skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My personal opinion - keep politics and religion the fuck out of the IT community.

I personally love building, coding, etc. I rather watch two people argue about emacs vs. vim; I vote vim. Or spaces vs. tabs; I vote spaces.

Remember the days when you could sit at work building something for your customers without having to hear about someone's political or religious views?

Pro Tip: Treat politics and religious like bedroom talk. Keep it out of the work environment. Leave it for the bar/pub, with your friends or on social media.

Now real talk - tabs vs. spaces? ;)
Great when will HN remove karma
Lets put some P in PhD. I mean, like two thousands years was quite enough to say everything about nihilism.
Just keep telling yourself that.
Don't underestimate the power of the exclusive Ad spot on the world's most visited web page.
Executive Summary Template
You’re thinking solar is all in the same location. Across a few locations in even a single time zone the ramp up and down is going to be fairly steady. Also, with nuclear in the mix you can be charging grid storage twice a day assuming a daytime and night time surplus. This possibly cuts the cost per kWh of some energy storage in half.
Extensions like pocket and the Mr. Robot thing? Yeah, bad execution and communication, but privacy invading?
The Power of Checklists
I consider myself obnoxiously sanctimonious on this matter. I will not steal video. The furthest I will go is to rip dvds to play on my own Plex, and I won't share access to it. I do not and would not share passwords. I pay to stream content I don't buy. This is a matter of personal honor.

That said, there is a maximum inconvenience I will bear. I can live without movies or tv. Honestly, I'd probably live better.

This feels a lot like 20 years ago with Napster and Limewire. I hope the content industry has learned something in the interim.
This is very much an IBM-centric narrative - it doesn't mean that it's wrong but at the time there really was an IBM world and an everyone else world - IBM carefully tended to its walled garden, to the point of getting people fired who might consider looking outside of it - the result is people who knew nothing about IBM, and people who knew nothing but.

Which essentially means that there are going to be different stories about 80x24/5 from that time - probably all of them correct in context.

(oh and the console monitors on our Burroughs 6700 mainframe had delay lines while the user block terminals - TD830s - had dram and micro-controllers - there's another non-IBM/non-DEC world view of essentially the same technology)
It is _technically_ viable as a replacement for hydrocarbons. As in, it could replace all energy generation from hydrocarbons, with room to spare. It is not currently _economically_ viable, however. This is what R&D and adjustments to regulations are supposed to help with. But then, wind and solar aren't economically viable either, and everyone is pushing them like crazy.
He also talked a struggling U.S. Grant into writing an autobiography which Twain then published. This basically saved Grant's family economically. (Grant's autobiography is a great book, btw)
Start with walking and fast-walking in bursts.
Why did you use a hyphen in place of the letter o?
This doesn't make economic sense.

If I create a piece of art that many people can enjoy, why shouldn't I get compensated for adding that value to their lives?

Same is true for software.
Unless I am mistaken, the extension never collected any user data and phoned it to a nebulous ad network. So user data still remained private
This is the most enlightening post I have seen on this page. Thank you.
It's true, that's terrible. But it'll probably get fixed in less time than it would take me to become proficient in steno.
> I tried my hand at writing generic map/filter/reduce once, and it turned out to be more nuanced than I thought.

Rust and Java both have good APIs for this kind of work. Take a look at their approaches.
In today's episode of "Things I Learned from 'The West Wing'"

Leo: "Andrew Jackson, in the main foyer of the White House, had a big block of cheese."

Josh: "...and a Wheat Thin the size of Lake Tahoe."
I think I was 8 when I had these thoughts. They seemed meaningless, so I moved on.
Stroke of Insight (2008)
> I've seen more bugs due to the cognitive overhead of reduce than writing a for loop. And then you don't have to wonder "Hmm is this a lazy stream? Concurrent?" You just look at the code, and know.

Out of curiosity, in which language(s) were those written in?
C++ template metaprogramming may be overused and very difficult to use, but its prevalence despite such difficulty precisely shows how much such a type level metaprogramming tool is desired (compared to syntax level ones like lisp macros or text level ones like C preprocessor and various code generators). New programming languages should try to improve upon C++ template metaprogramming and make more powerful and effective metaprogramming language constructs, instead of completely abandoning the front.
and how old are you ?
Good for the people once the system is perfected. Not so much for the ones who get run while the system is being perfected.

The "greater good" utilitarian argument has been the basis of some of the worst policies and politics in the world.

I'm not saying that self driving cars fall into the same category, but how many deaths are you okay with until Uber/Waymo perfect their algorithms (and later, charge you for it)? 1? 10? 100?
Or perhaps fork Electron to provide a version which uses Safari or even WPE [1]. I’m using WPE in an embedded device since it has better memory and GPU usage than chromium.

