skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yet another interesting benefit of/interesting feature of VB is that it was the Python of its day in terms of the "there's a library to do that" factor. Not only was it easy to pick up, but (while not built-in like Python) it had access to thousands and thousands of easy to install and easy to use ActiveX libraries. There was almost always an ActiveX Library to suit your needs, ready to literally drop into the WYSIWYG editor and use.

That combined with the easy to use WYSIWYG editor and the edit and continue functionality were, to me, what made it such an amazingly useful language for creating quick utilities or small programs. It was truly a "Rapid Application Development" language.

I also saw some nightmares in my days, though I don't blame VB as much as the people who created the app. The most notable one was a document management system that I'd been asked to port from VB3 to VB6 (so that it could run on win32 among other reasons) and to turn the system from a batch system for document processing facilities into a desktop DMS for home use. I will never forget when I opened up the project and there were 60 some-odd "forms" in it, and when I opened any one of them up not a single one defined a variable. They all - every last one - was defined as a global variable in a single globals.bas file. There were thousands of global variables. Every single one in the entire application declared there, and edited at will in any of the myriad forms wherever they fancied. My first task became "untangle the global variable mess."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_earth_block

Concrete can be replaced in part through the use of CEB/CSEB and/or rammed earth.
All true but all still better than what Obama did for us which was jack and shit. We have had a really bad run of poor/sellout leadership in the USA. It's time our representatives began working for us. Also, wouldn't it be nice if the country was run by the people we elected and not by deep state shit heels?
Vive Cosmos Is the Next Consumer VR HMD from HTC
The premise of the post seems to be that Verilog RTL is the lowest form of abstraction in which you can program an FPGA, and that everything lower is guarded by proprietary FPGA tools.

That is simply not true.

You can manually instantiate FPGA primitives (LUTs/BRAMs/DSPs) with all major FPGAs, and if you’re truly desperate you can add placement attributes to place these primitives exactly where you want them.

That’s as close to the metal as I can imagine (other than specifying the actual routing network), and from there one could build up any abstraction level one desires.
Facebook’s Libra must be stopped
A bullet fired straight up will come down in free fall (and tumbling). Certainly not lethal nor very dangerous.

Bullets fired on ballistic trajectories can be lethal OTOH, That's even a machine gun doctrine to hit enemies behind cover...
Oh I agree Dyalog is super nice and that it is free for personal/hobby use, but using it at work costs ~1k/year. I'm always a bit leery working with such systems when most software is now free. If your company already uses it, that's great and if they already have a site license it is essentially zero cost to use from your point. If you're that weird guy asking to use the heiroglyphics language...it can be a tough sell to management and IT.
Yes, ActiveX was the sauce that made VB quick and even fun to use! I tell people it was the Python of its day.
In a tyrannical country of 20milion people ruled by a dictator, giving the dictator agency doesn't help the 20million suppressed people. Never confuse a nation of people with its (often illegitimate) government
It's about darn time. Regardless of the whole "nuke" situation, Iran has been a thorn in the side of companies for years. Between them and North Korea, civilian operations are regularly crippled and data stolen. I even know a company that got ransomware twice, both times from the North Koreans (company paid the first time, so they went back after them). Most of the time, companies don't widely disclose this (except to affected parties), so you don't hear about it, but it's very much out there and widespread (according to the FBI agents involved in this case and what I have heard). China and Russia do it too.

The FBI classifies such things as acts of terror, yet we have done nothing to protect our own companies. If Iran wants to keep attacking our nation to compensate for lost oil money, it is about time we start crippling their infrastructure until they simply have no way to send a packet to the outside world.
Here’s How Technology Could Change Supermarkets in the Next 10 Years
Really? Seems obviously good for everyone on an expensive mobile connection. Just like old-Opera's low bandwidth mode that proxies all requests through their servers. Never heard much bitching about that, btw. Just praise.

It's kinda like an internet service that doesn't meter your WhatsApp data (very common here in Mexico): it's obviously useful to people, but it comes at an expensive price in the aggregate. Nobody really cares about the aggregate though.
In the past, it's been about budgets: Microsoft has an aura of money about it. The OS cost money, the good developer tools cost money, the database cost (a lot of) money. Startups are by definition cash-strapped.

Some of that is changing - the developer tooling is getting free/cheap - but the rest of the stack (OS, hosting, database) still isn't free. (I know, the MS folks are going to say SQL Server Express Edition is free, but you rarely run a startup on that.)
Temporary Containers is almost perfect, except when you create a new tab it takes a split second for that tab to be assigned a new temporary container. For that split moment, if you're typing in an address whatever you've typed in so far will be erased when the new tab is switched to the temporary container. On my underpowered machine, this usually means one or two keys are dropped, such that if i was typing in "google" immediately after creating a new tab, the effect is as if I typed "ogle".

