skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Most citizens ancestors in former colonial countries were often no less oppressed by their ruling classes and factory owners as natives in the colonies.

You have no idea what you're talking about. You ought to read about this before making such sweeping claims. The Dutch invaded islands, killed and tortured the locals into submission, razed the island and enslaved the women and children to work on spice plantations.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/11/26/165657050/no...

> Current ancestors of those working classes are not responsible for their ancestors oppressors.

No one is arguing that. They're making the very reasonable claim that one group of people oppressed another and that this put the oppressed people at a significant disadvantage relative to those who benefited from the oppression, and thus that resources should be redistributed to balance that - a policy that makes perfect sense in terms of economic incentives.
Not at all. As the page says, you can’t block pawns, which entirely changes the game. You also don’t need to move pawns to develop pieces.
As distinct from a "continuing state", yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succession_of_states

Ah, but:

"There are several recent examples where a succession of states, as described above, has not been entirely adhered to. This is mostly a list of the exceptions that have occurred since the creation of the United Nations in 1945. In previous historical periods, the exceptions would be too many to list."

Seems like there's going to be scope for endless debate here... at least the lawyers should do well.
>BBEdit probably isn't the best choice for code by modern standards

Yeah, I think perhaps this is what I'm missing. I'm a software engineer and at minimum in an editor I want syntax highlighting and code formatting (completion is a nicety but still largely a hassle outside of IDEs) and it's just not there for the languages I want to use.

I definitely appreciate the "works like a Mac app" angle, although in many ways it feels more like a Mac app from 25 years than I would like. It doesn't feel modern.
The "cobbling systems together" stuff is code bureaucracy rather than programming. You're no longer dealing with constraints of physics, mathematics and sound system design - you're building a bit-pushing layer in between Kafkaesque monstrosities that were never truly intended to work together.

Sadly, most programming jobs seem to primarily involve code bureaucracy rather than the "algorithmic" level.
This is voluntary. At least in the US, there is nowhere near enough police (including every last sworn officer and every single military member, police or not) to force people to stay at home. They are extremely outnumbered, both by population and by weaponry. Imagining this leading to an authoritarian state is fearmongering.
Hey, I made that meme.

It was based on a similar story the one in OPs blogpost. At my first job I used to work with some really talented fresh grads that wanted to show off their algorithms skills and ended up over-engineering stuff.

One of them implemented a trie and stored it in SQL lite to implement some string autocomplete where the number of strings was something like 100.

The other implemented a 2D segment tree for doing some grid updates where the size of the grid was small. This inspired the first part of the meme. Segment trees and sqrt decomposition are topics that are popular at programming contests and nowhere else really.

Regarding the triple nested loop, I just wrote the simplest pseudocode that represents nested loops, not necessarily something a "senior" developer would write.
Szyperski also said this back in 1997. "Maximizing reuse minimizes use"

https://books.google.ie/books?id=U896iwmtiagC&pg=PA45&lpg=PA...
I agree with it being a positive development, but it is probably a story for any potential second waves. Don't think it can be scaled quickly enough to change much in the current wave.

It also doesn't solve many of the spontaneous human interactions that are hurt by this. A 13 min per person test that needs to be adminstered by somebody who knows what they are doing works fine in a factory. It probably is still too much friction for a restaurant, the subway, a stadium, kid's soccer practice, etc.
Reply All is a group of very talented storytellers working at the intersection of tech and society. I love everything they do and have been listening to PJ and Alex since before Reply All (before starting Reply All, they had a podcast called TL;DR that was a spinoff from WNYC's On the Media).

The stories they tell should be of interest to the HN crowd, I'd highly recommend everyone give them a try.
Stay out of the comments at the bottom of the article. Full of responses from people who didn't read it.
Applying algorithms in non classroom assignment style is rarely trivial. Takes some insight into nature of the problem to spot the opportunity and good familiarity with applicable solution in the first place.
> way more and better features

That's hyperbole. Affinity products are quite close. Artists with more of a "hacker" mindset who can improvise a bit around missing features can also get by with open-source alternatives like Inkscape and Gimp.

Oh, and the new-user friendliness of Adobe products is abismall. I've never seem something more user-hostile than Photoshop - it imposes a brain-breaking mental model copied from the era of dark-room photo-effects or smth. and doesn't accept that everyone wants vector + raster in the same one software.