1: https://webkit.org/wpe/
While algorithms do affect how shows are surfaced, produced, promoted and discovered on streaming platforms, I'm unconvinced that television is more formulaic, unoriginal, and uninteresting now with dozens of online streaming sources and literally millions of channels (e.g. youtube) vs. cable (local monopoly streamer, hundreds of channels) or broadcast television (local oligopoly, tens of channels dominated by three national broadcasters.)

Most importantly, the barriers to creating and distributing video are lower than ever: we carry high-quality video cameras built into our smartphones, we can easily edit those videos using inexpensive (or free) and widely available apps or web services, and we can easily and cheaply make that video available to about half the people who live on the planet.

It seems to me that we are in a golden age of television in terms of quality, quantity, and variety. Regarding quality, it seems that many of the best writers and actors are working in television; moreover, streaming supports watching an entire series from the beginning, which can support longer story arcs without necessarily having to recap everything each episode. Compared to a 2 or 3-hour movie, a series watched from beginning to end can potentially tell a longer and possibly more interesting story with a larger main cast and deeper character development. Regarding quantity and variety, streaming supports a larger number of niche shows with smaller audiences, while wider geographic distribution means that we have access to shows that we would never have had the opportunity to view in the cable and broadcast eras.
10 years old and still very immature and a pain to work with... it's all so backwards and I am not sure how many unnecessary lines of error code handling I had to write. Its horrible to read, my takeaway, pick either Java for business problems or Rust if you wanna do native stuff. Python is also much better compared to Go. I feel like I became less skilled in coding the last year and a half... Switching jobs soon, moving to a go free world. :)
I would happily pay per show or movie I watch if I knew the people involved got the cash. As long as there's money men in the middle, wringing their hands over how to extract their middleman tax, I'll work to subvert them.

Delivering content is not a valuable service. Making content is.
A whole lot of people are rubbed the wrong way by the whole cryptocurrency thing they have going on. And it's still chrome under the hood so you are still indirectly enforcing a lot of what google thinks is the best for it's bottom line.
There is a term for this distancing, "butthurt": People used to privilege outraged when it is withdrawn.
Your reasonable arguments are wholly undermined by the jackhole manner you end your comment.
From GGP (emphasis mine):

> And it should be the basis for systems of morality...
The Apple App store dwarfs the Google Play store as far as revenue is concerned. So at least as far as mobile is concerned I would say Apple is in a pretty monopolistic position as Developers are forced to follow what Apple dictates less they basically give up a majority of the market.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/16/apples-app-store-revenue-n...
"got pulled into"?
Really, though, it is the beauty that matters....
When a request is made to a server, the server creates a log of it. When you interacted with the site that the plugin worked in tandem with, it requested assets (JavaScript, images, CSS, etc) to Firefox-run servers. That's enough for them to know you looked at that content and may have interest in it. Not a huge deal in that particular instance but it's CERTAINLY not putting the user's privacy first.
You're a senior software engineer and yet somehow you can't pay for content?
Presidential candidate Andrew Yang was asked if his platform of $1000 a month Universal Basic Income was passed, how much would be spent locally. He said the majority of it would...but not all, and joked because people would spend it on their own Netflix account.

Based on the comments here, I doubt that'd even get people to buy their own subscription.
At least you can't mistakingly ignore errors, unlike in a lot of golang code I've seen where errors are either ignored, or worse, silently overwritten.
To be fair here, back in the 1990s, when Usenet was king, one common FAQ said words to the effect that “you should never post anything online that you don’t want to be published on the front page of The New York Times”.

There’s a reason why I deleted my Twitter years ago; it just is not possible to have civil discourse and well-made arguments in 160 characters (or whatever Twitter’s limits are these days); instead it’s like a bunch of chimpanzees throwing poop at each other.

Scott Alexander recently posted a long entry where he, among other things, misses the kinds of long winded rational arguments places like talkorigins.org had over a decade ago:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godles...
I put Paul Graham's essays in audio format in Spotify
> but the fact is that almost all of the world's most influential ideas had been devised in Europe up until WW2,

It is difficult to take for a fact vague statements that make sweeping generalisations without even an outline of the issues at hand. Maybe we should begin by making a list of the world's most influential ideas first?
Help yourself. The door's right there.
BuzzFeed article accidentally shows WiFi password in subheading
Ack, I misspoke. Ubuntu 16 was the one with the busted MAC randomization. It worked in 14, but was broken in 16 due to the SystemD deployment.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+b...
Related question: why is the stack limit so tiny in modern operating systems? Why do we allow programs free reign of the heap but not the stack?

Edit: I hadn’t considered that all of a processes’s threads share the same address space. In a 32-bit address space, a 4MB stack limits you to 1024 threads (with nothing left over for heap).

