skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Chinese people doing business with Chinese companies aren't affected by these sorts of things either. By restricting the discussion in that way, you're evading what you must know is the main point of what I'm saying: people doing business have been much more heavily affected, so far in this trade war, by arbitrary actions of the US President than of the Chinese government. This applies equally to American businesspeople. The ban on doing business with Huawei, for example, has wiped out billions of dollars in revenue from the balance sheets of American companies.

So while these threads on China regularly draw huge numbers of comments all but calling for war with China, the much more serious, arbitrary actions by the sitting US President are met mostly with approval in these forums.
It's barely a corporation. Just another monolithic utility with government mandated monopoly and no incentive to provide service or value.
Not only is the article overblown IMO, but it's also irresponsibly written.

A lot of people suffer from insomnia and sleep anxiety. They don't need to be told that missing sleep is dangerous. They need to be told that missing sleep is normal sometimes, and that your body will sleep when it's ready to.
if by maintenance work, you mean "patch up the system so it keep trudging a long" then sure. it sucks.

And I feel that when people refer to maintenance work that is what they end up doing.

I like improving systems (I think it is a much a bigger challenge than making a new system from scratch). I suppose this is a kind of maintenance work.

But I am still trying to figure out how to get the green flag to do this. I often want to re-architecture big parts of the system; but at the same time, I don't want get overworked (neither does anybody really).

I find that I don't really have an incentive to refactor a semi-large part of the code into a better design (how do I even know if it's better? seems subjective). My incentives (deliver the story, complete the sprint's points) push me to just change as little as I can (patch it up) and then forget about it instead of refactoring a lot of it.

And every time I have done that I keep thinking as I do it: "this is exactly how this code got to this point. A few generations of developers with no incentive to refactor this from a slightly bigger picture, just carefully hack in what the story requires and move on". aah the joy of software engineering in real life :/
Unlocking new cheaper energy grows the economy more than anything else. Can you think of an example in the past where a new source of energy has caused a negative effect on productivity?
Google pulls Hong Kong protestor game from store
It’s Okay If You’re Not Resilient
Vim does not use the Unix philosophy. It is an Amiga program ported to Unix, designed along the lines of Emacs, which also does not use the Unix philosophy. You would think he would have noticed that his text editor was a domain where he wasn't applying the superior Unix philosophy.

I'm not convinced that the Unix philosophy doesn't apply to image and video editing, but certainly we haven't seen an example (aside from filters, which work well in things like netpbm and Khoros, but I mean for actual interactive drawing and editing.) And certainly the performance cost of the Unix approach was infeasible in 1988, when Thomas Knoll wrote Photoshop. Still, the tree-structured pipeline structure of CAD models in FreeCAD, SolidWorks, and CATIA suggests that it might be a productive approach with enough work.

We have seen the Vim philosophy applied to video editing, with great success; that's Blender.
Hmm, Apple was nowhere near that big in Jobs' era. Everybody was in one or two floors in infinite loop 1 and 2
...and in our industry, the fire fighters praised by management are often the one who designed the house like a tinderbox.
Does not appear to at a light skim thru, just may happen to have the same name...
Why ground water and not river water? Aquifers in CA are already collapsing and will not recover.
a few years of that until one day, for example Apple realeases Catalina?
Do you know the huge GitHub banner which gives you a link to there basic tutorial?

I have seen too many people in it NOT clicking this huge waste of space away but instead always scrolling down before doing anything.

User don't care that much apparently.
steam engine - what to fear ?

combustion engine - what to fear ?

computer - what to fear ?

internet - what to fear ?

robots - what to fear ?

artificial intelligence - what to fear ?

?????? - what to fear ?

Maybe there is not point to fear ?
A lot of SaaS businesses aren’t really SaaS, they’re glorified custom development shops with a few high paying customers.

That’s not a great business to run though as it’s very difficult to scale.

Far too many fall into the trap of saying yes to the first BigCo that comes by early on because they need the $$. While they neglect every other niche and business where it could fit like a glove.

Or more often doesn’t even bother legitimately testing it on the open market since their very limited programming time is spent serving BigCo and doing support.

A lot of companies using SaaS have a bunch of different systems interconnected with Zapier or their own systems. Which IMO is far more like Unix than x product that turns into a full blown CRM, CMS, ERP etc tacked on top a niche product.

Building highly customized software also generates tons of risk for smaller companies as it binds their entire revenue on the success of a small group of other companies who may die, switch core business, or get stolen away by a bigger enterprise software sales team.

I’d much rather build a niche software product and instead of building a CRM on top just add every sort of API, webhook, Zapier, or direct integration. Or isolate them into separate products with shared authentication and logging systems.
> Former Blackboarder here with +50 implementations in 4 years.

