skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow. It's amazing the lengths people go to to maintain their delusions. Show me one python IDE in action doing effective refactoring across a large, nontrivial python code base. And you didn't even mention concurrency and skipped over it altogether!

> use type hints or one of the many libs that enforce types...

As if that's pythonic. Heard of duck typing? And those are things you have to do yourself, as additional work and maintenance rather than getting it free because it's a feature of the language. And you don't always have full control over the stack.

Is there an IDE that will guarantee that no runtime errors will take place due to typing?

> Adoption rates keep exploding

Because python made its way into the rapidly growing machine learning market. Python is great for writing glue code/scripts because it's easy to extend with C. Everyone and their grandma getting into data science use python.

> I have no problem with that, just don’t try to sell it to me on technical grounds, because it looks very much like you have none.

Looks like you are just not willing to accept or even recognize any valid criticism of Python. This type of fanaticism towards the language is not the first time I am seeing it.
> My current understanding is that new neurons aren't so easily formed because your brain is actually so efficient, it will simply form new pathways between existing neurons to do the same thing it once did with lost or damaged neurons.

That's what we have been taught at school.

Meanwhile we better understand neurogenesis, creation of nerves, and neuroplasticity, rewiring of nerves:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201...

In a nutshell, the brain continues to grow new nerves and new connections throughout our whole lives.

Hth?
Looking at the source code, this appears to be a UWP wrapper around the xterm JavaScript library loaded in a system web view. It uses a WebSocket connection to facilitate communication between the embedded web environment and the application. I’m not sure how comfortable I am with that from a security standpoint.
My immediate thought is that smoking overall is falling and falling, so maybe advertising does more than shift brand loyalty of existing customers.

Smoking in the United States and other developed nations is declining, but it’s rising worldwide. Tobacco companies simply shifted their focus to poorer, less educated nations and they’re taking in the money.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_cigaret...

While smoking rates have leveled off or declined in developed nations, especially among men, in developing nations tobacco consumption continues to rise.
Shopify payments doesn't support Credit card vaulting aka tokenization; as well has some interesting restrictions like a fixed 7 day authorization expiration.

Shopify is great if you are willing to conform to the Shopify way of doing things, if you have to go outside of that ... well then you are going to have a bad time.
I’ve worked professionally in Haskell across three jobs (one huge corp, two start-ups), and seeing how bad Haskell functions in practice, when quickly mutating state to incrementally modify behavior is live-or-die necessary and under constant business pressures from product managers who don’t care about the paradigm of the backend.

I’ve found so many unexpected runtime errors in Haskell, behavioral bugs that require deep, stateful dependency injection to properly test for, type class designs that were set up wrong for some use case last year and now are horribly brittle and unmanageable to try to use it for the new use case that needs customer feedback immediately.

Plus, for all the syntactical niceties of Haskell, the code becomes unreadable the instant you start needing a dozen different GHC compiler pragmas all defining weird special behavior or syntax. Yet it’s just basic Haskell 101 these days to require new compiler pragmas for tons of basic functionality that you could get out of the box in other languages. Getting a whole team up to speed on how to mentally keep track of that from one section of code to the next is a very difficult chore.

My real life experience with Haskell is why I don’t use it professionally any more.
I'm not suggesting it as a primary cause, I'm offering it as an explanatory factor that is not coincidental.

The network effects statement is both true and relatively unimportant, considering prior social and chat networks had periods of extreme dominance before Facebook and Whatsapp, and that others will in future.

All despite network effects.

Apologies if I came across somehow invoking autism as an explanation for business failure. I certainly applaud initiatives such as Dell's, and we can easily find examples of brilliantly successful products and services created by those on the spectrum.