However, perhaps the question still stands: why use a small stack size on a 64-bit system.
What do you mean by country of the future? That sounds like a compliment but it’s clearly meant to be negative.
Maybe you missed donglegate six years ago. These people aren't new, but they seem to be gaining in numbers and influence.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes...
Just glancing at the title, I thought they were referring to Trump as the Huge Chunk of Cheese
You know a great way to prevent tracking? A decent ad blocker. I don't care how good Safari's "intelligent tracking prevention" is, but as long as they're blocking uBlock Origin I'll browse elsewhere.
I think it indeed heavily depends on your marginal return in reducing bugs. I agree Rust is unsuitable for most software, because rightly or wrongly, bugs don't matter in most software.
> You don't have to use Swift as there are plenty of alternatives many of which run on Windows or Linux.

I'd use an application written in Java or one built with a cross-platform GUI toolkit like Gtk+ or Qt in Windows or Linux. I wouldn't in macOS and most users won't either. They're ugly in macOS. They stick out like a sore thumb. It's not that it's impossible for a cross-platform approach to produce an application that is nice to use in macOS, it's that there is technical debt in the libraries and frameworks that attempt cross-platform and usually it's a failure to keep up with the constant changes in the Apple ecosystem. A few years ago Apple removed support for OpenGL so now if you want to write 3D applications you have to use Metal. Thankfully, there's MoltenVK so if you want to target multiple platforms you can use Vulkan but how do you know that approach is sustainable? MoltenVK only uses public APIs so its safe to use for the time being. That said, any number of decisions Apple makes moving forward could potentially rule it out as a viable option.

> And you don't have to give Apple 30%. Just notarise your app and add a link from your website.

That's a fair point although maybe not the best UX for all purposes.
I've seen cases where spammers abuse sign-up forms to generate spam (by using the name field for their content). Without server side validation it would be trivial for a malicious user to accomplish this.

Shameless plug - I run a hosted alternative to Sendy https://www.mailblast.io/
Same article gets regurgitated a few times a year ever since Netflix started.
I see nothing about how this will be fixed. The VP 'wants it reduced', recognizes the decision was made too quickly, and improperly.

If the decision was made improperly, what kind of alarms do you need to tell you that there's a problem that needs fixing here. That problem being your 'arrangement' of employees.

But yet again it's empty statements.
I wanted to listed to PG in my commute to work on my startup, but there wasn't any audio format than PG's lectures/interviews on YT (they're ok) and some guys with bad audio quality in Spotify.

So I decided to use Amazon Polly to put some of my reading list of PG's essays on Spotify with Anchor.

Would you like to see more essays from PG? Tell me which ones and I'll try to put them.

Essays included so far:
-Beating the Averages
-A Unified Theory of VC Suckage
-Organic Startup Ideas
-How Not to Die
PostgreSQL supports deferring constraints. https://begriffs.com/posts/2017-08-27-deferrable-sql-constra...
would be nice to have a link to the paper. Anyone?
Whenever I saw news like this, I feel the system designed for USA might be close to expire, mean it is no longer working for the goodness of the people.

Left and right can no longer tolerate different opinions at all, left controls most of the media and universities and to some extent, the social media, so in most cases, it actually is the left bullies the right, to the point some of the left just lost their mind when they spot a MAGA hat, this is insane.

the left combined with socialism agenda looks great on paper or ideology, but it will kill the society for good. I have long been thinking that we're doomed, the current system is an version out of date, and there is no new release on the horizon, chaos is the only step next.
no worries, i just won’t illegally share my account.
It's not that you can't make money. It's that this particular business model doesn't jibe with reality. There's a reason iTunes switched to DRM-free formats early on. For video games, piracy can actually increase profits, because people really like a try-before-you-buy model. (Piracy is not as helpful for movies.) It's possible, actually not super difficult, to make money for "bringing films into existence" without trying to keep 100% control over distribution. Check out all the Patreon accounts that put out freely-available YouTube videos for a trivial example.
I wonder how different the state of database application development would be today if all those cheap whitelabel webhosts powered by cPanel or Plesk (where most of us got started, I imagine) opted for PostgreSQL instead of MySQL - which would have influenced the major MySQL adopters like phpNuke, phpBB, WordPress, etc.
Seriously? You could just put aside that insane, clearly evil opinion and listen to them speak for an hour? Give them an applause and move on without the slightest burden on your conscious?
KHTML wasn’t anywhere near the same position as WebKit when Apple forked it. At the time, KHTML was niche beyond its use in KDE.

When Google forked WebKit, Safari and Chrome combined were something like 40% of the market.
I made this switch about 12-ish months ago when the writing was on the wall about ad-blocking and ... something about auto-creating a "chrome account" something something ...

I've been fairly disappointed in the lack of flexibility that firefox provides and the real lack of maturity (and even usability) of the containers feature.

