skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Most of these things are not ridiculous asks

- universal undo (depending on what kind of operations you're running and how large your databases are, this can be a really weird problem. How do you "undo" a one way operation on 5-10 Gigabytes of data that takes several hours to run?)

- optional cascade deletion (Does your app allow references in formulas anywhere? Have fun trying to automatically rewrite those formulas in a user-predictable way)

- translated to my language (AKA, hire a translator that speaks that language)

- works with the database and version we use (more on this in a second)

- WYSIWYG editor that behaves like Word (Hahahaha, Slack)

- etc...

None of these are "ridiculous" in the sense of, "we could never do that." Many of them are significant asks.

To pick one example, I've worked in enterprise environments that allowed on-premise installs with customer-specific databases. It is a serious pain in the neck. Every time you want to do anything interesting with a data format, you have to figure out what which clients support it, what connectors they're supplying you, and how you can hack consistent file-locking and modification times onto someone's outdated WebDAV client.

And honestly -- we've gone to customers and said, "hey, we could get features out earlier if you switched to an industry-standard infrastructure", and a lot of customers are very happy to make that tradeoff. The big thing to remember is that customers are using your app to solve a problem. That's what matters. End users do care about this stuff, but only if it doesn't get in the way of allowing them to solve their problems.
DXVK Development Halts, developer says its “fragile, unreliable and frustrating”
> chat rooms, not feeds like Twitter

Twitter is a global chatroom

what i think jack/twitter is moving towards is a model thats catering to the direction the youth are headed, with twitters implementation of topics, its akin to discords (gamer chat app) interest servers
I have the original Z80 programmer's quick reference around at home, still.

If I was smart enough to know how to post a photo to HN then I would do so :)
On the other hand, it's not like NASA was trying to get the lowest energy density possible. They were trying to get a li-ion battery pack with acceptable safety margin. And for this I understand one of the biggest factors is to have sufficient space between cells that a thermal runaway in one cell cannot spread.
I think this is nice but having this in and a lot of other meta data in a machine readable form would be nicer. You could also think of things like licenses a and copyrights.

Technically, the problem this specification solves is making it easier to find security related metadata for projects that typically have this information already but just not an easy to find place. So, the next logical step would be making this machine readable so IDEs, project hosting websites, and other tools, can do the right things instead of having to parse files intended for humans with no consistently used syntax.
You know, this was one of the things that made me feel that I made the right choice in moving to Linux, years ago: I realized that focus was under my control. My current WM even has an option to disable focus stealing, but it's not necessary because the software defaults to respecting you. That, and I realized that all windows could be resized, regardless of whether it even made sense (Ever seen an okay/cancel dialog maximized? It's hilarious.). The system put the user in control. So I stayed:)
An infra-red sensor, as implemented in many public toilets, seems like a less error-prone solution to that problem.

Or a pedal.
Size matters, statistically. About 1% of males are sociopaths a little less for females. Socipaths are drawn towards positions of power. In organizations much larger than 100 people it is quite likely to be lead by a sociopath. APA doesnt call them that anymore. Antisocial personality. It isnt even considered a disorder necessarily. Sometimes they can actually be good leaders precisely because of their lack of empathy.
Patriot Boot Camp – From Techstars
Nice! Any suggestions on people/groups to follow on indiehackers? Have you been to any of their meetups?
It's amazing what lengths people go to in order to get custom colors and fonts: they'll decompile apks and upload new ones with a custom colors.xml; they'll root their phone and change the colors in the OS; or they'll install a binary of unknown providence where someone else did this.

There are things you can do to make it easier. You can provide settings for specific elements (for example, HN has "topcolor" in user settings). If you're doing a web app, keep the markup simple so that one can use per-domain user stylesheets (try inspecting the markup of a HN page). If you're doing a Windows app, use native controls so they can be themed by the OS. But these decisions constrain what product and graphics designers can do, so you need buy-in from the other parts of your team.
Ask HN: Does Azure suck or is it just me?
if programmer.have_time() and programmer.very_well_paid():
implement_things_users_care_about()
This reads like a list of decent enhancement that separates a good program from a great one.
Some of them are really hard, but many are just the spit and polish that makes a good program a great one.
> The alternative is python's equally crazy menagerie of almost-but-not-quite-hidden numeric types waiting to bite you in unexpected ways.

No, it's not. Python and JS aren't the only two approaches to numbers, even among dynamic languages (Schemes numeric tower, which favors exact types, is another.)
If you're genuinely eager to learn probabilistic programming then by far the best resource I've found is a book called Statistical Rethinking by Richard McElreath. His (almost finished) draft for the second edition is up here:
http://xcelab.net/rmpubs/sr2/statisticalrethinking2_08dec19....