It's unsettling the way you're willing to come right out and admit that.
Click to select and move with arrow keys could be OK

Oh god no. Like you already state, most people operate both the mouse and the arrow keys with the right hand, so your proposal adds a lot of unnecessary movement. It could work with click to select and with WSAD keys, but most office users wouldn't discover that mode.

I would much prefer navigation keys (arrow keys, page up/down, home, end) to select, shift+navigation keys to move.
Often case that isn't the wrong way to go. Newer doesn't mean better, and there's always trade-offs to consider. "It's newer" by itself really shouldn't be much of a consideration.
Iraq - 100+ dead
Thanks ronsor. Appreciate your reply.
A mob of tarantulas is prowling San Francisco
This.

People talk about Starlink like they never heard of RF engineering or something? I mean really, what does Starlink change when the entity doing the blocking is a state level actor?
I feel like going the other way would be more useful.
I'd rather not be one of those "why is this on Hacker News" people but it seems anything remotely negative about China gets an instant bump to the front page these days regardless of relevance. China seems to have become something of an obsession.
Reduced model for direct induction startup scenario development on MAST-U&NSTX-U
> That would be "many numbers" not "a number."

A distinction without a difference, honestly. Your computer conceptually has "many numbers", but its addressable storage is finite, and so is really just one big number.

> So many numbers that it's possible no digital machine can simulate it.

The very fact that the brain exists is proof that a machine of this size fully mimicking the brain's capabilities is feasible. Encoding information digitally is at best a constant factor difference from other numerical bases.

And this is assuming a quantum-level reproduction, which very likely isn't necessary.
> Ecuador remaining Ecuador

what do you mean, exactly? This is just a personal thing, but I know many ecuadorians and I feel very strong emotions to the current events there. For me it is much closer culturally than Hong-Kong.
This is missing a big part of the dynamic. Much enterprise software is what Joel Spolsky describes as "internal software"[0]:

> Internal software only has to work in one situation on one company’s computers.… Here usability is a lower priority, because a limited number of people need to use the software, and they don’t have any choice in the matter, and they will just have to deal with it. Speed of development is more important. Because the value of the development effort is spread over only one company, the amount of development resources that can be justified is significantly less.

So, a lot of enterprise software sucks because it simply doesn't make sense to make it decent. No matter how directly the end users communicate with the developers, this won't change.

The economics of internal software don't apply to products like Blackboard (which would go in Joel's "shrinkwrap" category), but the vast majority of enterprise software is internal and thus sucks for reasons entirely unrelated to this thread.

[0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/05/06/five-worlds/
a new project is much easier to do than having to deal with software a few years old created by a parade of a dozen people
Things drones can do that seem UFO like: turn sharp corners suddenly and stop on a dime, move in concert as if they were points of light attached to a solid object, disappear or hide by turning their LEDs off, appear by turning them on.

Things drones can't do: go fast enough to cross the sky in a blink, stop on a dime or turn sharp corners at jet speeds, travel at jet speeds at all - without an obvious and loud model jet engine, create slabs of light or opaque surfaces, block the stars behind them like a solid object, be eerily silent.
Generalizing the inverse FFT off the unit circle
I've told this story before here, but I actually did have a job interview for a company, where they had me work on site for four hours, doing "real" work, and they actually paid me. Granted, it was only like $35/hour, which is pretty low for an engineer in NYC, but it was still a welcome change of pace.
Acrostic
I'm not the author of this tool, but I submitted it to HN because I just stumbled upon it after unsuccessfully trying to transpose a complicated cURL from Chrome devtools into python requests for a good 20 min. This worked instantly. Props to the author - https://twitter.com/nickc_dev
Do You Know What Your Newsletter Is Doing to Help You?
At least Type-C is permanently reversible, where MicroUSB is just destructively reversible.
Do you have any sources for that? I'd agree with the GP: one reason for the astounding safety in aviation is the conscious decision to leave blame and criminalisation out of the picture, and focus instead on the causes and prevention of accidents.

What you wrote goes against everything I know about aviation safety.

As an example, every NTSB report comes with this explicit disclaimer:

> The NTSB does not assign fault or blame for an accident or incident; rather, as specified by NTSB regulation, “accident/incident investigations are fact-finding proceedings with no formal issues and no adverse parties ... and are not conducted for the purpose of determining the rights or liabilities of any person.” 49 C.F.R. § 831.4. Assignment of fault or legal liability is not relevant to the NTSB’s statutory mission to improve transportation safety by investigating accidents and incidents and issuing safety recommendations. In addition, statutory language prohibits the admission into evidence or use of any part of an NTSB report related to an accident in a civil action for damages resulting from a matter mentioned in the report. 49 U.S.C. § 1154(b).
Google Bans the Revolution of Our Times Game About Hong Kong Protests
The Wired article itself mentions that the particles in question settle within a few weeks.

