skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Performance is one thing, but I'm really just struck by how often I run into things that are completely broken or barely working for extended periods of time.

As I write this, I've been trying to get my Amazon seller account reactivated for more than a year, because their reactivation process is just... broken. Clicking any of the buttons, including the ones to contact customer support just take you back to the same page. Attempts to even try to tell someone usually put you in touch with a customer service agent halfway across the world who has no clue what you're talking about and doesn't care; even if they did care, they'd have no way to actually forward your message along to the team that might be able to spend the 20 minutes it might take to fix the issue.

The "barely working" thing is even more common. I feel like we've gotten used to everything just being so barely functional that it isn't even a disadvantage for companies anymore. We usually don't have much of an alternative place to take our business.
The corollary is that naming is important in the adoption and proliferation of a technology. So public image is a concern technology devlopers should be on top of.

Don't hate the player, don't hate the game; Adapt and move on.

This goes for everyone involved.
Women have the power to say no as they please - they do not have to date anyone. Men on the other hand rarely refuse a potential partner. That is a major difference.
> Keep in mind that the transitional years, after the governmental collapse, but before western institutions stepped in, were worse than regular life when the eastern systems were functional.

Are you talking about the post war years? Yeah, those generally were pretty hard, especially with the east not having a Marshall Plan. Lots of political change necessarily did make a lot of people unhappy. But I'd be surprised if you'd find many stories of people emigrating in the latter years cause they couldn't make ends meet.

Or do you mean the reunification years? Cause I hardly remember "western institutions stepping in and saving the day" ever mentioned when the days of the Treuhand are brought up. The more common narrative is "west stepped in, destroyed all our industry and left us with little prospects to these days" or some more grounded version of that.

But yeah, while a good king might be the best form of government, the necessity to get rid of the bad ones (=worst possible gov) makes authoritarian systems not very desirable. At the same time is it a good idea to non the less find ways to integrate the strengths of those societies into our own as well.
?

It's MIT https://github.com/svaarala/duktape/blob/master/LICENSE.txt
+1. For example, according to one of their job listings[1], Twitter currently has 25 people working on the main twitter.com experience.

Twenty-five people! For a Twitter client! And they're still trying to hire more! (Important to keep in mind: this doesn't include any of the people working on the database, or the advertising algorithm, or the server architecture, or any of the other hard problems Twitter faces. This is just the team that writes the JavaScript code that takes the Tweets from the JSON API response and puts them onto the screen.)

[1] https://careers.twitter.com/en/work-for-twitter/201910/twitt...
"webrings" were primitive social networks, too
> Each point alone requires a long rebuttal that no one would read

I'd like to sell you a solution for that. Brief bullet points like the one you made are readable, but when people disagree you need hypertext links to your supporting arguments. I made a web app for creating such trees of arguments. Here's an example in which you'll see I think the dangers of nuclear waste are debatable: https://en.howtruthful.com/o/nuclear_power_is_a_crucial_comp...
Surely, Apple and Google have just about as many resources as Microsoft does.

If Android, Mac OS, etc were super slimmed down systems in comparison to Windows, I would understand the argument much better. Instead, it feels like we're in the worst of both worlds.
> "Troublemakers, mostly boys, are kids who will not silently sit still."

The best remedy in this sort of situation, where a boy's got ants in his pants and can't sit still, is sports. Sports give kids a productive way to burn off their energy. I know some people here and in other STEM-associated communities think sports is a four letter word (ackshully it's six) because of the pop culture meme that athleticism and intelligence are mutually exclusive and you can either be a jock or a nerd but not both. But that's nothing more than a dumb pigeon-holing stereotype perpetuated by lazy hollywood and television writers (and sometimes internalized and aped by impressionable children.)

Extramural sports help unruly kids in other ways too. By providing a structured environment for a greater portion of the day, the strain placed on parents is reduced and kids are kept from getting into trouble unsupervised at home.
Seems to be solving the same problem as CalVer[1]?

I've used it in the past for Continuously Deployed web applications. The dates make it easy to determine the age of the release, and it's easy to automate away to a CI job[2].

[1] https://calver.org/
[2] https://dephell.readthedocs.io/cmd-project-bump.html
I run a SaaS company and quit my day job 5 years ago. When my wife was going to have our second child last year, I posted here and on other startup forums to ask how male founders handled paternity leave. Many people commented that they were also interested in hearing stories of what others had done, but there were zero responses from male founders who had actually taken a paternity leave.