Perhaps on faster hardware, the switch to the temporary container happens faster than you can begin typing.
Lazyness in Haskell can never change I/O (maybe except performance) unless you use unsafePerformIO, right?

Also, there's a link to a page about laziness on the left.
> lazy I/O which can introduce horrible bugs or straight up mess with execution order of critical code

I've never seriously programmed Haskell, so honest question: I understand the first point, but how is the second possible? Isn't the point of passing RealWorld around that you enforce the order of execution through data dependencies rather than expression order? It always seemed like a very elegant (and incredibly impractical :) ) solution to me.
You overlooked the influence of the US State Department, War/Defense Department, and CIA over those nations.
How to Use Safari Web Inspector on Mac OS and iOS
Lazy I/O is widely regarded as a mistake, I don't really know any Haskell programmers that advocate that anymore. We have plenty of other approaches that have a better foundation.
The real answer: the cost (in developer time) of making computers that boot instantly is too high to justify the benefits.
Wow, really? Interesting, the one's I'm familiar with (used in tilt-up construction) are just solid concrete (maybe plus some rebar).

Totally with you on exterior foam though, you want the insulation outside of the thermal mass if at all possible.
It is an engineering challenge, but not in development and innovation so much as in policy and implementation. There is a lack of understanding of that what is happening isn't a choice. It is an escalating situation where things you don't deal with today will cost more to deal with tomorrow. Something we and our societies aren't used to. Rather we are used to a Moore's law situation where things get better by themselves. The future will very likely be defined by who can provide more prosperity for less energy. Something that many countries won't manage to align with for many decades.

So unfortunately I think the optimism is misguided. The current trend is more like that demotivaional poster, "if you are not part of the solution, there is good money to be made in prolonging the problem".
Lifestyle business is nice except the niches in which they can sustainably exist are really really scarce. Most of the time you either get big yourself, or pushed out of the market by someone who does.
In 2005 I have switched from Internet Explorer 6 to Firefox. At that time unlike Firefox IE6 did not have tabs and could not prevent pop up windows. Since then I'm on Firefox, and I have never been disappointed.
> Now we just need Mozilla to come up with a more modern-looking logo.

You're in luck: https://blog.mozilla.org/press-uk/2019/06/11/firefox-the-evo...
Even if you can prove that, it doesn’t follow that communism is the alternative.
Lets not blame Microsoft alone for OEMs having the easiest route out, it takes two to dance.

Poor little OEMs, specially the ones that were installing pirate copies, so they weren't bound to any Microsoft requirement to start with.

Just like they do nowadays with Android updates, producing new handsets with 2 - 3 versions behind, to avoid new development costs, without any kind of updates afterwards, regardless of Treble compliance.
> The only way this is happening is if the planet gets depopulated of humans rapidly.

Please don't tell me you're one of those "earth would be better of were we all dead" people. I can't stand that kind of post-modernist, nihilistic garbage. I'm not mister optimist, but still, that's way too far.

Also, that kind of rhetoric is going to end up being a justification for some one very evil doing some thing very bad.

> The only way to fix this problem is to stop using fossil fuels. There is no politically viable way for this to happen.

Eeh, wrong. The fact that we're not there yet doesn't mean we can't get there. At some point, pulling energy out of thin air will end up cheaper than doing expensive drilling operations.

Post-modernists are the philosophical equivalent of the kid who gets mad when he loses at Monopoly, flips the board, and walks away.
No individual is responsible for things like this (if only!). This is a systems-level failure. It's only going to get worse; our short-term incentives are all wrong and our systems are set up to favor short-term thinking. Anyone with "power" who attempts to go against the existing incentives will be shut down. You need a mass movement supporting some real visionaries who are capable of solving the underlying systemic issues before there will be any real movement towards change. Unfortunately this takes time, and we may be out of time.
> Initially, with the help of the nomadic snake charmers, he subjected himself to the snake bite (possibly cobra, but patient was not sure) over his tip of the tongue. The snake bite was associated with jerky movements of the body, blurring of vision, and unresponsiveness, i.e. “blackout” as per the patient for 1 h. However, after waking up he experienced a heightened arousal and sense of well-being, which lasted for 3–4 weeks, which according to the patient was more intense that the state of high experienced till that time with any dose of alcohol or opioids.

I am... surprised that this does not permanently damage your tongue.
You just need to fit another person in that single room, make more use of the resources to build it and need less to heat it. If the only action is shaming you for existing, because existing increases entropy, then the limit is that it goes to shaming you until you commit suicide.

