skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice post and congrats. Thanks for sharing actual numbers. Can I ask how did you spend the SEO money? And did you do any further validation prior to building or simply used your own experience with existing solutions as validation?
I heard people saying this a lot so I decided I'd give it a try. My experience is that this quote is actually, "The web is lightning fast when we don't use most of it." The number of features and websites that just wouldn't work was significant.

However, some sites I visited that were informational only did get a bit faster which for some people with bad Internet connections might make a difference.

This probably already exists, but what I want is an AdBlocker-style plugin that executes a community-curated list of "websites that need JavaScript to work." I can then get the best of both worlds: faster websites with less unnecessary JavaScript, but without crippling a large portion of the Internet for myself.
"one of the things that makes me steaming mad is how the entire field of web apps ignores 100% of learned lessons from desktop apps"
Not perhaps 100% but sure, in the modern age of web apps for everything I miss having proper desktop apps.

Even more so, programming web apps is nowhere near as convenient as developing desktop apps in late 90's with tools like Delphi.
I think zhdc1 was saying, "now that employees are expected to be back at work"--that is, we're now exiting the time period for which everyone had planned on much of China taking time off.

It's hard to gauge the impact when we expected everyone to be out of work anyway. Now that we're past that timeframe, it'll be easier to gauge the long-term impact, especially on foreign companies.
You make a good point by the way. I really think that next iteration of the OS paradigm will come from this angle. OS is becoming redundant anyway, in the age of cloud services (I don't think it will be desktop OS, just another OS for cloud). You are basically only interested in environment for your app, hardware abstraction is not that important, when whole filesystem is read only docker container anyway.
This site is not the vehicle for slinging political commentary and trying to be edgy, even if I might agree with it. Perhaps you would feel more at home on Reddit.
Most computers weren't that bad, but there was a time when Windows 95/98 and the mainstream hardware it ran on weren't a good match. That's what you remember.

Even then, once the thing did boot up, applications were rather responsive.

> ...you can easily setup a command line interface or Linux system and move blazing fast.

No, you can't. The majority of people uses software that is imposed upon them. The majority of work can not efficiently be expressed in CLIs.

It's the responsibility of software developers to write responsive software and in many cases, they have failed. Of course, with the inefficient web platform, their job is made difficult from the start.
Streaming Anomaly Detection in Ruby
BPF Performance Tools
> It was a great technology of its time

It was. And then that time came and went and after that it became harder and harder to justify its continued existence and development of applications.

I've worked on a moderately complex mumps system for a bank and the amount of arcane trickery to work around the limitations of the core MUMPS system were mind-boggling. The whole thing had to interact with other systems via trick comms links and the fact that it worked at all was a small miracle.

There are some other systems that are still in use even today that should have probably never been built in FoxPRO, Filemaker and other pieces of software of a certain age.
Can't wait for someone on here to say: "This is why you should run your own gitlab instance".
Error 500 on all github.com pages. Github Pages however seem to be working fine.
It’s already happening right now to some extent. But I highly doubt this trend will include the more educated and the less narcisistic, and on top of it, trends come and go in cycles and generations learn something from them. The not so good part is that the collective memory is relatively short, otherwise we’d learn more from history.
>But why do we still use unstructured format of binary data transmission even today when all communication is structured? Even seemingly binary stuff like streamed audio is structured.

This reminds me of Bluetooth with it's billions of different profiles. Want to send FLAC or opus audio streams over Bluetooth? Tough luck, you better use the blessed profiles or make your own proprietary implementation (aptX).
Well, I will say this about the TLD "debacle", when I recently went looking for a domain name made out of real words, but not in what you'd call the "A list" (i.e., not "drugs.com" or "money.com"), they have at least made it ineffectual now for squatters to squat on everything across all the useful TLDs. Someone wanted a couple $K for the .com variant but there were several other useful variants completely unregistered.
As with most things, humans are generally predictable. People in every generation will feel like their own society threatened in one form or another.

I'm not afraid of change - i grew up around technology during the 90s where we played outside every day and consider myself "up to date" wrt the current zeitgeist. I firmly believe technology (especially space tech) is the way forward but i still have reservations about the current sate of social media due to the effects on the psyche i see in people in my life. But that's just my experience.
That's beautiful. And so very true.

I think the very best liars and fraudsters are the ones who they themselves don't know what's true. And what better way to not know than complexity!
> Not to mention that I can almost guarantee there is some scientific research into visibility and colors that would have predicted this just based off of color palette alone.