I mean to suggest that psychographic profile differences between the large tech workforce and their potential customers may be enough to contribute to product failure. This is particularly so if the products require empathic understanding, a known problematic for both the autistic and psychopathic spectrums.
Last I checked, Apple is still the biggest company in the world in market cap. They are also on the very top in terms of revenue and profit.
Common license now for freebies: https://unsplash.com/license
I am using the current Python version and tried type hinting. I don't see how it can help much, since types are not enforced;especially when interfacing with not-so-well-tested modules that don't use type hinting and can sometimes return values of unexpected type.

It's definitely a neat feature when writing an application from scratch that interfaces with few other modules or only the well-tested ones.
I have a genuine question. One of Rust's biggest plus points is having no GC and the related overhead at runtime. Go, on the other hand does use GC. Then how come so many successful Systems programs (e.g. Kubernetes) are written in Go. Anything I am missing here?
QUIC costs something like 2x to 4x as much CPU time to serve large files or streams per byte as compared to TCP. This is because the anti-middlebox protections also mean that modern network hardware and software offloads that greatly reduce CPU time cannot work with QUIC. When combined with the fact that QUIC is userspace, that's just deadly for performance. I'm talking about TSO, LRO (aka GRO), kTLS, and kTLS + hw encryption.

Let's compare a 100MB file served via TCP to the same file served via QUIC.

TCP:
- web server sends 2MB at a time, 50x times, via async sendfile (50 syscalls & kqueue notifications)
- kernel reads data from disk, and encrypts. The data is read once and written once by KTLS in the kernel.
- TCP sends data to the NIC in large-sh chunks 1.5k to 64k at a time, lets say an average of 16k. So the network stack runs 6250 times to transmit.
- The client acks every other frame, so that's 33333 acks. Let's say they are collapsed 2:1 by LRO, so the TCP stack runs 16,666 times to process acks

QUIC:
- web server mmaps or read()'s the file and encrypts it in userspace and sends it 1500b at a time (1 extra memory copy & 66,666 system calls)
- UDP stack runs 66,666 to send data
- UDP stack runs 33,333 number of times to receive QUIC acks (no idea what the aggregation is, lets say 2:1)
- kernel wakes up web server to process QUIC acks 33,333 times.

So for QUIC we have:

- 4x as many network stack traversals due to the lack of TSO/LRO.
- 1000x as many system calls, due to doing all the packet handing in userspace
- at least one more data copy (kernel -> user) due to data handling in userspace.

Some of these can be solved, by either moving QUIC into the kernel, or by using a DPDK-like userspace networking solution. However, the lack of TSO/LRO even by itself is a killer for performance.

Disclaimer: I work on CDN performance. We've served 90Gb/s with a 12-core Xeon-D. To serve the same amount of traffic with QUIC, you'd probably need multiple Xeon Gold CPUS. I guess that Google can afford this.
Could we use this to make more haptic touch screens?
Most western countries distinguish between free speech and incitement to murder. Relatively uncontroversial.
I'd say desktop Linux is more insecure than Windows, and the only reason we don't see malware is that nobody uses it. So if high profile targets, like energy companies, started using Linux on the desktop, it may end up being worse than Windows.
> I actually disable QUIC myself, because I've noticed it slows everything down too much on some home routers.

I'm curious how you measured and came to this conclusion since the design and most all metrics claim the opposite? And are you sure it isn't a bufferbloat issue rather than QUIC?
Just thinking. Maybe using lxd with rendering on the X server of the host if you use Linux. Then keeping a base container that you can clone anytime you want to start a new browsing session. Or making use snapshots if you like.
I wonder if there are any good pseudo-profound bullshit generators.
I believe Java also fits that list. The [Java Language Specification](https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se12/html/index.htm...) via the [Java Virtual Machine Specification](https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se12/html/index.ht...) is implemented on the open-source OpenJDK project and many other free distributions exist, including from Amazon, Azul, IBM, Alibaba and others [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Java_virtual_machines#...
Wrong.
http://ttendency.cs.ucl.ac.uk/projects/type_study/documents/...

"our central finding is that both static type
systems find an important percentage of public bugs: both Flow 0.30 and TypeScript 2.0 successfully detect 15%!"

