skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> “Programmer time is more expensive than computer time.”

I support the idealism of the article, but this quote is very accurate. Nobody wants to pay for quality software. Not your users, not your stakeholders, not even you!

And that's because the price of quality isn't just a little more expensive. It's not 1$ a year. It's exponentially more expensive. And some of those paid efforts will still end up slow and crappy in outcome, because of something else the article doesn't acknowledge:

Writing fast, efficient, simple, correct, full featured software is really really hard.

So not only is it expensive, it's also just plain difficult. Meaning it's not just about money and resources, but also time, time to experiment and fail.
Playing Games with Quantum Computers
OK Boomer, Who’s Going to Buy Your 21M Homes?
In the age of industrial warfare, economic output matters a huge deal to winning. China was overtaken by the West massively before it got subjugated. If that wasn't the case they wouldn't have let it happen.
> Have they? They've done really well in some markets, but also done really poorly in others. People are definitely interested in them for music, films, TV, etc, and people + companies are interested in for them for certain products and services, but there are still many areas where they haven't done nearly as well as expected.

A pattern I identified was that subscriptions work really well when property rights are strong and enforced strongly (TV shows, movies, music, books etc). It doesn't really work well when property rights can be bypassed easily or have a convenient alternative (you want to read NYT story without a subscription? read that story on some other outlet).
I took my avalanche course last weekend, and my biggest takeaway was the advice “that bad avalanche decisions usually just leads to great skiing”. There is so little feedback in avalanche decisions it leads to reinforcing bad choices.
Britain seeded the Earth with English speakers that inherited her legal traditions and cultural values for the most part that then developed into rich trading partners that participate in an international system of voluntary exchange that has enriched the British.

It could have gone another way, there’s a reason we’re talking about Britain instead of England and Scotland, but I would say it has worked out brilliantly.
I would argue that weak men (with big egos) sent young men to war, giving them the hard times and the fortitude and determination to make good times for their children (boomers).
I have used this to steal JS libraries I wanted into other high-level languages that had Duktape wrappings
> Liu assumes that it is somehow a lot easier to wipe out a civilization than communicate with it...

This may be true, though. We struggle to effectively communicate with creatures on our own planet available in real-time, like dolphins and elephants, who appear to think and have language of sorts.

Launching some relativistic sand at another planet may well be a lot easier.
I spent quite a few years working in the isp/cdn/dns space. Is “virtual location” an idiomatic term for VPN users? The more general industry would probably say youre looking at Points of Presence (“PoPs”).

The core of the article is one of (mis)representation. The VPN providers are trying to present broad network coverage with a minimum of expenditure, and the clients are concerned with actual geophysical location. Virtual Locations seems to be a term designed to comingle the concepts, and obfuscate actual location and connectivity.

The clustering is because there simply arent that many physical locations with connectivity to various networks (Internet Exchange Points “IXPs”). Those IXPs are themselves often clustered and associated with a few nearby physical facilities (DCs or Colo(cation) for hosting general compute servers.

You mention companies “leasing” address blocks. Thats probably more correct to say theyre “delegated” from NSPs to clients like the vpn companies.

In general Id find whois/rir data to be of very little use. Theres little to no association or restriction for either of those and where the IP addresses are actually announced or used.

It may not matter for your use/methodology but latency for ICMP is unreliable. Many networks will use a lower traffic priority for it, introducing variable loss/jitter/delay. If at all possible actual TCP or UDP is better for evaluating RTT.

One thing you might look at is the vpn provider network adjacencies in different locations. Many/most NSPs handily include some sort of location identifier (like iata code) in their device names. From those adjacent devices you can probably infer city at least. PeeringDB and/or looking glass portals are another way to deduce network topology and connectivity, possibly narrowing it down to specific facilities.

Lastly your ICMP replies are inherently limited in what you see. Its very likely that there are underlying networks (ie MPLS, or GRE tunnels) that you cant see. Itd be very easy to have an interconnect in AMSIX and tunnel it over to belgium or germany. You wouldnt see that in DNS or ICMP replies, but could infer it through latency.
White men still dominate the C Suite and other workplace diversity stats (2018)
While I'm no expert in the subject. Shouldn't read after write in event sourcing be nonsensical in terms of correctness? Instead you have to convert that problem into asynchronously waiting for a ACK message that your message had its intended effect. And only then would you ask to read the state?