To the extent that's mostly over the ocean, that could be consistent with claims that shipping particulate pollution has a minimal effect on the health of land-based humans.
I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine and it has never reverted back to Google. Perhaps it only happens on certain major updates??
And mankind will never be able to soar like the birds.

shrug

We've seen this play out many, many times before...
> The real reason enterprise software sucks is that enterprises have complex and unique workflows and would prefer to buy software that they can fit to their workflow rather than change the workflows of their profitable business with tens of thousands of staff who will need retraining.

This is the nominal reason executives responsible for inflicting terrible software on their workers tell themselves. But it's not always true. In fact it may often not be true. In many cases the assumptions about how much training is necessary to use the software are all wrong in the first place and the only reason so much training is required is because they chose such terrible software in the first place.

> People hate them because they are complex, configurable, and have 1000 features.

No, in fact it's often that they LACK features and are NOT properly configurable, because they are simply bad software from the very core. You often have a rigid and unwieldy platform with features inelegantly bolted on by underpaid programmers to satisfy corporate buzzword checklists. The end-user experience is furthermore left for last. So not only are you trying to design a UI on a garbage platform, it's your lowest priority. So worker efficiency takes a hit, a hit that you can't measure so you just dismiss and issue beatings to anyone who doesn't use your awfully-designed software effectively.

For a real-life example:

Good Trouble Ticketing Software designed around trying to help teams track work and be more efficient: Request Tracker from Best Practical.

Bad Trouble Ticketing Software nominally designed around being "ITIL compliant" and providing nice reports to management, but is actually just really large badly designed CRUD: Service Now.
So why now? Considering Project Blue Book, and the rise and fall of UFO popularity with the decades, why only now - is this just the slowest dissemination of knowledge possible?
I think this gets it fundamentally correct, although your point has some validity. But the reason that enterprises often wish to pay for configuration of the software instead of changing their own workflows, is that one of these requires no work from them (the decision makers), and the other does.

Much of what is called "enterprise software" is actually more like a proprietary programming language or framework, which you will have to pay specialists to program your application in, with bad debugging tools.

Lastly, Oracle and SAP and etc. aren't actually good at the problem you describe, as attested to by the many users who hate their products. They're just good at selling their software to the decision makers (not the users).
A level of indirection was added to move from gods of nature, through gods within nature, to a monotheistic level of indirection further. That they are the creator or creation (usually). Judaism and Christianity aren't something apart, that move to "a creator" seems to be a tendency of monotheism. They are no more or less convincing than any of the rest of the monotheisms - or pastafarianism come to that. They are just the story that arose in a particular society tied to region and/or time, then belief spread wider, particularly if there was inclusion of evangelism. Or holy wars.

Pastafarianism is the interesting one. It's clearly parody, yet it's equally clearly holding up a set of beliefs that are difficult to argue against - be nice to each other, don't kill people and so forth. The efforts to have it recognised as a "real" religion are interesting as on most counts it's as real as any of the rest. Despite it being humour, it's equally clear it's a nicely formed object to fit the monotheism pattern perfectly. Perhaps not surprising that some people are now claiming to "believe in it" wholeheartedly, even whilst knowing it's comedy.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/18/documentary-fo...
>Perlow describes how she developed a solution to white-collar peonage at Boston Consulting Group. She called her strategy “PTO”: predictable time off. It didn’t seem like a big deal. Teams would pull together to arrange one weeknight off per member per week.

what a nightmare to read. i wish i could say i have never worked with any company so apocalyptically dysfunctional as to need a policy like this.

after 5PM on a weekday and for 100% of the weekend, the default expectation should be that 100% of teammates are not working and are unreachable, even if there is an "emergency". yes, even if it means you or the team is blocked from doing something because you need their input. yes, even if it is "just one tiny question". yes, that means that clients will get mad sometimes.

the team doesn't need to be pulling together to ensure that one person's time off on a weeknight is not interrupted. the team needs to be pulling together to tell management that work stops at 5, every night. then, they need to follow their own rule and be unreachable by 5:01 PM, as a group. this is a problem of labor against management, and the solution is for labor to organize aggressively and set ground rules rather than being picked to pieces by their own sense of industriousness and their desire to please authority by working longer than required.
I’d bet good money Watson got sold to a bunch of companies who wanted “AI” then they didn’t do anything useful with it.

It was a smart play by IBM, the sales guys want to say AI and machine learning, so give them some generic crap which gets loosely integrated into parent projects and they can have a field day on the phone selling it.