In fact there have been more than 1 study with the same conclusion.
The main benefit of Python is the ecosystem of libraries. Those libraries don't have type annotations. Mypy is a far cry from a real statically typed language.
Which Startup?
What is the most interesting startup you have come across in the last couple of months?
2400 sq feet two story 3 bd/2ba apartment with 30 minutes commute to Google via subway $4k/mo
Some non-3D iPad game seems like a bad example to use in the article given the popularity of things like Minecraft. Why not discuss the impact 3D games have instead?

Also, playing with blocks doesn’t do anything to your inner ear.
People still make music using C64, NES, GameBoy, etc. Some pretty decent stuff out there if look around. For anyone else interested see https://chipmusic.org which is a forum for posting and talking about chiptune-related things, or http://www.8bitpeoples.com a label run by chiptune artists most of which I believe can be downloaded for free at 192.
Theoretical question: what would be more effective rallying support for this:

1. Having 3000 developers on LinkedIn privatemessage developers working on the windows OS apps team to have this bumped up in priority

2. Having 30 000 developers on twitter tweet @SatyaNadella and other prominent figures in the MSFT world, who could rally support and make things move at the top so the orders come down the chain to get this terminal thing settled.
Amazon finds an alternative workforce of people with disabilities
Personally prefer ConsoleZ over conemu. Its more stable and does fewer strange things when i last evaluated it. Fluent i guess has better themes support and UWP might be some sort of advantage.

https://github.com/cbucher/console
Happens a lot on articles about non-western civilizations technological advancements. The writers -of this articles- assume that western technology is the best/most advanced (most probably without malice) and the others' are just cute or magical.
I have the same feeling. Thinking about competitors eats more than social networks.
Is there a good reason why running this requires you to install a certificate authority?

I get that this might be because of software signing requirements on Windows, but in that case you should bundle a script that generates+signs the build using a local certificate instead of loading a random CA into the system trust source.
A Gallery of Computer Setups
The article refers to the oldest printed book, which is expensive by the virtue of being in the hands of a private collector(s). The Diamond Sūtra pre-dates the Gutenberg Bible by some margin, is in The British Library collection[1].

[0] https://wiganlanebooks.co.uk/blog/interesting/10-of-the-olde...

[1] https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-diamond-sutra
Anecdote: In the 90s California, there was a chemical science research company, perhaps formed in the late 70s. Many scientists there had PhDs or quality Master in Chemistry, and they set out to write software to support the drug discovery, pesticide and industrial chemicals industry. The company was well-managed, and it grew. Into the 90s, the Macintosh computer got a lot of attention for graphics, while Windows was stuck at 3.x, and many of the scientists had DEC associations.

So the company had a plural, cross-platform code base in C for some of its core IP. Scientists may not write the best code, but they can write a lot of it, so the core libraries grew and grew.

In the 1997 or so time, Internet grows, VAX declines, Windows improves and pushes hard. The senior management are being tempted by the huge (at the time) money for valuation. Someone decides to take the Microsoft point of view.

There was a "global rollout" effort conceived and implemented, to switch every working piece of code to Windows , backed by fanfare and the sort of content-less cheerleading you find at an ordinary school.. matching t-shirts and good looking people there to "help" you with the transition (!) to port the code ! There was tons of it, there were build chains, there was network code. But it was the MONEY at the top, and the relentless pressure from Microsoft and affiliates, directly, at golf courses and at hotels and at the airport and in the money meetings, that greased the wheels to decide for everyone, that Windows was the standard, end of story.

Many working, carefully built products, were retired, and the team management was required to change over or else be retired also. The change happened. Within a few years (before 2000) the entire company was sold to Elsivier for three-digit millions.

postscript - a small few senior scientists did find Java when it was released, and led an effort to port certain things to Java. The web was a cacophony, and Java might have over-represented itself as far as a web-GUI and also backend. No news about the fate of that, but it was a minority effort, amongst a few who had discretionary budgets to allocate for that.
Some people run Chrome in a container:

https://github.com/jessfraz/dockerfiles/blob/master/chrome/s...