What I ended up doing was basically ramping down my work for many months, and only taking a week or two off completely. This was the most helpful for our family, although my wife's job (professor) offers a significant maternity leave, so my approach might not be optimal for other situations.
I'm not convinced by the long term benefit of nitrogen fertiliser synthesis. A significant boom in food production is attributable to it but also long term degradation of agricultural soils, pollution from fertiliser run off and repression of more sustainable agriculture and food distribution options. Perhaps if it had been used to buy time for more ecological and equitable policies it would be more impressive, but it seems only to have advanced the alternative.
In page 3, "Readers rated each case using the forced BI-RADS scale, and BI-RADS scores were compared to ground-truth outcomes to fit an ROC curve for each reader. The scores of the AI system were treated in the same manner (Fig. 3)."

This isn't as clear as I want it to be, but Fig. 3 shows both "AI system" and "AI system (non-parametric)" ROC curve. My understanding is that the former is fit from discrete BI-RADS class, and the latter is "raw" output.
Your understanding is correct. And this is the point that we can say it is bad for society.
The Constitution says "a limited time" and that time should be relatively short. I'm saying 25 years. Perhaps you can extend it for a large fee.
But currently the limit is 95 years longer than the average human life. While it is limited, it is unlimited as far as a person goes, and in my opinion goes against the spirit of the Constitution. Problem is, people with more money than me say otherwise.
Space-based solar power
I think you overestimate the importance of the EPA rating for a worldwide vehicle (Europeans really don't care about the EPA for ex). The reviews are overwhelmingly positive and full of superlatives - this is the true "high end electric car" to beat now. Yes Tesla might tweak the Model S to make it a bit faster, and it's significantly cheaper, but it also feels significantly cheaper to sit in and drive, and it's unlikely to magically improve tomorrow because Porsche has had decades of refining those qualities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vq6KEOIiMg
They're drastically different, though.

The YouTube link you referenced is an actual recording -- the notes are all distinctly different dynamics, and there's plenty of background hiss. It's a real recording, full of life, on a real piano, and genuinely overdubbed. It's not "a little crummy" -- to the contrary, it's an invaluable historical record.

On the other hand, the "Gershwin Plays Gershwin" album is a genuine player piano, but the Rhapsody in Blue is totally different -- it has zero dynamics, everything is exactly the same volume. [1] It's interesting to hear, for sure -- but more as a historical curiosity, since no pianist would ever perform everything at the same volume unless limited technologically. Your original link is Gershwin's full interpretation. In contrast, his player piano version is nothing like what he would have performed live, but rather adapted to the technological limitations.

[1] https://open.spotify.com/track/2XSBXz4uDvx1PQPYJWQpcK?si=EO3...
> approaching a CENTURY without any significant advances in physics

If we changed that to 60 years, I'd make an even stronger statement. It seems that all the great theories and discoveries in all scientific fields happened more than 60 years ago:

Evolution, Big Bang, special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, Godel's incompleteness theorem, continental drift, asteroid death of dinosaurs (K-T extinction event), fission/fusion, germ theory, etc.

Certainly there has been great advances in technology (semiconductors, superconductors, quantum computing, etc.) But the great theories on which those are based happened before most of us here were even born.

You'd think that with scientific knowledge supposedly doubling every 7 years that we'd have many new important discoveries and groundbreaking theories. We don't.
Absolutely true. However we also need people who do have solutions/ideas to these problems running for office even if they don’t know how to flip bits. It would be nice to see technology enabling skilled candidates rather than troll farms.
I Love The 20s
> For example, I work on an app which wouldn't be possible on the web 5-10 years ago. It's a single page app because it needs to be.

No, it doesn't need to be. If you need to use hacks like SPAs to have the functionality you want, that is telling you that you're using the wrong tool for the job, and shouldn't be making a Web site.

What you and a lot of other Web developers have done is, when faced with a square peg and a round hole, break the peg and the hole. Worse yet, not just for you, but for everybody who has to use those pegs and holes. Now the Web is a terrible place even for the people who used it correctly. Now the desktop is a terrible place because Web people have infected it with Electron.

Web developers, if they can be called that, have set back the state of the art by several decades.
How do actor model languages (like ponylang) handle this? It seems like not having back-pressure support would be a fundamental issue with the language.
Solid post, but complaining is easy. Programmers have complained about slow software, excessive complexity and abstraction for almost the whole history of computing.

What are some non-toy examples of people doing it right? What are concrete steps we can take to write cleaner, faster software?

--

I think HN itself is a pretty inspirational example. It's one of v few sites that always loads fast, even on a bad network. It has zero ads, zero trackers, and very little fluff.

So what does HN put significant effort into? Moderation, tools for moderation, algorithms to detect spam and brigading, etc. So one concrete suggestion is to focus your engineering effort and your hiring "below the waterline". The best software is often minimalist, with lots of thought and effort invested below the surface. A classic example is the original google.com: just two buttons and a text box.

Much bloat comes from teams that only know how to think about the part of the software they can see.
By all means, go for it, just do it with eyes open, it’s a lot of work.