I think I expected the move to firefox to bring with it a lot more flexibility and a richer set of configurations and customizations and this really isn't the case.

Instead, my firefox experience has been surprisingly restrictive. Unless, of course, I am willing to install a bunch of add-ons, all of which come with the obligatory "access all of your data" and are from just some random dude on the net.

Some specific issues:

- I want to define a "home page" BUT I also want both new tabs and new windows to open with a blank page. You cannot do this. As soon as you set both new tab and new window to "blank page", the fn+opt+leftarrow shortcut ceases to do anything.

- I want to use containers. Containers are only tabs. That makes no sense. The very first thing you want to do with a container, after learning what containers are, is open a Window and have all future tabs in that window inherit the container that that Window is. This is the basic use-case of the container feature and it doesn't exist. Instead, every use of container is mouse-mouse-mouse-click-click-click (since there is no key shortcut for them) and then open a tab for a single use. We should be making container windows and using key shortcuts to open tabs in those windows.

- I can't force-title a firefox Window - it just gets the title of the currently open tab. All manner of interesting Window management can be done, outside of firefox, if you can lock the Window title. I could create 6-8 ffox Windows, just like I create 6-8 spaces in GNU Screen, and quickly hotkey between them ... I see no way to do this.

- The fixation on tabs is, itself, a bit weird ... I don't think either a window-centric nor a tab-centric workflow should be favored - they should be equally developed and enabled.
Hopefully that was intended with the implied restriction "in modernity", i.e. since approximately the lead-up to the Enlightenment, since that'd be a position that could be given a credible defense, at least.
Would you pay for a service that physically stores your DVDs, but rips them and makes the content available via Plex? It would be less of a copyright violation since the copy is made for personal use. You'd have your library available anywhere in the world and it wouldn't take up space in your house. the content would be available permanently and not subject to contract disputes with publishers. What do you think?
In a way, I envy you. You have a simple and straightforward explanation for how Trump got elected. At the same time, I pity you. You seem to have lost the ability to see good in people that disagree with you.

There are a lot of loving moms and dads that decided in 2016 that they wanted to live in a country ran by Trump. They wanted to have their kids grow up in a country shaped by him. These are people who would gladly wear a MAGA hat. Can you think they are wrong? Have at it, you might be right! But boiling down all their reasons to intolerance is a simplification I am unwilling to make.
Study: Ants are “immune” to traffic jams
Why would a person ... bring a child into the world

Do you believe that people are descended from ancestors in the Garden of Eden?

If not, the most rational explanation is that we are descended from ancient organisms on primordial Earth. Perhaps not even Earth (i.e. panspermia).

How many billions of generations of asexual reproduction as single celled organisms? How many millions of generations of multi celled animals? How many thousands of generations of Homo Sapiens?

Each and every one of your ancestors reproduced. They survived long enough to reproduce. Probability 1. Not probability 0.9999999999. Probability 1.

That is such an astonishing thing that it is literally inconceivable (not capable of being imagined or grasped mentally; unbelievable) by me, at least not fully.

And yet, here we are. All of us. We've all won the lottery of life. We, each and every one of us, are here because each and every one of our ancestors brought a child into the world.

That's why he had a child. Because each and every one of his ancestors had a child. And many of those children survived in a far far more difficult environment than what we find ourselves in today.

That biological imperative outweighs everything else. This isn't usually conscious. This doesn't have to be rational. It's hardwired deeply into our DNA. Because we wouldn't be here unless it was.
> Firefox on mobile does support extensinos is a bit rocky though

It supports uBlock, good enough for me.

It is the only thing that makes browsing recipe websites possible on Android!
Or... Someone would have just watched something else that was free. It seems to me that actually they're getting free publicity
Facebook is deleting the name of the potential whistleblower
Even worse, the Containers don't sync, so they have to be remade for every device. I really like the idea of the Container extension, but it needs a lot of work from Mozilla to be something I could recommend to others.
Potential vs. Delivery
> I think that the difference between the Go way and exceptions is that exceptions are “automatic” and thus invisible

That exceptions automatically take care of propagating context is a big plus.

> See, for example, how Rob Pike et al. do error handling in their Upspin project[1]

The fact that there needs to be an entire blog post just to explain how to use errors in golang properly is quite telling about how poor of a job it does. Not to mention all the hoops they have to jump to propagate useful information, all of which we already have in languages with exceptions.
Firefox was dumbed down when they ditched XUL and followed Chrome's lead. Hopefully they will see the light and add more power to the extensions than Google will ever let Chrome have.

Still waiting for a non-hacky way to hide the tab bar.
i think you're reading too much into it.
Competitor Analysis Template
Turn web apps into lightweight native apps, no electron
iTunes sells DRM-free music. They seem to be doing just fine. Trying to keep 100% control over distribution is not at all necessary to make a profit.