It's much more important to ship 20,000 tons of Spiderman toys over the Pacific ocean for Christmas presents, only to bury them in a dump, because that's profitable. After all - you don't even buy stuff or spend money on flights or fuel, why should you even have a say or a right to exist at all? /s
Was thinking this recently. Saw the Netflix show. From my very limited understanding it seems the cost per litre of safe water could be prohibitive but I don't know that.
I'm on XPS/Windows and switched to Firefox a month ago and so far it's been enjoyable. I think it is noticeably slower than Chrome but no more memory usage issues with just a handful of tabs open and adblock running over a period of several days. XPS also has a weird scrolling bug in Chrome when the trackpad just stops scrolling until the window is resized. That's not an issue anymore. I've not been disappointed in general.
Because ICANN is not the freaking United Nations where everyone has to be invited. They're supposed to run business and not screw us up.

> Why are we letting this group of business people make decisions about global internet?

As opposed to another group of non-business people such as a bunch of government or UN employees without experience in running a business?

Why did you let the UN give the Saudis get a seat on the UN Human Rights Council?

> Why not, for example, scientists from the different countries?

What difference would that make, except that it would open ICANN to influence of communists and religious fanatics?

You have some very good ideas, I'd put you in charge.
Could also be a security issue. Creating one of those sites would surely help nefarious actors create amazon related scam sites. If amazon controls the TLD then only amazon can create .amazon sites.
And yet, whenever given the choice with my hobby projects, I always drop the open source available FPGAs and toolchains for Altera or Xilinx.

The moment any kind of debugging or timing analysis is required, the open source chain currently falls flat.

Things will improve over time, but I think some of it is painted a bit too rosy.
I wasn’t trying to insult Lisp.

Compilers for Lisp have been around in some form for many years—I can remember hearing Patrick Winston talking about them when I first learned Lisp in his class in 1973. There are both interpreters and compilers for many languages and translators that are in between that use JIT compilation at run time.

Lisp and it’s offshoots (Scheme, Dylan, Common Lisp, Clojure, etc.) have a wider range of compilation and interpretation strategies used in their implementations than other programming languages. Perhaps this is due to the fact that Lisp has been around longer than almost any other important language or perhaps its due to its homoiconicity.

However my point was really about the availability of eval at run time, however it is implemented, and particularly eval that runs in the program’s address space and security context.

It’s true that the SBCL implementation of Common Lisp, by default, compiles eval’s arguments at runtime, but it may also use interpretation at runtime depending on the value of the a global variable. Other implementations of Common Lisp always use interpretation, like CLISP. Also, Common Lisp has eval-when which affects the compile vs interpret decision [1].

Readers interested in interpretation vs compilation can find introductory coverage of the topic in Wikipedia, see [2]. Lisp has an interesting and important history to computer science as the first interpreted high level language, see it’s Wikipedia entry at [3].

[1] http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw50/CLHS/Body/s_eval...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpreter_(computing)

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)
> “If Uber didn't produce any value for the user people wouldn't be taking them”

At current prices, which are unsustainbly low due to VC subsidy, people find value in the trade of money for the service. At a price that fairly reflects the cost of delivering the service unsubsidized and maintaining driver quality of life at a socially acceptable level, nobody would pay for it.

So the game was to lever perceived market value up very high with VC subsidy and hype, all the while knowing that they are selling a dollar for fifty cents, just long enough to be acquired or go public at prices that pay back the original VC subsidizers at a multiple allowing them to profit, while whomever bought in is left holding the bag when the company is left in an unsustainable operating position and there’s no more hype-profit carrot to attract new subsidy investors.
Aren't sea levels predicted to rise causing damage and altering coastlines?

So seafloor subsidence should be great, let have more of it!

(yes, I realize it likely won't be much)
Social isolation and loneliness in Canada
When all the adblocking news came out I switched to Firefox. Used it for two weeks exclusively, then I switched back. There are a lot of things that just don't work, or work in a weird way. For example, I use Linux with the Arc Dark theme, and Firefox shows the inputs, textareas and buttons dark background and dark text, which results in an almost unusable experience on a lot of websites. Of course, this can be fixed, if you add an extra config (so not editing an existing one), and you set the "inner" styles to use the light Arc style.

Next, my laptop has a touch screen, and I cannot use it to scroll. When I'm listening to music on YouTube, even if it is in the background, it uses so much CPU that my whole laptop becomes extremely hot. Also, I'm developing a website where there is an element that has overflow:auto on it, and has some inner paddings, Firefox doesn't render the bottom one. The buttons are rendered with the text off center on all Bootstrap 3 websites, and for example on Github a bunch of buttons, badges, labels, and pagination elements have their text vertically off center too.

I know that all of these could be happenning, because we (developers) optimize things for Chrome now, but when the CSS styling works as expected in Chrome, and not in Firefox, then it certainly feels like Firefox has the bugs, because Chrome does what I expect it to do.

Lastly, on my iPhone, the browsing experience was really bad. Frequent freezes, slow page loads, when I closed a tab, the whole tab screen scrolled to unexpected positions.