It could be configured to run in a totally clean container to keep the browser reasonably isolated from the host system.

Of course, the truly harcore can use Qubes OS and spawn a disposable VM to browse the web from:

https://www.qubes-os.org/doc/disposablevm/
No reason for an MITM to try and support HTTP/3 on a reasonable timeline, and avoid making their customers figure it out on their own? Er, okay.

Edit: Ahh...read some of your other posts. You aren't a fan of HTTP/3, which puts your comment in context for me.
I've always have thought it is the result of diversions developed by very smart and curious people.
Don’t underestimate unintentiofnal lucky accidents and coincidence.

Many cultures were burying things such as fruit, fish and cattle in fields before planting the seeds and burning fields after the harvest as a form of a religious offering without understanding what was going on, on a chemical level in the soil.

No one would think of burning “sky rocks” to make daggers and swords out of them either in a rational manner. But it makes sense that they would do so in some odd religious ritual.

Pretty much every initial technological advancement in human history was likely driven by an irrational thought completely unrelated to what would be achieved in the end before the scientific method was developed.
I even checked as I was writing it, and still got it back-to-front!

You are of course correct.
Also note that the header is clickbait: you get 14 yrs for possession, not for reading.
My experience of working with Go in teams is that it encourages copy-paste programming and "works on my machine" deployment problems.
The situation for terminal emulators is still bad on Windows.

Those web-based ones have no problems with fancy font features like powerline icons or ligatures but they still have a limitation when it comes to color support. [1] Fluent seems to be affected from this as well.

The other important feature for me is tmux with mouse support. To my knowledge, only WSLtty [2] does this right. It lacks support for font ligatures but I value a functional tmux more than some ligature eye candy.

I still hope that Microsoft will improve their own conhost.exe in further updates. Also, the upcoming 1903 update will improve the color support those web-based terminal emulators.

[1] https://github.com/zeit/hyper/issues/1968

[2] https://github.com/mintty/wsltty
As angel rounds can very well be 100% private deals, I have to question how complete this data is.

I can certainly believe that in the "Startupland", as they call it, seed rounds are changing. But that isn't the whole industry. Because at the same time, there is growing pushback against VC investment for small software companies, and growing pushback against the "grow fast or fail" mentality.

I know of multiple angel-backed projects just in my small town over the past couple years, that have zero news coverage. Admittedly, my small town is a bedroom community for a tech area, so we have more than your average number of software professionals here. Still, if you tell me the half dozen projects going on in my small town is outpacing the entire state of Texas... I just do not find that plausible.
Thanks for the pointer. I'll share a link to Cmder[1], which was what I was pointed at the other day.

[1]: https://cmder.net/

(So far, it beats the heck out of cmd.exe, especially for WSL...)
As a first approximation, about 20 years before the end of each century: pre-1880 for newsprint & pre-1980 for television.

All that is required for the press to function is that someone foots the bill.

They can do so for a variety of reasons. Supported by a political party (Fox is actually returning to earlier times here). Supported as a charity / pet project (the news barons, Bezos). And supported commercially from sales (CNN).

Generally, every news media form in the US has eventually moved to the last.
No, seriously. There is a TOS against posting reviews outside of Airbnb. A medium blog post was posted here about it[0].

> I still can’t believe that leaving an offsite review was a bannable offense, but even more disturbing to me is the way AirBnB handled the situation with a one-sided, permanent, irreversible, closed book suspension.

[0] https://medium.com/@jacksoncunningham/digital-exile-how-i-go...
‘I'm struggling’–Facing paycuts some ride-hailing drivers prep for strike
Uh why ? Thousands of hits per second will generally be IO or DB bound and will be done using clear code and a minimum of boilerplate.
In Russia, we had "pay us 1m dollars or we kill you spam." Unsettling it is, given that once in a million times, the threat carried is true.

