skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I think that a large proportion of gamers would be happy for almost all of the competition to disappear in favor of getting everything on the Steam platform.

Yup. Competition is good for the market in general, and for consumers in a more indirect way, but balkanization of content space and having to deal with the crappy apps of me-too competitors is a real pain.

(There's probably some economical theory around this that I don't know, but my gut-feel classification is this: competition is good for consumer when competitors are providing the same, or at least directly substitutable, goods and services. Individual video games - and music, movies, books - are not substitutable goods, so the competition is useful only to the extent you can get the same game/movie from any of the competitors. Exclusive publishing deals make competition harmful to the consumer.)
i have been looking into actually making kefir.

a friend of mine did that. unfortunately he switched to making beer which doesn't mix with kefir before i could get his culture.

i found yoghurt rather maintenance free in comparison, especially because it is just the yoghurt, which can be kept fresh in the fridge for a few weeks and frozen for longer. it's also easy to replace by fresh yoghurt from the store. so rather worry free.

kefir culture on the other hand is a separate beast and not the resulting kefir that you consume.

the kefir culture needs to be taken out of the kefir when it's ready and put into fresh milk or it dies.

the culture also grows so you get more of it to give to your friends.

it's rather like tending to an alien animal of sorts.

watch it grow after each iteration. gently rinse it before putting it into fresh milk...
Unless you live in a styrofoam box, you're going to need heating. Also, people like windows.
Can Governments Help Grow the Legal Tech Sector? Yes, They Can
As others have pointed out, this is also used in the Linux kernel. But unfortunately it shares the kernel error of using the same type for list head and member. That's not good separation, and on particular it means list_add() is ambiguous (the kernel one is member, head, which is backwards).

Hence I recommend kernel refugees start with CCAN's list: http://ccodearchive.net/info/list.html
Yes, I'm there every so often!
Embrace, extend, exterminate
Best. Thing. Ever. Tell them that for me.

Seriously, such a good idea. Esoteric languages are fun, but an esoteric language that gives you the practical ability to stick it to these ridiculous job ad descriptions? That's just legendary.
I don't see how those really benefit the end user.

Firefox has developed Container Tabs, First Party Isolation, integrated Tracking Blocker, an early alpha for a password manager, Screenshots, Firefox Sync, DNS over HTTP and eSNI, not to mention that Mozilla lets addons do much more with the browser so an addon can really change how your browser works instead of being severely limited in what it can do.
So you're saying that a publicly funded utility should provide some kind of beneficial service to the public? Like it's some kind of public service?
Get a copy of "Working effectively with Legacy Code".

The definition of Legacy Code for the author is "untested code". The book is mainly a list of situations a code base can be in and how to add tests.

Once your application is end-to-end tested you can play with the code with better peace of mind. Just adding those tests require you to get all the specifications the app has to fulfill so it is a good way to learn them.
You can change the params e.g.: http://emh.lart.no/publish/csb/csb3d/v1/?dupCount=1000&swarm...
> beta testing, and figure out discoverability

I feel like these two are much harder than the others. How does the app store help you with beta testing? Isn't discoverability basically a lottery?
Empires are built on top of old, ugly, or niche technologies.

You might have more job opportunities with the latest and hottest tech, but you will have far less competition with legacy ones. And you can have a long and successful career with them.

If anything I would consider a red flag to have proprietary or in-house stacks. Those could damage your career by employer lock-in, where your build expertise in tech only used in that company, thus reducing your marketability.
(disclamer: I belong to the "show me your tables, and I don't need to see your code" camp)

- Strong data modelling skills

- Strong SQL skills

- Fluency in at least two of PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, Go, C, C++, C#, Java (more exotic languages like haskell, erlang, lisp a plus)

- Basic unix (most likely Linux) skills (basic commands, ip-route, unix-permissions, acls, superuser vs normal users, unix sockets, sysv, systemd, basic bash scripting) and hands on of at least two different "families" (redhat, debian, arch, slackware, gentoo, exherbo, and many more - ubuntu is in the debian family for example) of linux (or BSDs).

- Conceptually understanding of how networking works (ip-addresses (4&6), ports, unix sockets, subnets, routing, nat, ).

- Curious nature and an ability to keep asking questions in a friendly fashion (if the answer is not complete or shows that the question has been misunderstood)

- Basic HTML/CSS/Javascript skills
Borneo Campaign, Last Major Allied Offensive in the South West Pacific
Whether by accident, or design, The Netherlands seem much more able to have transport options that join up. Buses that terminate at the train station, tram routes that serve both, park and ride that serves all. With compatible timetables and ticketing. After reading the piece about Delft cycle routes yesterday, I suspect a reasonable part was by design. I'm sure someone native can point out some major holes, but still from my UK perspective it seems to work very well. :)

UK still happily has bus, train and tram routes that only sort-of join up, sometimes, often by accident. The bus might arrive at the station 5 minutes after the express leaves, etc.