If the industry would not be so high-pressure and artists would have time to learn more tools and play with stuff instead of crunching to meet deadlines, stockholm-syndrome-software like Adobe's would die off... it only survives because that +10% productivity + extra 15% productivity for using the same tool as all the others and all the examples give overwhelmed and overworked artists an extra 25% they can't say no to!
Medium grows 140% to 60M monthly visitors
Hmm, maybe I misremembered them for their Softbank activism
In order for anything useful to happen in our society, we have to vote. It is now abundantly clear which party values what, and for whom. If we would rather vote based on 'abortion preventing our souls from partying with Jesus in heaven' instead of 'municipal broadband for all residents as a public utility', then we're going to continue to complain about this for another 50 years and beyond.

The problem is that saying this out loud means you're politicizing this problem. Well, it's largely a political problem, otherwise we could get the Federal Government to step in and properly fix this. Legislation in the past with the best intensions was purposely weakened at the last moment to allow billions to be taken from Federal programs that left zero actual improvement or infrastructure development. Guess which party is fighting hardest for such loopholes and promising that corporations can do this better than "big government"?

If we don't get our acts together in November, not having quality Internet access is going to be the least of our problems. Anyway, everyone enjoy going back to business as normal by Easter during the peak of this pandemic. I'm sure that will help as well.
I have Affinity Photo, but I find I don't even use Photo for photos at all.

It's usually for manipulating non-photo raster stuff for the web. For photos, I pretty much use DxO (Lightroom equivalent) exclusively.

I have found Lightroom equivalents to have just the right amount of Photoshop functionality that a) lets me do everything I need faster than a dedicated Photoshop type app, b) lets me do that stuff in batches faster.
Delegated Properties in Kotlin
Publish to NPM Automatically with GitHub Actions
Situation update worldwide, as of 28 March 2020
Oh god. Don't talk to me about linked lists. One of the bigger performance improvements I've made in a certain company is taking the code working with lots of numerical data in linked lists because they had easier syntax, and rewriting it using honest-to-god, contiguous-memory arrays of doubles. After that, we could process three orders of magnitude more numbers per operation, and one order of magnitude more of operations, and we still came ahead.
I quite like Affinity too, but have a small gripe with the company. While they have free online tutorials, they also sell "workbooks" for their software, which seem to be beautiful manuals. Why are users expected to pay for manuals? Shouldn't their PDFs be free downloads?

More generally, why do many tech companies charge for training in using their products? For instance, Google has GCP courses on Coursera, but you have to pay $49 month to access labs. I don't see this practice with physical goods, but we seem to accept with software.
>It's still bizarre how much they make off of a unit considering how little they provide. Their insurance never pays out - their website and app are embarrassingly bad.

Then stop using them. There are plenty of other options.
I'm hopeful for that satellite internet from SpaceX to solve availability.
I'm pretty sure you posted this after my edit, but in case you didn't, please read that. I'm not the one that came up with this contrived "A stabs B" example, and I never claimed that "for any A that stabs B, then B is causally at a financial disadvantage in the future" (though I would claim this effect in the real world, on average, but that's off topic).
At my work we’ve run into a similar issue with inconsistencies with print styles. To solve this we used a separate server with a library to convert the doc to a pdf, then gave that file to the user for printing. This may be overkill for this use case but it’s an option to look at.
> It also doesn’t solve the underlying problem, but instead throws money at the companies exacerbating it for profit

Quite similar to Obama's approach to healthcare, what a coincidence! :-)
This is one of the reasons I think it is healthier. A post about the problems of not being a white middle class male no longer has to have its comments devolve into people attempting to explain why this particular kind of person has a right to exist, or what it is like to be one.
That’s why I included tax-paying hosts. Presumably individuals pay taxes on their hosting earnings, and individual tax rates are often higher than corporate ones.
Illustrator is abandonware at this point. What a sorry joke it is. Decade-old defects not fixed.

To me the last straw is its lack of a proper selection method (select only objects that are fully enclosed by the marquee, not just touched by it). This glaring deficiency had me running Corel Draw in a VM for years.

Now we finally have some newer vector tools on Mac: Designer and Sketch (although Sketch buries the aforementioned selection mode under a hotkey).
So I can't obviously "prove" any causality, that would require serious studies; but I can testify how things work here in France.

1) doesn't change anything. Mostly due to ISP practices, which are regulated under typical communication laws (this dates back to radio, landlines, post offices, etc)

2) bandwidth is generally great. The idea is this: you mutualize the pipes (shared by citizens through public organisms, and some private infrastructure / maintenance companies). Then all ISP invest together to build the best shared infrastructure; at which point any customer can just switch to any ISP at any time — you just unplug-replug in the locally shared DSLAM/PON/whatever.

FWIW we've got the same infra for elec, water, kitchen gas, even banking... you just hook up with another utility provider and they switch you within days, weeks at most (it's a manual intervention in many cases). Don't like your elec provider? Next month, you're out.