That was one of many many things that made me leave.
What were Facebook’s reasons?
I don't read Linkedin messages. Do you? I think this is the kind of non-biz-demand "charity" work that needs to be driven from the top to succeed.
> Python has all the bells and whistles you need to build large code bases, but you do need to get organized, no language can really do that for you and attempts at forcing you to do it give rise to 'factory factory' nonsense

This is almost satirical.

> Assembler has all the bells and whistles you need to build large code bases, but you do need to get organized, no language can really do that for you and attempts at forcing you to do it give rise to 'factory factory' nonsense.

I can definitely see someone replacing python with any X language.

Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should. I personally like opinionated languages that have made some decisions for you based on best practices and research.
I think Python is at a weird place regarding data science.

If you need easy-to-use tools, R libraries cover significantly more ground than Python. You don't have to worry about 2/3 compatibility of niche libraries. Plus the functional language forces the libraries to have similar API's. You also get to use tidyverse and ggplot2 in all of their majestic beauty. At most you have to write a "%>% do() %>%" to get around weird library API choices.

However if you are in the frontier, you could avoid so much awkward notation with an array-first language like Matlab or Julia. You have "^" instead of "np.linalg.matrix_power", "/","\" instead of "np.linalg.lstsq", the . operator and so much more life-saving tools.
i’ve used pycharm to refactor 100k+ LOC bases.

pycharm also uses the type hints that are PART OF THE LANGUAGE (aka pythonic) as of python 3.x and enforces them.
True, I've seen a lot on some clients CMSs. Classic case would be the ones uploading an screenshot of an image done on their Mac, which by default (as many OSes, anyway) outputs a PNG.
https://www.flaticon.com/, maybe?
My understanding of your argument is it's too much of a burden for devs to run a static type checker manually so the language should force you to run it as part of the compilation process.

Sure, yeah, if you want to ensure type safety then use a type safe language...argument over.

...unless you want to do something like duck punch some function into someone else's library and you really don't want to rearchitech how the whole thing works because of that one special case which just doesn't quite work.
AI Should Be Renamed
The suspicion I have with the 'propaganda being interwoven into the fabric of American society' argument is that it's non-falsifiable.

How would you prove this isn't happening?
This is the theory of phonons: pseudo particles which transfer heat in materials.
UWP apps are signed. To sideload, you either need to enable developer mode (allow installing untrusted app signatures), OR install the signing CA (but don't enable developer mode).

Your proposed individual CA model does seem like an improvement for that route, but I just enable developer mode.
Right, and if some secondary source called out the fact that they are still in use and these guys are idiots then at least the original article would have made the sin of omission, and not the sin of outright contradicting yourself.
- TikZ wizardry.

- Often, I had to look deeply into forum posts to get LaTeX to format a formula in the way that I imagined (often the solution involved deep LaTeX wizardry)

- Creating a document that involves text in multiple alphabets (e.g. Latin alphabet, Greek alphabet, cyrillic alphabet). Actually trivial with Microsoft Word. ;-)

Not to even mention problems where I have no idea how to start such as how to do reproducable build processes for LaTeX documents (i.e. each run of the build process produces a binarily identical PDF document).
These two stuck out as well. I wonder if the issue is with their coding practices and not necessarily a fault with the language.

If the issue is one of fundamentals it will only follow them to the next project or language
This equation is lacking, since he doesn't account for the cost of ownership.

I'm moving all my people to macs from windows because the amount of lost work on windows and the amount of IT help needed is much greater for windows.

Also, the anti-virus solutions on windows, which are much more needed there[1], have gotten really terrible recently. AVG was basically making the machines useless.

[1] The standard I use for new mac users is they are not administrators, like everyone is on Windows. That prompt on windows to ask to install something that all users get numb to and say "yes"? Doesn't exist for my mac users, since they aren't admins. That alone helps in so many ways.