Dr. McElreath also posts his lectures on youtube. The R code in the book and his lectures use a library/package he wrote which provides a wrapper to simplify building Stan models. The code has also been translated to PyMC3 on Python.

Code, slides, lecture videos are all referenced here: https://github.com/rmcelreath/statrethinking_winter2019

It might look like a huge amount of content but this course leads you very gently through key concepts, keeping the mathematics to a minimum. Don't be put off if you don't know the R language. The concepts are more important than the programming language and the code examples are kept simple.

If you make it through Statistical Rethinking then you might consider picking up Doing Bayesian Data Analysis by John Kruschke (a.k.a. the puppies book). I've found DBDA to be heavier going than SR but Kruschke takes a different approach to McElreath which can be useful if you get stuck on a concept, need more detail or just want a different angle on the subject.
Does Status Serve the West or East Coast More?
I need some clarification on something. I'm constantly comparing the East and West Coasts (in US, like NYC and SF) and seeing which one has a higher bias for people from higher institutions like Ivy League schools. I've always assumed the East Coast had a higher bias, but after months of researching the backgrounds of successful Bay Area unicorn founders 95% came from high institutions. This is contrary to the openness the West Coast has towards dropouts and people without college degrees i.e. Google is known for hiring many people like this. And a lot of the anti-college/status quo figures come from the West Coast like Naval Ravikant or Peter Thiel (with both having come from high institutions). It seems like a tiny minority of top bay area figures didn't go to the 'top' universities.

While I do value passion higher than status, this topic has been in my thoughts for a while. This is a difficult topic as it can be very misleading, but we have to be blunt sometimes.

Excluding how smart someone is or how much passion they have for their work, which coast do you think has a higher bias for graduates of 'top' institutions?
Books Are Not Products, They Are Bridges
Roadkill Became an Environmental Disaster
Excellent book and I later realized that the author is the Klein bottle guy from numberphile.
stylegan2
Ask HN: What is your favorite software that you adopted in 2019?
Cape Porpoise Fish House Is an Icon. But of What, Exactly?
Javascript is by no means uniquely bad. Far too many languages make float/double much easier to find and use than decimal types. If your decimal type is buried in the standard library that's not really any better than being in a third-party library. Java won't even let you use arithmetic operators on decimal types!
None of these are going to happen.
We all want but free software, but that is impossible . not is a goal we all strive for though.
While you may not want ET to phone home, most other people do. For a variety of reasons. Upgrade checks, analytics, etc.
As much as I hate ads, links will never cut it.
This is the main issue. It's not that the information is unwelcome, it's that the delivery of said information interrupts workflow. Notepad++ has been particularly annoying me lately with this one. They removed the option to disable auto update a while back, need to see if it has returned.

There should be a site that catalogs anti-patterns and nuisances in applications so we can publicly see the outcry over stupid stuff.
These are mostly things that programmers who are also end users care about. I haven't run into a single non-technical user who cares about customizable colors, dark mode, exporting to CSV/JSON/whatever else, customizable shortcuts etc.

The average user won't even know what most of this list means.
> Right now Javascript specifically is to blame

Nah. JS is particularly bad on this point, but every language that has not been a special purpose langauge for the narrow domains where float-first makes sense that has made the premature optimization of defaulting decimal literals with fractional parts to floats and/or not providing language level arbitrary-precision decimal and rational types—which is a lot of languages, many more broadly influential than JS (C, for one) are too blame.
This list could be titled "Nice things users like but could live without"

For most software it would be better to focus on making more core features or making those features better over all of the small (as in usefulness) but large complexity improvements.
Ouch. Been a rough week for OpenBSD.

And their errata description linked from the CVE seems... sorta obfuscatory: "ld.so may fail to remove the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable for set-user-ID and set-group-ID executables in low memory conditions."

This is true, but really fails to capture the fact that this is a trivially exploitable local root. "Low memory conditions" refers not to global system state but to the availability of memory to the process, which is under the control of the attacker via setrlimit().

Not good, folks.
Not sure why this is downvoted, "growing from 700/month to 7000/month can be mostly momentum" is trivializing what is more likely a very difficult scaling process, and there is a huge opportunity cost to continue to operating the business as opposed to cashing out and trying the next thing.
My husband left his vape pen out. My toddler found it
> Most people are ass holes and that's life

Whilst I tend to agree with this "between the lines" as it were, it's not an attitude I can healthily recommend. Re-shape it to "most people are trying to get ahead and that's life" is a much more helpful way of looking at various situations, and makes human behavior much easier to understand and predict.