Well, blue is the harder color for the human eye to see; night makes it worse.
Yes, acid compliance is not a prerequisite for what most people call a database either laypeople or not.
Scala Magnet Pattern to Handle Type Erasure
As far as I can tell, 'HR departments' that advocate for the interests of workers rather than the company exist, and are called 'unions.'
I can only answer the 3rd question.

Rob Ford was the king of retail politics. People in his ward loved him because if you called about a pothole he would be there personally with a work crew the next morning. He became mayor due to the amalgamated Toronto. A previous conservative government combined many outlying cities into Toronto proper, completely changing the makeup of the city. Rob was elected by the suburbs surrounding the old city thanks to promises to keep taxes down and find efficiencies. The core of old Toronto voted overwhelmingly against him.

Doug was elected because a tree stump could have beaten the Liberals in the 2018 election. Liberals had been in power for far too long and the province really did need a change. Internal politics and infighting within the PC caucus allowed Doug to extremly narrowly wrest control of leadership. No matter the PC leader was they were going to win the provincial election between a liberal government that did need to go and first past the post voting.
Director of Talent and Culture
> is people have been oppressing the person in question for centuries, so he’s not really in a position to be able to honestly say that he isn’t being racist or generally isn’t.

Since we dropped collective punishments a longer time ago, this statement is false.

On the contrary, it a big problem on the topic of racism.

I would escalate that argument any time.

edit: it is additionally false, because "the person in question" hasn't been oppressed. So the statement is flawed in numerous ways.
What you’re describing is an opposition to affirmative action policies. The general intent of actively considering more women (and people of color) for speaking and leadership roles is to examine biases that prevented us from considering them in the first place [1]. It also helps normalize and set role models for newer employees or students.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/break-the-future/2016/12/20/thi...
Turn on the ability to view flagged comments and scroll down.
The HTML vs XHTML situation: would you prefer a hard failure on any error, or a graceful degradation system that is therefore always slightly degraded?

We go back and forth on this because tightening the schema only works when you can adequately define the requirements of both ends up front, and there isn't a vendor battleground happening in your standard. Developers end up escaping into an unstructured-but-working zone. Classics like "it's such a hassle to get the DBA to add columns, so we'll add a single text column and keep all the data in there as JSON".
Nah.

This is why you should run your own gogs/gitea instance.
When an area of engineering is new we make products better than the market will eventually pay for. Over time, we learn how to make them just good enough to reach an equilibrium in a market. This is an idea that is explored in _The World Without Us_ by Alan Wiesman. The Roman Colosseum still stands, but buildings today don't need to be that durable. It would cost significantly more to make them that way, so we don't. The same could be said about supersonic travel. We could do it again, but enough of us are happy to not pay the premium, so that product has disappeared.
I remember when all of this was trees.
I guess the old fuddy-duttys gotta fuddy-dutty somewhere, eh?
It's more convenient to call and export needed function directly via C API than force everybody to make and use another "universal" layer.
Not really :)

Consider a VT100. It could only go up to 19200 baud, and couldn't actually handle constant streams at that speed.

However I do agree with the general message of the article. Current UX is a mess, websites are overblown by tons of javascript. There's no reason there should be loading spinners in this day and age with the power we have at our fingertips.
Also the amount of data we query in most cases is many orders of magnitude larger.

Most of the 1980-1995 cases could fit the entire datasets in CPU cache and be insanely fast.

Most things I query these days are in the gigabytes to terabytes range.

Lastly, we have to make them secure,especially against malformed data attempting to attack the app, which eats a lot of CPU cycles.
Not really. Just show your mobile to a guy from the 16th century and see what he thinks.
Most companies are not SAP, Microsoft or Google, and would do well to stay miles away from developing their own tools. Because the tools that you develop then become the millstone around your neck in the longer term.

Unless a tool gives you a major advantage you should never go near that. Your competitors will all happily use COTS, drop projects and adapt new tech while you will be stuck in the hole with your sunk cost and impossible to migrate toolchain. That sort of situation has sunk more than one company.
> But that only applies to houses that are now zoned to allow them to be replaced with condos.

Literally what I’m talking about and what is often fought against. But really any development constrain, zoning or not, has this effect.

And: Priced out of the whole area in many cases — folks are absolutely leaving NYC and the SF Bay Area for cheaper locales. Just ask anyone in the Central Valley, Portland, or Pittsburgh.
Does HN traffic spike when github goes down?
A tweet thread where you complain about AJAX popups and other Javascript-based slow downs seems utterly ironic. Whatever happened to having your own blog? Even better is that these tweets were from 2017.

This makes me yearn for building an ncurses-rooted non-GUI flavour of Ubuntu.
> Terminal response times are way slower than they used to be in the 80's.

