME irrelevant - I'm way past the day I cared about the wallpaper or the icons or the colors of the window chrome. I pay attention to what's inside the window, not its border.

The other day I fired up a Solaris 10 VM so I could give Wikipedia a proper Solaris/CDE screenshot and I was surprised it's actually still usable - the terminals are responsive and the rest, oh well... You don't want to use a GUI to copy files, do you?
And then they look up your income on one of a dozen information gathering platforms and decide that you qualify for a 2% discount, because privacy doesn't matter and hospital price gouging isn't a problem. Enjoy!
Vanta (YC W18) is hiring an account executive – first business hire (SF)
Seeing a correct proof may or may not help you understand whether your proof is correct. What you're asking for is more like code review, not something you can package with a book.
And of course there are already bikes that meet your specifications on the market, electric mountain bikes are already refined as a consumer product. Like you said as well, the bicycle industry has parts standards and some trusted parts manufacturers that hold considerable sway for a consumer. GM may be able to catch some new riders off guard but they won't be breaking into the bicycle market with this offering.
It's disrespectful because there's no actual attempt to draw a serious comparison between the two cases; Somalia is used as a crude stereotype, and the reality of the people living there, and the real progress made in the last years is ignored.

But hey, maybe I'm wrong: tell me, what specific drawbacks do you see in the building standards of Mogadishu or Hargeisa vis-a-vis Berlin?
Debt & collections exist.
I remember playing a computer game in math class where you were presented with a XY plane and had to "hit" points (really circles, didn't need to be exact) by plotting equations through them. With some trial and error you could make a polynomial go through basically as many as you wanted, it's neat to see this applied to a real problem!
Would you mind nudging your comments upwards in terms of thoughtfulness and substance, please?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"Disabled people's problems are not the same as healthy people's problems"

Do we have any reason to think that health status / disability is discrete rather than continuous?
Please don't cross into incivility, even when the topic is sensitive and you feel someone else is wrong. It just makes this place worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> Unless providers have some freedom to raise Medicare prices (which they don't)

I assume you mean by "provider" humans like doctors, nurses, aides etc.

Drug and device prices are essentially not regulated. Medicare/Medicaid pays a fixed percentage of the price set by the company -- but that price is indeed set by the company!

(I used to work in pharma and this dynamic was an important part of our pricing plans)

If you ever need a drug with an enormous copay (say, $2000/month) you can often contact the manufacturer and get most of that copay rebated. WTF? Well the manufacturer wants a high list price for the drug so that they get paid a lot by insurance companies and MC/MC. Paying your copay means you won't object to the prescription, the rest of which (which is much larger than the copay) is paid by third parties.
Quite true, but considering the age (I'm not sure whether the battery is original or not), it does the job. The laptop was used, it's not new.
Lower refunds amplify calls to restore key tax deduction
I haven't use DjVu very much, but as far as I was aware it doesn't store vector data?