> tracks + trains as a business is very different from roads + vehicles

I'm no rail expert either, but I'll waffle on a bit. :)

It's much closer to air than road - you can't just throw more trains out there, they need slots, separation and compatible timetabling with the others. On a road you can just put out another bus and see which survives, they can even have the same timetable if you like.

The problem I see with UK privatisation is the competition is a myth, but it's been made bloody complicated for the sake of it - for example "what is the "optimal" penalty that the train operator...". A single train operator gets a single regional franchise, yet at least three companies are involved in every route (track, train, buildings). The old train builders, station hotels, and catering had already been sold off.

The old big 4 (GWR, LNER, LMS, SR) owned track, station and train, a train builder, the station hotel and caterer too - if they want to add a new route it wasn't a nightmare of inter-company contracts, or trying to persuade another company to keep the building staffed another hour, or to put new sign on a station wall. No penalties or silliness, just service embarrassment, maybe a government requirement or two. Only when you got to an interchange station did it become multi-company. Course that meant there wasn't much competition - well no kidding. Before the big 4 there was more competition, often from duplicate lines. Also more than one company running trains on lines, though one rail company always owned the infrastructure and rented a slot. So more coexistence than competition.

We missed an opportunity several times to get the main lines electrified - West coast main line was asking for electrification for about 40 years before it got it. Same for expanding to 4 lines so slow and fast can run together more easily, and freight can expand. Beeching destroyed a lot of the joined up nature of our rail, and much of the branch network. We bought in too heavily to the car as the only answer. Thanks to the curse of being early, we may never get double decker trains - that would need countless bridges and tunnels being modified or rebuilt.
Me three! Often in Hamilton for days/weeks at a time but frequently in Toronto and certainly no stranger to (U)Waterloo.
Are you sure about that? Forth is famous for being extremely fast. As for SML, assuming a variant with manual memory management (which I do not consider to add complexity in C), I can't think of any reason on why it would be more difficult to optimise.
even some sweetened fruit joghurt will work in a pinch. (it won't result in more sweetened fruit yoghurt though ;-)
> It's a balance, right? If browser extensions had kernel access, I think we'd all agree that's bad. Now, that's obviously an extreme, but where is the line?

It is, and it boils down to the usual security vs. utility tradeoff - beyond some point, more secure means less useful. Kernel access is a stretch, but then again, I could make my computing experience much more pleasant if I had a deeper ability to control and inspect the browser from external software running on my computer.
> So how do you solve the heroin junky passing out/projectile vomiting/falling asleep/dying/leaving needles around/defecating everywhere but the toilet with the door locked problem?

Universal healthcare, harm reduction and rehab services, comprehensive welfare, affordable housing and a sufficient number of properly trained and resourced social workers.
Exactly, that's what I was told yesterday as well. They're collaborating on https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-core
JetBrains Rider is a significant productivity upgrade to Visual Studio, especially when working with a large solution.
In big european cities many fast food places have weird blue lighting in the toilets; apparently it makes it hard for junkies to find their veins or something.
If your predecessors were indeed total hacks at programming, you can get all of the above. But it's a dubious pleasure. My head sustained a lot of scratching and smacking and my face was over-palmed.
> There's probably some economical theory around this that I don't know ... competition is good for the consumer when ...

Yes, there is a pretty standard economic proof that much of capitalism is based on. It says that an economy is most "efficient" (you can take a class on that word), when three pre-requisites are met:

1. Perfect information: Everyone knows the value of everything.

2. Commodities: Products created by competitors are equivalent. This works well for oil and bananas, but not so well for much else.

3. Access to Capital: This means new competitors can start competitors and enter markets easily. This isn't so easy when there is regulation, monopolies, or network effects.

In short, there is a set of circumstances when things work really well. However, in the real world, those circumstances rarely arise.
The streets of Portland aren't quite as bad as those of San Francisco, but there are plenty of heroin addicts in the Northwest. This particular article doesn't seem to state it directly, but those poor souls are exactly what this public toilet was designed to be resilient to.

https://portlandloo.com/faq/
I strongly agree that networking should not be in there either.
As I read the article I really feel the authors intention and I share his opinion because I love my craftsmanship and want to develop deep feelings with the product.
As I read your answer I also understand your point and I agree too in case of short contracts. Thanks for sharing your view!
Definitely. "Is it good enough for the business?". If yes, then leave it alone. Try to add new features in a safe way with automated tests.