Do you have data / a citation to back up that statement? Most things seem faster to me. As long as the command line responds as faster as I can type, I don't care about it being faster.

That being said, overall speed and what can be handled by the system certainly does matter in many cases, even if it is _just throughput_. I've recently been running commands to search/process data from the command line recently

1. Search through a directory structure with millions of files (find)

2. filter down to ones containing a certain thing (grep)

3. find certain values in the files based on pattern matching (sed)

4. filter to files where one value equals another (test)

I can't imagine that would _ever_ finish running on a computer in the 80s. It works just fine on my current computer (albeit taking a minute to run).
That’s okay, I fully support him. There’s bound to be differences of opinion, but after a decade and half of liberal corruption, Doug Ford is incredibly refreshing. Will vote for him again.
OH, thank you! This explains why the article is a wall of one-sentence paragraphs.
Thanks, yeah I assume it's biologically comparable, I was just curious about the massive social event side of things
This post again with its ridiculous ranting examples.

"This text searching program that searches text against text is way faster and simpler than a fully rendered, interactive map of the entire world with accurate roads and precision at the foot / meter level."

No. Shit, really? Get out of town.

Yes, some very popular apps have bad UX. But some apps have incredible UX. Cherry picking the bad ones while ignoring the good ones to prove a point is boring and not reflective of the actual industry.

These posts fondly remember just the speed, but always seem to forget the frustrations, or re-imagine them to be something we treasured.

Remember autoexec.bat files? Remember endless configuration to get one program working? Remember the computer just throwing its hands up and giving up when you gave it input that wasn't exactly what it expected? Remember hardware compatibility issues and how badly it affected system stability? Remember when building a computer required work and research and took hours? I do, and it wasn't fun then, it was a detriment to doing what you wanted. It wasn't a rite of passage, it was a huge pain in the ass.

So yeah, things are slower now, and I wanna go fast. But I also don't need to spend an entire weekend setting up a PC and a printer for my mom anymore either. I don't need to teach her arcane commands to get basic functionality out of her machine. Plug and play and usability happened, and while things feel slower, computers are now open to a much wider audience and are much more usable now.

These posts always have a slight stench of elitism disguised as disappointment.
"Rich tech people" is such a bizarre and mostly imaginary group to rail against.

> Doesn't really apply to EU. Bankers, lawyers, real estate agents, some doctors, etc are the (small-time) rich. Most of tech people barely touch the upper-middle class.

It's the same in the United States.
Convox (YC S15) announces our multi-cloud platform built on Kubernetes
Renault shares fall after Moody's cuts its debt to 'junk' status
This is the typical maltreatment you experience as a programmer?

> After the first couple of weeks of training, I chose to join the team that worked on my area of expertise, and this is where things started getting weird. On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn't. He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn't help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR.

Or this?

> When I pointed out how few women were in SRE, she recounted with a story about how sometimes certain people of certain genders and ethnic backgrounds were better suited for some jobs than others, so I shouldn't be surprised by the gender ratios in engineering. Our meeting ended with her berating me about keeping email records of things, and told me it was unprofessional to report things via email to HR.
TeX is faster.
One DC Judge Is About to Decide the Future of Hospital Economics
Why don't we simply petition the Internet Society to hold prices fixed for all existing .org domains in the Alexa top 100K? That should be a small part of the potential profits of running .org, and anyone else can just register a domain name on .party or whatever. That way we avoid the cost of a transition to a new system.
me to you can solve the same problem in 100 ways and each way can have its own tips and ticks and pors and cons! C# will be complex like c++ not for new developers only for experts!
That’s not true, and I can think of several examples where rent control would help grad students:

Grad students often live in Santa Cruz long term. I know multiple people in Santa Cruz who went back to school for higher degrees, and kept their same housing.

Even students who come from out of town still live there for the duration of their program, which can be 6 years. The rental market changes fast, and rent control for those 6 years would have an impact.

Many grad students live with other students, so the same lease can carry over as long as a leaseholder stays. I lived in one house that had kept the same lease going for over 15 years. That might get harder with rent control in place, but our rent was still comparatively cheap because we’d been there for so long.

Regardless of whether it helps grad students survive, it helps the people who live in Santa Cruz long term. I eventually left because I couldn’t afford to live and work there, and might not have had to make that choice if rent prices hadn’t gone through the roof.
All of the rigor of modern software development.
Rob Ford was populist before Trump, so in that sense he’s right.
Related to this, is there a native desktop application for kanban?