All in all, the small things are the ones that ruin the experience for me, and Firefox has a lot of them (at least for me).
Even older actually, 52. (He was born Aug. 1937 and Garmin was founded Oct. 1989.)

> In 1989, they pooled their savings and persuaded Dr. Kao’s Taiwanese relatives to invest seed money. With $4 million...

That's $8.4 million in 2019 dollars. It takes a lot of money to start a hardware company, especially something as complex as a GPS. I'm wondering if Garmin would exist if he didn't have the personal savings and access to family money. One advantage of being older is having more money (usually).

It was pretty standard that you used savings and/or relatives' money to do startups in the past. I think that a 20-year-old being about to raise cash from arms-length investors (like VCs) is a recent phenomenon -- only in the last couple decades. Jobs and Wozniak built the Apple I with personal cash, and got Mike Markkula's loan for $250,000 (in 1976) or $1.1 million in 2019 dollars only after getting a large order.
"Planting a tree does capture carbon. However, when it dies and rots, all the carbon gets re-released over time back into the atmosphere."

Not all the carbon. Some of it stays in the ground to eventually form more fossil fuel.
Article 50 of the Constitution of the Soviet Union granted its citizens not only freedom of speech, but many more rights than its American counterpart.

Which tells you something about how meaningless the discussion about whether a country explicitly grants this right or not is. Whether there's a piece of paper saying you have freedom of speech tells you nothing about whether you have de-facto freedom of speech.
USB inventor admits that the plugs are annoying
> Now we just need Mozilla to come up with a more modern-looking logo

Like the one Mozilla announced last week? :)

https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/firefox-the-evolution-of...

They have been working on it for almost a year.

https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/evolving-the-firefox-bra...
Does rice cultivation generate more greenhouse gases than meat farming?
Was Joel Spolsky a great programmer when he was coding?
> in the US at least, because belief in climate change is a political opinion.

Which is a strange state of affairs. In the European countries I am familiar with, all the mainstream parties agree with core mainstream science. Their voters largely do as well. They may have more or less credible plans to address the problem but they don't have their own private scientific conclusions.

Why is the US (and maybe Australia?) different? Is it because voters are ignorant or short termist, and politicians follow? Or politicians are corrupted and mislead their voters? Or just a higher level of scientific ignorance all around? Or a heavy dependence on fossil fuel prosperity in key districts?

Can someone suggest the answer? Clearly Europeans are not more intrinsically virtuous or sensible.
The very first one was called Openmoko, released in 2007.
The A.I. Landlord That's Building a Single-Family-Home Empire
Ask HN: Features you would like to see
We're currently in the process of designing a project that'll result in (a) product(s) for economists and management in "medium" sized companies, to keep track metrics and/or calculate more. There are plans to make it modular, and it's features be extend-able.

We're looking for features you would like to see in such an application. Thank you for your time!
The thing is Google is punishing me for using Firefox with recaptchas everywhere. Recaptchas with Firefox needs like 5 or even more attempts (the slow ones) while Chrome is resolved automatically or just one attempt at maximum.
Also there are semi-bugs. Sometimes opening urls linked to containers put the tabs in weird places, and sometimes.. I think I lost the tabs, if that makes sense.
Doing a full rewrite is often asking for trouble, though. Somebody out there on the internet maintains a list of companies which have pretty much put themselves out of business by doing full rewrites. Why is this? Because it turns out that a lot of that "old, ugly code" is in fact various types of bug fixes and other operational accommodations. And when you do a full rewrite you tend to lose track of a lot of that stuff, meaning that you get to deal with it all over again, often in a quite painful manner.

A former employer of mine had switched from using custom code to packaged code, which introduced plenty of problems of its own but overall things were generally going about as well as could be expected. Then they decided that they just had to have the latest and greatest version of that code from the vendor, which promised all kinds of flashy bells and whistles. They unwisely jumped into this with both feet (they were an early adopter), only to find that when those bells and whistles were added a lot of the old code had been rewritten, too, which introduced (or maybe re-introduced) a large number of very serious bugs. By the time those bugs were corrected (if they ever really were), the company (which was by now my former employer) was in such bad shape that they were basically forced to close their doors. They had pretty much lost control over their inventory and financials, for example, and had committed themselves to fulfilling contracts which were based on cost figures that were woefully incorrect.
Atari launches its VCS console
> rapid depopulation

What exactly do you mean by this, and how would you accomplish it? Assuming, that is, that nuclear doesn't work (for whatever reason), as you've drawn a dichotomy.
If you think of the situation in North Korea as a hostage situation, you wi find that the action of the criminals ( the government ) is generally rational.
Was against, but AFAIK not anymore https://brendaneich.com/2014/03/inclusiveness-at-mozilla/