EDIT: This of course does not cover the optimistic concurrency models in say PostgreSQL where you can effectively begin-write-read-rollback to extract information about a hypothetical state. Sadly I've had to use patterns like that before and there seem to be no alternative to that hack in event sourcing.
The stuff about Apple bugs is a bit of a stretch. The most likely reason is they had to prioritize other things to get it out the door, and it had a few warts. Who hasn't worked on a project like that. :)
Everyone forgets the spiritual cost that it takes on the meat to make silicon think. Does it suck? Certainly not. Could it be better yes. That's why we're here. Right now though the human can barely interpret things less than 1/60th of a second. Speed/Performance isn't everything.
Show HN: An infinitely nested task manager where progress bubbles up to the top
Professionals in any field have a responsibility to do good and thoughtful work, and to treat their field with respect. Anyone who just builds whatever crap they're told is a bad professional.
What are the circumstances in which someone would be doing something like this?
I've heard this argument often, but I don't buy it.

1. The environmental cost of ineffective software is negligible, when compared to Bitcoin mining or other forms of hardware planned obsolescence.

2. By using more efficient software, surely, you can save a lot of CPU cycles, and it can improve the energy efficiency of some specific workloads under some particular scenarios. However, on a general-purpose PC, the desire for performance is unlimited, the CPU cycles saved in one way will only be consumed in other ways, and in the end, the total CPU cycles used remain a constant.

Running programs on a PC is like buying things, when you have a fixed budget but everything is cheaper, often people will just buy more. For example, I only start closing webpages when my browser becomes unacceptably slow, but if you make every webpage use 50% less system resource, I'll simply open 2x more webpages simultaneously. LED lightning is another example, while I think the overall effect is a reduction of energy uses, but in some cases, I think it actually makes people to install more lightnings, such as those outdoor billboards.

This is called the Jevons paradox [0].

For PCs, certainly, as I previously stated, in specific workloads under some particular scenarios, I totally agree that there are cases that energy use can be reduced (e.g. faster system update), but I don't think it helps much in the grand scheme of things.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
That's obvious. It's a work that by definition reach many others automatically and acts faster than humans, with less human intervention so it saves work. Anything that saves time/money and has this multiplication effect will generate tons of cash. No wonder we catch a part of it.

Edit: in other simpler words, it's useful and scales fine.
It's a little more subtle.

Strong men take advantage of perceived weakness.

Hitler declared war on Europe and Russia because it perceived itself as stronger.

Japan declared war on USA because it believed it had a stronger navy. It did, but it awakened a Colossus.

Credit: Prof. Victor Davis Hansen.
This is peephole refactoring. Architectural redesigns (the ones that result in 1/10th the code with the same functionality but more robust, maintainable, etc etc) aren't feasible to do incrementally like this. If you're resourceful and clever, you can sometimes get to a certain point with both the old and the new architecture in place at the same time, but at some point you have to make the hard cut-over, and redevelop all the old features/edge-cases in the new system.
Six works of Computer Science-Fiction (2015)
This is why I just use AlgoVPN. I know where my traffic is going and can install it on any cloud instance I want. At the moment I'm running it on my laptop, phone, and my RPI cluster.
Very interesting article.

One thought I had. At the beginning where you talk about about reasons for VPN virtual locations I was reminded of an article I read like two years ago that talked a little bit about VPNs using IPs apparently registered in North Korean IP-space[0]. Since then I have scratched my head wondering why exactly a VPN provider would offer something like that. I never looked through the data to confirm that these IPs were abused, but I assume these IPs are (or would be) attractive to black hats who want to obfuscate attack patterns and confuse/alarm unknowing threat analysts. Would VPN providers like HMA actually offer such a thing to boost revenue? Or maybe they were just gimmicks. I don't know...

[0] https://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/... (I am pretty sure none of the IPs mentioned in the article are geolocated to NK anymore; also idk if HMA still offers IPs virtually located in NK)
As bad as management can be, you can't entirely shift the blame from the developers.

Having a good issue tracking system is addressing the symptom, not the cause. If the developers are writing software with these kinds of fundamental bugs, then there will simply be too many issues in the issue tracker, and management will have no choice but to prioritise other things because fixing all the issues would take too much time. It's very easy to get into "bug whack-a-mole" where you just add more and more code to address problems without ever fixing the root cause.

The article says this is because there are too many abstractions. I think that's sort-of right but could give the wrong idea. Abstractions are a good thing: they are the only way to contain complexity. The problem is when the abstractions are poor, when the implementation fails to match the intended abstraction or when there are no abstractions at all and you simply have an unworkable mess of spaghetti code.