Essentially, a local version of Trello without input lag. I'm tired of web apps.
At roughly that same time I did buy an Alpha but for one reason only: it could use more than 4G of RAM in Linux and files could be larger than 4G. It was the cheapest 64 bit platform at the time and I needed that to be able to use very large MySQL tables. Very nice hardware, super reliable and it ran for many years.
Sure. But neither does the "spooky action at a distance". And we still can't explain it.
I find the concepts he makes you think about are helpful.

Think through the big problems and make sure you keep them in mind as your are coding the subsystems.

Make sure any code you write could be used by another system in case you need to break it apart later.

Make things pluggable though interfaces.

No global references.
Thanks so much. I was curious about these things for a very long time now.
Goodbye anything you’ve ever said about AWS Lambda, too.
I really liked that about this article. Social Media sites are full images of that illustrate the point.
The BIOS POST message is still there btw even on eg Thinkpads (Phoenix BIOS), you just have to enable it in the ... BIOS.
Reddit Compulsively Shows Bernie Sanders Ads
Most operating systems ship a general-purpose structured binary serialization format parser as an OS component: ASN1. There have over the years been a number of security critical bugs in there, and everybody hates ASN1 anyway.
At least the "Responsibility" problem is relatively easy to solve, use the manipulator to move and provide power to the computer. Since they're able to manifest things into the universe they can probably just provide the appropriate voltage at the end of the cables going to the computer and similarly provide any other needs like cooling (this spot is 0.1K or whatever temperature the device needs).
The author bemoans how everything has gotten (perceptually) slower, and then proceeds to communicate this not through a single letter or blog post, but instead through ninety-five (95) tweets.

C'mon.
C++ Function Object
Smart Home Groups Explained
Escalation never helps.

I think we have to acknowledge that discrimination and oppression will be followed by retaliation. Even if white people and men are treating black people and women, respectively, with perfect equity (spoiler alert, they’re still not), those groups have already been wronged and have been conditioned to understand that those people consider them to be sub-human. It is logical for women and black peoples to continue to distrust men and white people, respectively.

So, we have to accept that there will not be be a world without bias and discrimination until we treat people like we would want to be treated, and stop escalating.
> Implementing streaming files over record-based files is easier

What a performance-wise nightmare. Goodbye page cache and other zero copy optimizations.
"the status quo is still in 2020 that a baby born in America white and male is among the luckiest babies in history."

Millions of these "luckiest" babies are suffering from crippling illnesses, yet they are treated like they are awash with privilege solely because they are white and male. This is racism and sexism. Disabled white men are not privileged.
I can already migrate from .org to .com or other alternatives today. It's just that all of my links will break, my search engine placement will plummet, and users won't be able to find my site. If I'm using my domain as an identity indicator for email, it also opens the door for other people to impersonate me.

The problem with the current system isn't that there aren't enough TLDs. There are tons of TLDs. The problem is that once you register a domain, you need to have permanent ownership of that domain. It doesn't matter if there are 5 thousand (or even 5 million) TLDs. Once I link a .com domain to my email, the .com owner has a monopoly over me.

Handshake doesn't solve that problem. TLD owners will still be able to rent-seek, and they'll still hold monopolies over anyone who buys from them.
I consistently get a 500 error when I try to logout, the main page loads fine for me though.
> Why can't HR be what they purportedly say they are

Because the owners pay them, not the employees
could you do that in the past though?
> Why license plates are allowed to act as regional advertisements for local states and provinces rather than identifiers

Because they are harmless fun? Many hours of road trips were spent trying to spot a license plate from every state.

And quite frankly, I love that each region has its own plate design. It adds a bit of spice to life.
Required Reading for Marketplace Entrepreneurs
I guess it's a bad time to make a presentation to let us move from an on-prem SVN repo to GitHub...
Any advice for working with people who insist that I should "know something already" that's not obvious and/or was never communicated?
Did we read the same blog entry?

Her first manager propositioned her for sex almost on day one.

HR lied about that managers past issues and told her suck it up or receive a negative review.

She received a negative review anyways (changed after the fact - her in-person review was positive). This blocked role changes and made her ineligible for graduate tuition reimbursement.

Leather jackets for the men, women told to deal with it.

Threatened by manager with termination because she reported somebody to HR.
Hacker News spends half its time making fun of moral panics and half its time participating in them. Who cares if people want to have plastic surgery or injectable treatments?
Speaking of Uber and Susan Fowler - had the current CEO frog marched out everyone that authorized, worked on, did not block, did not fight against what she experienced especially after the publication of her post?

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/18/books/review/susan-fowler...

If not, why has not the board frog marched the current CEO out?
I love seeing designs that fail while keeping the product as electrically hot as possible - said noone ever.