You may also find that it reflects back on you some.
I'm pretty sure the control city on 80 east is NYC and not Newark.
I prefer to get them separately and directly . Make a compliment and leave it there. Criticize and leave it there. If you often use the sandwich method I will just wait for what comes after the first part so the compliment is worthless. Don’t give a long speech before you get to the point.
A Man Who Never Was (2010)
Enterprise users love excel import/export. Potentially CSV as well.
Maybe as far as "I want to see this table in Excel". And that too for very specialized roles and use cases.
Yeah, and that is a problem with the majority of programmers. They readily choose a seemingly easy path instead of something that leads to simplicity. Lisp is a fantastic idea that (even after over six decades) is still very much relevant today. Once you get used to program with a true REPL, every other (non-lispy) language starts feeling like frustratingly over-engineered, bloated, and unnecessarily complicated. Waiting for compilation cycles and annoying syntax quirks would slowly turn what once was a joy into a "just a job."

It feels incredibly liberating and joyous to be able to grab any part of your program and without any preceding ceremony just to "eval" it and see what happens.

And let me prematurely answer the comments that probably will be thrown here. No, other languages (most of them) don't have real REPLs. What they have, at best can be categorized as "interactive shells".

Younger folks who are learning, juniors, seasoned developers who for one or another reason, never had any exposure to a Lisp, please do yourselves a favor.
Try Racket, Clojure, Clojurescript, Fennel, Chez. Give Lisp an honest, heartfelt attempt to learn it.

Follow the work of people like Harold Abelson and Gerald Sussman, Matthias Felleisen, Dan Friedman, Rich Hickey, Guy Steele, Richard Gabriel, Alan Kay, and many others.

Once you attain familiarity with a Lisp to the sufficient level, perhaps then you will get it. You will see that it is indeed a lifetime investment that would allow you to reap the rewards for the entirety of your career.

I am telling you all this, not from the top of some ivory tower. I never went to CS academia. Like most of you, I am altogether a self-taught programmer. I am honestly begging you not to make the same mistake that I did. For many years I have ignored Lisp due to my self-righteous ignorance. Unknowingly, I delayed my true growth, and I sincerely regret it.
> - universal undo (depending on what kind of operations you're running and how large your databases are, this can be a really weird problem. How do you "undo" a one way operation on 5-10 Gigabytes of data that takes several hours to run?)

You can still fake your undo like gmail does before it sends email. I prefer that over a confirmation dialogue, that users are trained to click through without reading anyway.
I understand the feeling, and used to share it more before I became a bitter old man with corporate responsibilities and a hatred of all spontaneity and joy.

But constant changes can be a hassle for a lot of reasons. One pretty recent example from our shop was that a third-party service change combined with some vague wording in one of our "start here" docs for new hires led to subtly broken development environments. More often, the changes just randomly make documentation somewhere between difficult-to-interpret and nonsensical.

It also increases the cognitive load for less-frequent users. This has caused me to switch tools out of frustration. ("I'm already relearning this part of my workflow, may as well try something else and see if it sucks less...")

And that's before we get to new bugs, locally-inopportune deprecations, broken integrations, forced on-the-fly workflow modifications and all the other negative externalities of change.

The nicest way to avoid this is to not surprise people - let folks opt in to/roll out changes on their schedule. (With reasonable deadlines, of course, whatever that means in context.)
I want to say, as a programmer I used to overestimate how much it costs and underestimate how much it mattered to the end client.

Recently I have spent two days working on my personal project's esthetics and polish and was amazed at how gratifying it was to work on that.

As programmers we have the privilege knowledge of knowing which esthetic enhancements are the less costly. Take the time to get these low hanging fruits, it will make users and yourself so much happier!

And as a freelancer, I keep remembering this time when we were developing a complex simulation software for a big client, and that was a 6-12 months development, with little to show as intermediate step. But when we started showing plots (of straight lines! extrapolations that did not make any sense!) clients were really pleased with our "progress" and kept asking for UI improvements. They marveled at our ability to predict when two lines would cross...
The Long-Forgotten Vigilante Murders of the San Luis Valley – 5280
I've done my stint in "large enterprise". It's a whole new world there where management believe that if projects aren't on track, then the solution is more meetings, more agile training and in-house "coaches", and even more micromanaging. I'm no longer in that world, and I'll never go back.
> It should work on my old android phone browser/IE 11

Disrespectfully, No. Please die, IE. Please.

But otherwise, I think the spirit of this is pretty accurate, if only that parenthetical at the top were perhaps more emphasized or explained.

Anecdotally, working for crm-adjacent services, there was just a firehose of things customers (and our own sales/customer-facing teams) wanted to implement for the sake of "customization." And especially some of the customer asks were incredibly QoL-based and reasonable (shocking, I know), but the reality was that the roadmap was being pushed ever along, management and sales want new features to polish up for leads and investors, and we simply lacked the manpower to sufficiently cover both sides of that coin. Now that speaks more to failures in the org structure and leadership than anything (imo), but I think it's not dissimilar at many places, both small and large.

Long edit complete.
Bluesky Early Thoughts – By Sriram Krishnan
Ah sweet, thanks for the correction.
>I succeed at solving problems by being stubborn, but stubbornness is the problem.