I once worked a contract where it was expressly forbidden by the dev manager to refactor any code unless it was demonstrably necessary to support a new feature. Not much fun for devs at times but I respect the reasons behind the decision (esp. as it was a derivatives trading platfom and it can get pretty expensive pretty quickly when they go wrong).
This was an incredible read. Thank you for sharing (again).
They do use a common core: https://github.com/deltachat/deltachat-core
I am not a big fan of pseudo code unless:

1. You are designing a system that is handed off to an unrelated development team (common in agency work).

2. You need a stronger document of record because you lack enough trust in the development that a project plan plus design deliverables are insufficient when it comes to delivery and product quality.

When you go as deep as explicit pseudo code you are essentially building the project twice aside from testing and refactoring for edge cases. That is slow and expensive. If the UI is built using a very deep level of abstraction with lots of scaffolding I can see why the scope creep doesn't matter, because extreme abstraction can easily blow out a project from 2 weeks to four months so why not add an addition 2 months for planning and review.

On the other hand UIs can be formally specified by code if the code when the code is small (not a super deep abstraction) and when the content/behavior are separately defined from the code that builds the UI. Keep it simple and deliver more by intelligently doing less.
Not worried about reliability of sqlite, but the system running it, and what happens if it goes down. E.g. if it relies on a single node, but the cluster just can't make changes anymore but continues to run just fine and cleanly recovers once the main DB is back, that's probably a tradeoff that works often. If stuff starts breaking quickly, not so much.
Exactly!

The first version of anything almost certainly ALWAYS sucks. Usually the only way that doesn't happen is if the team developing the solution has prior knowledge of some kind...having built a similar solution before.

I used to always hate consulting for this reason. The company I was working for was always doing greenfield development for clients. We never, ever got to do v2, because the projects always transitioned to clients' teams. I can't remember a single project I was working on that I was happy with.
Thanks for the pointer to Ousterhout, I don't think I've heard of him before but a lot of the Tcl people have put out good stuff.

Uncle Bob and friends definitely form their own "school". I think they call the "functions and assignment" style "Newspaper style", since for them it's kind of like reading a newspaper. Following it you can actually get a long way towards the dream of "self documenting code". I'm happy when people who believe in some specific school of thought get it to work for them, and even if I disagree on things at least there's consistency.

It's still never as clear as a literate program, though. And while Uncle Bob has been upgrading by learning Clojure, a lot of that school's work has assumed OO-in-the-style-of-Java5/C++98 environments. And to be fair that's a lot of the mass of legacy code we unhappily get saddled with. I think their work is less applicable and there are other schools to listen to when you have different languages or programming methods (FP, declarative, OO with a MOP, etc.).

I read the Clean Code book finally not too long ago, and while I've never argued with a book so much, there is value in it, and some programmers would do much better than their current flailing to follow its approach exactly. But these guys aren't my personal programming heroes, I'd rather be like a Norvig than a Jeffries (even if the latter is a perfectly acceptable engineer). But I can usually find value in all their works; philosophically I'm aligned with Bruce Lee, I'll take what I think is valuable and discard the rest.
That's already been tried. SF spends more on homeless per capita than anywhere else.

Time for a police task force of a couple hundred forcing them to get rid of their addiction in jail.
Yesterday i was researching IP strategies for AI companies and came across this paper from a legal firm.

https://www.bereskinparr.com/files/file/IAM88_AI-and-IP_Jim%...

It blew my mind how much China is filing patents around AI compared to the rest of the world. It should also be considered that from an IP perspective American companies could be going down the trade secret route and academia is open sourcing. I don't have any data on this. I know in the USA trade secrets do now have some legal protection.

https://www.uspto.gov/patents-getting-started/international-...
Actual figures for CoQA from the link above: No.1 is 86.8%; no.5, 81.4%; no.20, 66.5%. No.5, though quite impressive (humans are at 88.8%), still give about two-fifth more errors than no.1.

These technologies tend toward natural monopolies as users tend to choose among the top 3-4 providers which allow them to spread costs, lower prices, and acquire yet more data. The winners at the right time tend to hold long-term monopolistic/oligopolistic power, until a major breakthrough happens.

Also, all results in the top 20 from the same link are from either the US or China (except for a couple of anonymous results). At least in this subfield, there could be only two national contenders, despite many key papers being open.

Exact algorithms, implementation details, and system engineering and integration count.
That may happen. San Francisco made a 20 year deal with JCDecaux for the existing public toilets. The 20 years are up and the Board of Supervisors is not going to renew.[1]

It's sad. A similar model works fine in Paris. It's way too complicated and expensive, though. I've looked over the mechanism when one was being repaired. It's all Telemechanique industrial control and automation gear. It needs to be more like a washing machine.