The other thing I’d add is that the physics models is only half the battle. The car and track geometry is critical to making an accurate simulation. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the car physics and forget to deal with the angles and bumps and materials and temperature of the road surface.

Cameras are huge too, if you do anything other than a fixed interior cam. A naive follow can behind a car can totally undo all the physics.

Good luck!!
The intelligence service watching over them last years, but "the organisation" had members even among the intelligence service members.

See more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21932211
This is UI. Imagine the ML mess we will have in 20 years.
Lol I cannot for a second imagine the mental leaps you must make to get to what you just said.

You’re essentially saying “Leninist Russia will be the best thing for entrepreneurs”.

Interesting how chances are you’re not a doctor or in the medical field. You and comrade Bernie have no skin in the game but are loud about your complaints.
v8 used to support them behind a flag. Chakra and spidermonkey teams said implementing was hard. v8 team put forward a plan to replace automatic PTC with syntactic PTC. The proposal has been essentially dead and v8 removed their PTC support completely.

A big complaint was "no stack traces". This doesn't matter (IMO) because shadow stacks have been prove to work well in Safari and in several Scheme implementations (you seldom need more than the first few stacks and the last few stacks with a rolling window). We've had way worse than that for decades now as you lose your whole stack every time the event loop goes to the next event. Safari has about 30% of the total JS marketshare including mobile. They've been running PTC on websites for a couple years without complaints, so the whole "we'll break the web" concerns seem overblown.

My understanding of the politics is that both the Safari and spidermonkey/v8 members on the consortium refuse to budge so there isn't consensus to move forward. This still seems a non-issue to me though. If you view PTC as an optional enhancement, then you could still add a non-optional syntactic PTC variant.
Things don’t really work that way in the USA. I can take a bunch of stuff to a place like Goodwill. They will give me a little slip of paper that is “proof” that I donated, but they don’t keep records of my donation. The only way the government could know about it is if I tell them at tax time.
2019 was Australia's hottest year on record – 1.5C above average temperature
California’s Privacy Law Goes into Effect Today. Now What?
> > With lower opt-level

> Yeah but who'd do that?

Anyone who does `cargo run`. A project I'm working on right now is slow enough in debug builds that I usually debug it with light optimizations enabled. Lean on the optimizer and you'll find it a leaky abstraction.
> There's a lot of shops that are pure django, drupal, laravel, wordpress experts, who would never be able to put something together from scratch, but can probably glue you a customized website in not a lot of time from relatively well tested components.

Nobody denies that these frameworks allow people who would never be able to program in C/C++ to create websites. Nobody denies that it takes more of these quasi-programmers to create and maintain websites than it would take more knowledgeable programmers writing in more efficient languages. So, here's the killer question: At which point do these frameworks and the large number of quasi-programmers required to maintain them cost more than just hiring somebody who can create a native app in C/C++?
Khan Academy has some lessons aimed at fairly young kids—counting, spotting gaps in counting, talking that simple. I tried to sit with my son on the Khan Academy iPad app a few weeks ago to do some with him, thinking it'd be great. Unfortunately it is (or seemed to be to such a degree that I'm about 99% sure it is) janky webtech, so glitches and weirdness made it too hard for my son to progress in without my constantly stepping in to fix the interface. Things like, no feedback that a button's been pressed? Guess what a kid (or hell, adult) is gonna do? Hammer the button! Which... then keeps it greyed out once it does register the press, but doesn't ever progress, so you're stuck on the screen and have to go back and start the lesson over. Missed presses galore, leading to confusion and frustration that nothing was working the way he though it was (and it, in fact, supposed) to work.

I don't mean to shit on Khan Academy exactly because it's not like I'm paying for it, but those lessons may as well not exist for a 4 year old with an interface that poor. It was bad enough that more than half my time intervening wasn't to help him with the content, nor to teach him how to use the interface, but to save him from the interface.

This is utterly typical, too. We just get so used to working around bullshit like this, and we're so good at it and usually intuit why it's happening, that we don't notice that it's constant, especially on the web.
Unfortunately this isn't the perfect solution as there is no universal device or average user. Especially with music, mixing songs for earbud/headphones will produce a worse quality song for another pair. In the same way we've seen software written by users primarily using x86 work less effectively when compiled to arm. Plenty of open source projects are developed on by people with less than adequate hardware yet they're still bloated and slow.

I think it's very sensible (if a little unrealistic) to test applications on as many pieces of intended hardware as possible, and this somewhat reminds me about this story of snow clearance[0], where the solution was not only the intrudction of a new perspective but also empirical measurements.

[0]: http://info.gritit.com/blog/what-is-gender-balanced-snow-cle...
Nah. It's thanks to the country having a huge mining industry. A lot of jobs reflected that. Hell, we still have politicians proposing a new coal fired power station in North Queensland. It's not like NQ needs a new power station, much less one that costs far more than the alternatives. It does however have a lot of votes whose jobs depend on mining, and mining coal specifically.