Isn't at all once you start your own business.

Being smart and stubborn is like having race car. Will make you go nuts sitting in a traffic jam all day. But once you discover where the race track is, you'll find it rewarding to hit the gas and leave everyone else in the dust.
This list looks more like what programmers care about as end users.

Average users prefer WhatsApp and Instagram over good messengers. I honestly don't know why such bad software is still relevant.
> Sure, we might not have a plausible way of testing it today but that doesn't mean there won't be in the future. 2000 years ago people were on the right track that the Earth is round but couldn't "test it" but going around it. I'm sure the prospect of going round the earth back then seemed as distant as testing a multiverse today.

But there lies the problem: people 2000 years ago had a very clear idea of how they could test their round earth idea, it just wasn't technically feasible. Even worse for your point, they did quickly come up with experiments and proved pretty definitively the shape and general size of the earth, based on ships going past the horizon and others.

There have been many physical ideas with no hope of testability throughout the ages, and many of these have turned out wrong. Aristotle believed, and physicists agreed, that all objects have a natural place which they tend to move to, so apples falls down, but steam rises up.

As far as I know, there are not even thought experiments about how we could tell whether there is a multiverse, or for many (but not all) aspects of string theory. This is not an engineering problem (its way out of our league to implement), it's a theoretical physics problem (we don't know whether there is a way to tell, there may very well not be one). It's like the difference between people in ancient Greece imagining a high-speed car, versus building faster-than-light travel.
Launch online stores for selling courses and content
Looks pretty machine readable to me? This is the consistent syntax to be used.
And if you redesign, please, pretty please, keep your URL structure intact. Having links being invalided every two years is jut a pain.
Users will pay a premium for high quality software. Just ask Panic, 1Password, BBEdit, and—until very recently—macOS and iOS.
Startup Growth and Venture Returns
This is a great list and I want to add that the “simple” ones are a lot harder when third party integrations are involved. Or even dependencies on other teams in a sufficiently large org. It takes a certain mentality and commitment to look beyond “programming” problems to address these scope/not-my-job issues.
The IntercalScript Programming Language
Use ublock & umatrix . Disable microphone access to insta on your phone.
That's not true. In fact I think ALL of my previous bosses have been extremely competent and super smart. Maybe I've been lucky or maybe I've had realistic expectations.
You wouldn't believe how many there are, open to the public. Even more so are the ones that allow shell access ️
> We could return to a world where only the upper and upper middle class could go to elite colleges.

Or we could just socialize college and abolish the distinction between "elite" and "not elite".
This a thousand times. So many app redesigns. Every time I open Spotify they moved the search option somewhere else. On Gmail for Android you have to guess which is the "mark as unread" button now. The train app for my country is still a bugged mess, but now they added one of those monochrome vector humans that everyone has in between loading screens to mask sluggishness. I'm starting to think UI design is the next bullshit job
One legal (AFAIK) method:
The company had low/no valuation, and it was private. Those shares were sold to the employees (likely of the vehicle containing the company) at the stated valuation. Once they went public, there was a valuation event. Roughly, they snuck through the 409a before it had to be reported.
MPX might be interesting, although I notice the Apple marketing comparing it to previous Macs and not competing PC-workstation cards, and of course application-dependent.

They were saying this one card has more processing power than the last generation Mac Pro.
You're characterizing SFgate and CNBC (the quoted source) as "far-right"?
It may have been a separate product in the beginning, but in the version that's on my PowerBook (and the version I had as a kid) it was built-in to Speed Doubler (which was still a separate product from RAM Doubler) https://i.imgur.com/XBw9fz3.jpg
"...United States military and its industry partners may have already developed next-generation technologies that have the potential to drastically change the aerospace field, and human civilization, forever..."

I believe it. I remember how the Bin Laden raid was executed with stealth helicopters- low noise and radar profiles. Came out of nowhere. And wasn't there a report on how the Navy hinted at all the UFO sightings were from tech they had to make ghost jets?
This assumes both parties are after the same thing. There are people that doesn't actually care what the right thing to do is, and only want to do what benefits them.

Ideally incentives should align, but often times what is good for the team / company isn't necessarily what's good for the manager and vice versa.
This is exactly what we do at my current job, and it's infuriating to everyone but the management asking for it.

We have many different apps and we have 3 different versions of the UI right now because we're slowly redoing the frontend for all of them as we roll them out over several years.

What a massive waste of money and time. Some of these apps don't even have enough users to warrant the reskin!
2.88MB was supported by most drives and was usable under Linux. You were supposed to use proper 2.88MB floppy, but you could usually get away with using a 1.44MB floppy and reformatting.

I'm not entirely sure how well they were supported under Windows though.
Decentralized Social Networking – W3C Draft