[1] https://missionlocal.org/2019/02/jcdecaux-toilet-contract-ma...
Bank customers hit by dozens of IT shutdowns
Yes, and sometimes the people are fully aware of that as well. But even a shitty designed piece of code that has been running in production for year will have ironed out most of its bugs. There might be other designs that would be more maintainable but refactoring to reach that might be an investment that the company is not willing to make.
React Hooks: Has React Jumped the Shark?
Sometimes a very dubious pleasure. I work at a company where another product team decided to rewrite the entire product from Angular 1 to Angular 2 because it was so much better. I was shocked and dismayed, but didn't say much because I didn't feel like starting a fight I would lose, and it would suck me into a project that wasn't my primary focus.
The problem isn't bugs in the IOMMU, it's bugs or performance issues in using the DMA API with an IOMMU.
Have you been to Saravana Bhavan downtown?
Visual Assist X should also get a mention. A lot of useful productivity features.
> I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust all the extensions that I want to use.

That's fair, but this dynamic drags down usefulness of the whole platform. Browsers could offer extended permissions allowing extensions arbitrary control over the browsing experience, but they can't trust extension authors not to get greedy about privileges, and can't trust regular users to be smart about it. It's what happened with Android: applications requested every possible permission, users learned to just accept it.

> Also being able to see what the extension does is really valuable to me, because allowing an extension to read the data on all websites you visit is really suspicious for a majority of extensions.

That's true, and I wish there was an easy way to transparently run a I/O trace on an extension, and to have super-fine-grained user-level control over its permissions. I use a bunch of extensions that modify the contents of sites; I wish I could manually restrict them to a whitelist - and sometimes blacklist. Like, e.g. I don't need Cloud2Butt to work on my banking site.
The only time I've seen something similar to what you describe was on my trip in New York. And I've been to about 20 countries across 4 continents.

It's an American homegrown problem with too much focus on capitalism.

edit: You can downvote this, but it doesn't make it untrue nor irrelevant to the point. If you have basically no people living on the streets, you also avoid this problem. I'm still shocked from seeing homeless (nearly) die in the cold in New York.

With a better social systems it's maybe not fully solvable, but reducible to a point where it's no longer an apparent problem in every day live. It does work, many countries in the world do it, also in major cities.
Not exactly something to be proud of. Also
"The idea was envisioned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk in a white paper in 2013". No, it was hyped by Musk, the idea dates back to 1904
i used to just take the left over yoghurt from the current batch to make the next one. the result wasn't good.

then i switched to freezing a few spoons full from a fresh batch. any small containers will do.

i got to 25 generations at one point. and the frozen yoghurt kept fresh for prolonged periods of time, like when we went away to travel...
It usually also means that public transport is too expensive for those who are in need of it the most (e.g. people who can’t afford a car or for whom owning a car doesn’t make any sense — which is arguably more common in Europe than the US)
If you're good enough to get into Google/Facebook/etc, you should demand more money to work at a startup. The risk is higher.
Competitiveness Leads Us to Sabotage Others' Personal Goals at Expense of Ours
>Twitter does sell premium data services including their much coveted “firehose” stream. Twitter’s firehose is a complete stream of all tweets made on their platform and is only available to a few businesses at an extraordinary price.

As a developer, I have no understanding of how is data monetized. How much is user data worth? What kind of user data is worth more than others? What is the data used for (why would anyone pay "extraordinary price" for tweets?). Who pays for user data - is there some public market that I am not aware of?
Show HN: Remedy8 – Stress Button for Your Phone
Because usually if you're working on someone else's giant legacy codebase that is completely new to you, it's because the original maintainer(s) is not there anymore to help, for whatever reason.

It becomes nearly impossible to understand what's going on and why without breaking something.

I've been doing this for the past 5 years as a consultant in banks and insurance companies.

The only way to know "what's is its use?" is remove it and wait for someone to call for a problem.

Most of the times this trick doesn't work, because stuff breaks all the times and it's really hard to tell if you broke it or if it was broken in the first place.

Like the monkeys, users of the software have changed over time and they kept doing things "the way we always done it", sometimes a new monkey comes in, does something differently and discover a bug that's been there for years, unnoticed, because no one else climbed the stairs anymore.
wl_list seems like an incomplete re-implementation of the LIST_ macros in <sys/queue.h>.

http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/queue.3.html

https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/master/sys/sys/queue...
Short answer: Humans are not mice
It's legal with a tile, illegal with a plate due to the LEGO logo getting in the way.
No country has ever solved their junky problem even with those things.

To some degree, we have to get used to junkies existing in jurisdictions that aren't inclined to lock them up. However, we can't spend our way out of the problem. San Francisco spends ~$40k/yr/homeless [0] , if that's not enough to solve the problem, then it's just too great. We cannot throw money away on problems created by cities that abet $4k/mo rents for one-bedrooms.