Apparently lying to them is a good way to get them to vote for you. It works for politicians and the mass media.
the trend of the world has been to decrease transaction friction and costs. Crypto increases both.

And moving to crypto is like going back on the gold standard. No way to expand or contract monetary supply.
As someone in a bootcamp right now, I'm really happy to hear this! Im hell-bent on starting a new career as a dev
AWSCLI backward compatibility has been so good, I've never had a Bash-My-AWS command fail due to a change.

AWS CLI v2 previews were released in Nov 19 and while this may contain some breaking changes, I wouldn't be surprised if all the commands BMA uses continue to work as normal.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/developer/aws-cli-v2-installers...
BigIP F5 irules shudder.
Is it just me, or has anyone else sensed a shift back from thick SPAs to Server-side rendering precisely because of performance?
This sounds like the kind of rant I would have written before I had to make those kinds of decisions.

- What bug tracking software do we use? You have two hours to research and pick one, and someone's gonna hate it no matter what you do.

- Do we focus on fixing a niche bug which affects one customer, or on adding a feature that all of our biggest customers have been screaming for?

- Do we get the new feature in for our next release or make everyone wait another three months because one dev is anxious?

- Do we build out our QA team ("nobody cares that us devs are overworked and drowning") or do we reinforce the dev team ("cheap bastards won't even give us QA")?

Once you have to think about keeping the lights on for a business as a whole, you realise that all of the choices that seemed so huge and obvious as devs are small tradeoffs in a much bigger picture.
Rather than blaming abstractions, wouldn't it be better to blame the structural pathologies built into these huge companies? Maybe the abstractions to blame are the ones on the corporate ladder. Among other things, there can be poor encapsulation (e.g. micromanagement), bad memory management (teams being shuffled, broken up, pulled out of one project and put to work on another) and misguided, dogmatic application of design principles (e.g. Apple: everything must look beautiful and sleek, even if in practice it is hard to use, increasingly often. Various companies: "we need to change the interface every time we release a new version", with nary a thought to those who would prefer to master a UI rather than have to constantly adapt to its sweeping changes.)

Part of it may also have to do with big companies' product teams being largely insulated from failure, through lack of competition and lock-in. Where's Apple Music app's competitor? How are Twitter's users going to rebuild their network and brand if they switch to another microblogging service? These companies are too-big-to-fail in a different sense (that their profitable and successful products underwrite their mediocre offerings in other areas.)

Big software companies aren't the only big companies around producing ugly, unusable products with few alternatives. Until those rare times are mightily and unexpectedly defeated by an unexpected upstart, we get to suffer from their mediocrity, especially those of us who are in a sense UI connoisseurs.
Most my coworkers have. I'm somewhat unlucky in that regard, average work week is about 60 to 90 hours a week for a $40,000/yr salary as QA.

That said, I something of an edge case. I have an IQ in the mid 80's, so the fact that I got an office job at all is something of an accomplishment. I should've ended up a minimum wage laborer or turning to petty crime. My employer took a pretty significant risk hiring me, so I'm grateful for it.
You can immigrate to the US without ever filling out an I-9, if you never work as an employee while in the US.

On the other hand, a US citizen who never leaves the country might fill out dozens over the course of a career, depending on how often they switch jobs.
From two years ago, and the discussion is archived.
It would be like posting "The dark side of SQL" for a slow MySQL query
> I want to take pride in my work. I want to deliver working, stable things. To do that, we need to understand what we are building, in and out, and that’s impossible to do in bloated, over-engineered systems.

Somebody needs to write this software. Efficient, maintainable, and debugged are not the low-energy state.

That means it either needs to come from business, or from open-source hobbyists. Business doesn't see a competitive advantage in it -- even Apple, which has traditionally cared more about UX than anybody, just has to be better than their #2 competitor (and price of entry to "desktop OS" or "smartphone OS" is high so that list is short, and not changing on any relevant timescale). And the open-source world has never delivered well on the end-user experience side of things.

The sad truth is that users would rather have new software for $0 (paid by ads, or media subscriptions, or whatever) than pay what it truly costs to develop software.

My main hopes today are that the end of Moore's Law will force companies' hands, or that government will step in to regulate minimal quality, or that workers will organize so they can stand for quality behind a CBA. These all seem rather unlikely at this junction. The number of programmers in it for the paycheck far outweighs the number of people who care about simplicity.

Software is going to get much worse before it gets better.
And any issue can be fixed the HN way - write a rule forbidding discussion of the issue.
Oops! Then that's a terrible design.
Or report your odometer reading every time you renew your registration with steep fines for lying.

Or simply add a tax on new cars. Those who drive a lot will have to replace their vehicles more often and pay more tax.