The reason things are worse now than they once were is that the environment in which code is running is infinitely more complicated than it used to be. More layers of abstraction are required for the program to understand its environment, and as a result, there is a higher chance that one of those abstractions is problematic. The solution is not always to reduce the number of layers of abstraction, because it's a really good thing that our programs can understand complex environments - it's what makes those programs more accessible, portable, etc. The solution is to always be looking to refactor and/or strengthen the foundations on which we build, and to be better at picking robust foundations to use in our own projects so that good abstractions gain the success they deserve, and bad abstractions are replaced quickly.

Unfortunately, those skills are very hard to teach and to learn, and now developers without those skills can do a lot more long-lasting damage than they would have been able to before.
That is a very interesting approach, however I can imagine that it can be quite a large database of encryption keys.

I'll have to build a small system for this and try it.
Are you ok?

Seriously are you ok and fulfilled in your life?

I know some "normies" get on our nerves Like "Jared" but the thing is:
Jared is nice, has some friends and more people want to be around him so his chances of happiness are greater.

I really wish you expose your work on Hackernews you seem a very good and intelligent (did not mean wise).

Please show your skills and work it may improve your market rate or even maybe people can contact you and exchange information.

I am looking forward to your contributions.
We can't even explain the double slit experiment. We are Neanderthals.

And you say there is nothing coming that could affect our day to day life...they might have said that in 1901.

Who knows what might unfold...
I think the last line is quite telling: "[docker and electron] are just compromised attempts to hide accumulated complexity from developers because it became impossible to deal with"

The alternative is what, infinitely increasing complexity? Every industry has division of labour: If you are a chef baking cheesecake, you don't need to know how to make cheese. If you are a cheese-maker, you don't need to know how to milk a cow. If you are a farmer, you don't need to be a cattle vet, or be skilled in building a barn or repairing tractors, or in smelting stainless steel that it's made of.

Step into the software sphere and the abstractions we are building are leaky, and unstable. The best example of this is Kubernetes -> it has a hundred moving parts, and if you got an error it could be because of the problem in the kubelet, or in underlying Docker, or in Flannel, or in IPtables, or linux kernel settings, or in the settings of hypervisor, etc, etc.

Instead of creating productive division of labour, in IT we create UNPRODUCTIVE division of labour: Ow, this is written in .Net and that is written in Java, But I only know Golang, Javascript, C++ and Python!

The most elementary problems don't have a standard solution: how many ways are there to format a settings file? Probably a few dozen. How many of them afford the user syntax highlighting?

I believe the root cause of bad quality software is accountability: an average android phone ships with dozens of bugs. You could not ship a car with a missing wheel. But if WiFi calling doesn't work, nobody cares. Companies know that they can get away with it, and they do. If your management knows that shipping buggy software is fine, and so does the rest of the industry, actions of individual developer can only go so far.
i'm sure this is against the rules, but this is one of the most unintelligent replies i've ever seen on HN
The linked document explains this, but it's because there is no federal copyright law for pre-1972 sound recordings. Before 1972 there was no federal copyright law for sound recordings, and then congress did not want to change the state-law copyright status of recordings made before the federal law was passed, so it was intentionally left non-preempted so that state law applies.
Why does everyone assume alien races would want to spread out and colonize the universe? Perhaps we should consider the possibility that the insatiable desire to constantly expand like a virus is coupled with the tendency for civilizations to destroy themselves through warfare. Maybe civilizations with advanced technology also have advanced philosophy and are content to merely exist and be content? Why do we take it as a given that aliens would be anything like us, with the same desires and tendencies we have? Its fine to consider that as a possibility, but there are many unknowns we should acknowledge.
Stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls... should be doable with current or near future technology.
I don't have kids but it seems obvious people don't have kids to do house and yard work for themselves. Kids are there 'cause you wanted kids. Get kids to do any drudgery and the result is "co-production"; You get home automation and kids for the price of kids.
Stalin was weak? Mao? This sounds like a very odd definition of weak, cut to fit the argument rather than working with the facts at hand.

Both won wars and ruled over hundreds of millions or even billions. They can't be brushed away, nor any of the other dictators who perpetuated all those historical horrors.
There is no universal "good work life balance". What works for one person, does not work for another. Even the phrase "work life balance" implies a particular solution, which I think is often damaging to people. It implies that there is work, which when I'm doing it suspends my life. It implies that work is inherently bad for your life goals.

Interestingly, I taught English as a foreign language in Japan for 5 years. I had a colleague who was giving a class on different professions and she asked the students (first year high school/grade 10) what profession they wanted. Many girls in the class said, "I want to be a mother". This infuriated my colleague who chastised the students and told them not to "waste their life".