Watson would be a perfect study on modern big business software that these billion dollar consultancy companies engage in.

Plus IBM makes even more doing the “integration” than the original sale.
I hate Photoshop. ;)

It's a jumbled mess of features added over the years with no coherent UI workflow between them. It hides way too much of the complexity of image editing in one-click-effect solutions, that often don't compose well.

I don't know of any good competitors in its price range though. I would recommend Nuke if it wasn't that expensive.
While enterprises businesses may not use every single feature, they typically end up using 90-95%. The problem is that the same tool is l used across multiple departments. Take Epic. The EMR is used by doctors, nurses, billing, operations, finance, executives, pharmacists. And keep in mind that the way doctors use it will carry depending on the department. That's a lot of use cases to support
Life may have begun with simple genes made out of urine
"Or have everything you do on the web be phoned to Google, to improve your advertising experience."

Chrome already does this.
> First you have to convince those of us that see no little in static typing when weighed against it constraints that it is a valid development philosophy that created a clear advantage over dynamic typed languages.

I cannot convince with words, only experience can change one's perspective. Thanks for the reminder. I admit my opinion may spark religious skirmish.

I came to love javascript in 2014 when I was making an HTML5 game almost alone. Coming from beginner java and c++, JS' flexibility blew my mind.

4 years later, I came to dislike JS for big projects.

Fast-paced gaming industry drives project managers to rotate new developers in and out, leading to low knowledge retention, thus bad code quality.
The project was then handed to my team. Iterating was painful. Regression was everytime. Manpower need rose up fast to add feature and tests.

Long story short, led a total rewrite. Initially most people objected, now most are satisfied.

For me, what's missing from JS is type system. In static-typed languages, types, used correctly, often act as contracts which bind function params and return type. It helped with knowledge retention.

Most frontend devs of the company now agrees that Typescript + network and storage contract hardening saved our asses.

Some argue that unit tests and documenting with comment helps, they don't. Unit tests allows us to warn future bad code change, while comments are not compiled and often not read, so I limit comments usage to the most complex code only.

> I am in the camp of static vs dynamic is a developer's aesthetics preference, both are valid ways of getting the job done, but they depend on the developers perceptions and the way they process code.

True, but it's sometimes the circumstances rather than the developers. I still love to write simple build scripts with JS and bash, but not big projects with people coming in and out. Unfortunately, and fortunately, the priority in my work is now both growing product and people, and that's why it's important for new developers to understand the product knowledge by the code, type helps.
Not sure I agree. There was a lot of innovation on smartphones before the iPhone, they were just not as visionary as the iPhone was. Look up the Nokia N-Gage as an example
Mmmmm. I used to think that. It sounded good but ended up being a pain in practice, and very confusing. The intent was right (ha ha) but the implementation was lacking in some ways.
How Susan Sontag taught me to think
Brings TypeScript to Tailwind CSS
No, this does completely get it right. Enterprises thought they needed all the control and security features of Blackberry until the iPhone came along and made the UX gap unsustainable. Enterprises thought they needed on-premise hosting of Exchange, Office and SharePoint instances under their control for email and productivity, until GSuite came up with a better, less configurable user experience based on consumer features that is making inroads in the market and generally works better for users. Slack is another proof point - the "consumerization of IT" trend in general.

There absolutely are outlier businesses like banking, government, healthcare and other highly regulated fields where they do have critical control needs. Notice how all of these are associated with crappier UX.

But the average business does not really have such needs, or at least it can be a mistake to blindly trade off employee happiness and productivity against feature checklists, yet that is typically the approach employed by procurement experts.
>Solar energy is "free", asteroids are "free".

The rocket equation says that if you want to do anything besides sitting in one place, it's super expensive. Moving mass around requires throwing huge amounts of mass away.
Geopolitics, sustainability, and environmental issues are on topic I believe.
It does not appear to be related. As a side note calling the US Spygate a 'conspiracy theory' on wiki seems a bit disingenuous. It'll all come out eventually and be interesting to see how history views those events... 'OCONUS lures', foreign intel collusion, information laundering through intel (push & pull) and all. It seems very fishy, looking forward to the release of the facts. From my rather deep research I'd put it more in the plausible but, unverified category rather than full blown 'false conspiracy theory'.
Companies like Basecamp and Trello are here to prove that assertion wrong. Basecamp is in every fortune-500 company more than once and never officially. Why? Because you don't need IT to approve it first and it's price is just under what most managers can stick on their company credit card. One of Basecamp's mottos is "Do Less".

It's also worth pointing out that the simpler the software, the more likely it is to fit in with more companies' workflows. As soon as you start adding niche features the more likely it is that they won't fit neatly with most places they are sold into.