Of course, being a full time parent is actually a risky proposition in your career. You have to depend on your spouse for making money. If things don't work out, you don't have a lot of security. From that perspective, I completely understand my colleague's reaction. What I find interesting is the feeling that the choice of "full time parent" is considered an unfit career, regardless of risk. Had the students said they wanted to be musicians, a career with considerably more risk, my colleague would not have reacted in such a hostile way.

When put in that light, what is your career to your life? If you spend your time lounging on the beach drinking pina coladas all day, have you "made it"? What if you sit on the street corner drinking cheap whiskey? Are you wasting your life if you achieve nothing in your career? How much of your time on earth should you devote to that work? If you spend your time simply amassing money, have you failed since you did not spend that time curing cancer? Do you need to make up for your complete waste of time making money by donating it at the end of your life?

Of course, I'm being facetious. Your choice of what your want to accomplish and how much of your time your want to spend on it is up to you. Some jobs require considerably more effort than others. Look at the life of the average rock star. Many of them do 300 or more concerts a year. That's a work load that would bury the average software developer, but it's generally necessary at the top end of that profession.

My advice, for what it's worth, is to try to find a job that is satisfying to you and for which the time spent does not seem to be wasted. Don't partition your life between "things I want to do" and "things I have to do". Yes, there will always be things that you have to do that you may not want to. But instead of trying to avoid the things you have to do, try to find things that you want to do and make them things you have to do.
It's not just you. Seems like at least a few of the errors go away if you let the spinner stop spinning, but it's strange that it needs to mess your typing up to do whatever it's doing.
I'm surprised this guy isn't bankrupt and homeless.
This brings to mind Dr. Greer and the Sirius Disclosure project [0]. The first documentary, Sirius, is available on YouTube [1] and the second documentary, Unacknowledged, can be viewed on Netflix.

To be clear, I'm not sure if I entirely believe in all of this myself. However, I don't regret watching any of it. At the very least I got some inspiration for short stories/screenplays.

[0] - https://siriusdisclosure.com/ and https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC6B4Y0oFACv9QBlf0ebBcg

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C_-HLD21hA
> pose no national security threat

> sucking blood from 400 witnesses

Pick one.
Rust in Blockchain #7 – December 2019
The AI/ML hype drives away talented students from engineering and systems research, as well. Because of the hype engineering somehow is less prestigious than “data science”. Wonder how long until this trend will blow up.
> problematic at best, racist at worst

any and every discussion related to class on HN
It's sad, the point about the bay area. We could have done a lot more but nobody wants to make any sacrifices. I hope in the next decade the state will take a larger role and force local communities to drastically increase housing, density, and transit rights of way.
For future reference, vote as you please:

The “looming climate crisis“ and most of today’s popular academia will be a mainstream joke by 2030.
Xiaomi hires Chang Cheng, former Lenovo mobile business chief in China
I can speak to the blog. First, the daily posting rigor is inspiring. It makes you want to do something useful every day.

Second, many of his blog posts prompt you to ask questions of the work you are doing. They are not always the questions you expect and sometimes the pairing of your current situation and the current blog post are fortuitous.

Third, he has strong, uncommonly held about how to start, continue and finish, and find an audience for meaningful work. Unless you are particularly prolific, his writing should help you raise your expectations for yourself.

Fourth, he’s an executive and product creator and sometimes it’s worth understanding how those people think, whether to emulate them or just to sell to them.

That said, at this point I would start with his books because he’s had so much time to distill his blog ideas into longer writing and it’s better to catch up with a book than to read a lot of old posts.
This looks good and functions very nicely. However, the playhead in the progress bar moves in discreet steps. It'd be better if its movement is smoother. the playhead inside https://beta.music.apple.com unfortunately behaves the same way.
I think the problem with personal VPNs is correlating incoming with outgoing traffic is trivial for a global adversary (NSA, ISPs). When you use a service provider where a bunch of people are connecting to a single server correlating input with output becomes much more difficult, I seriously doubt it would be impossible though.
Safeguarding freedom and democracy is not a small trifle.
Major economists like Friedman disagree with you.

It has huge relevance in the USA. George was American.

Read this essay on raised land values by proxy (railroads or today tech or infra):

http://www.wealthandwant.com/HG/what_the_railroad_will_bring...
Bullshit!

I know Turkey had a Kurdish president as well as many kurdish senators in parliament. Some member of opposition party some members of Erdogan's party.

I know some cities have Arabic people more than Kurdish in east of Turkey.

The problem historical, needs to be closed for the sake of the citizens.