The net result is that we've got up to 1Gbps symmetrical for €40/mo (say $45), basic offers for e.g 250Mb at €10-20/mo maybe. There's even a 10Gbps network being deployed (at the routing level, it's mostly equipment) by one ISP, I got it and measured ~3.5Gbps max concurently (I'd rather have 1Gbps symmetrical since I've got servers though, self-hosting is a very real possibility with such bandwidth; all IPs are full stack on demand here (all ports, no sub-1024 shenanigans) unless you're on budget offers.

3) that's freedom of speech most likely (e.g porn is legal... nobody questions that). Also ties to GDPR now, on the source side. We've had such laws in France for two decades now, look up the CNIL. Nothing to report here, ISPs would be fined if not respecting a modicus of neutrality — but there's no data cap on home connections whatsoever, so it's not comparable to the US situation. In the past (DSL era) we observed some early / prime time throttling of selected websites (e.g YouTube) by a certain ISP who was "at war" with Google (so, that was a choice, not a factor of infrastructure).

4) See 2. It's all private but there's gov oversight and regulation to maintain access. For instance, you can't cut internet to poor people, unemployed etc. here: we've determined it's too important to have internet access to find a job and do basic admin stuff (pretty much all state services are now online). That's the real value of internet as a commodity: it's a matter of "can you leave a household without electricity? without water? without internet?", the answer being a resounding "no" because that's inhumane, that's attacking their dignity and our decency. The question thus becomes, how much of it do we 'guarantee' to everyone, like basic healthcare. The answer here in France is: enough to live decently, enough to keep functioning as a normal member of society, notably to get a job (or keep it) and have a social life (we've found that depression doesn't help anyone).

Honestly, none of it is perfect, but as far as internet goes, yeah we've nailed it. I don't know of any better offer for the price (many Asian countries have a better infra, but costs are 2-3x for customers).
This kind of attitude is exactly my concern. You don't seem to have a shred of sympathy for the rights or motivations of the people who don't want to be locked down; you're talking about them as though they're cattle, and they'll be prodded into compliance no matter what they have to think about it. Every advocate I've seen of months-long lockdowns has had this kind of authoritarian power fantasy.
The thing they have up without a fight was Flex, their Rich Internet Application dev framework.

When they abandoned support for it they killed the careers of thousands of developers and removed their chance of dominating web app development.

Flex was miles ahead of what HTML 5 was producing at the time, if they had focused on getting the Flex compiler to output Javascript we would be living in a world where Adobe was synonymous with Web Dev.
This is interesting, but there is no context regarding the reason for posting this.
I'm not sure that I want the government in a position to be a single point of control for which websites I can or cannot access.
AFAIK, Germany counts Corona death similar/the same as Italy.
Look, you couldn't make a more wrong assertion. You would destroy countless more lives by keeping this quarantine going on indefinitely. Our economy would implode and we'd wind up in a situation far worse than what we saw during the great depression. We'd go into full stagflation and I guarantee the suicides alone would dwarf the possible death count from mass testing ppl with this device.
My own opinion?

I don't believe people or nations should receive any sort of monetary reparations. I think there are far better ways to do this sort of thing.

For instance, if we know that, say, ex French colonies had slaves taken away from them and those who remained were obliged to pay onerous taxes to France, fine. If that is proved in a court of law, which would be a mere formality in the case of most French colonies, particularly the African ones, then we relax WTO rules on these colonies so they can build their internal markets. Same would apply to any former colony of any former colonial power. (It should have to be people based harm though, not monetary. So not, "the Dutch West India company gave me 23 beads for the Island of Manhattan." That's just a bad business deal that you shouldn't have accepted. But if the Dutch East India company rounded you up, shipped you to Cuba and forced you to work the Sugar plantations, that's a whole different story.)

Such former colonies should be able to be in WTO even if they have rules about domestic ownership percentages of businesses. Just prove the harm to your people.

Problem solved.

You want money? Great! There's your opportunity to make money on the global market with your own resources and efforts, and at a favorable rate to your own people to boot.
A Visual Basic program is not allowed to have undefined behaviours like a C program; InStr has a specification and that specification has to be implemented; that spec includes defining the behaviour for all inputs.

There's also no null handling here, which was a deliberate omission for clarity. In practice, the convention used inside the VB source code is that null string pointers are semantically the same as empty strings, which introduces some complexities.
Heh... reminds me of my first proper MS internship, when I too was responsible for speeding up some code, this time in the VS Code Go extension. This code was responsible for tokenization, so it affected pretty much every operation and ran on every edit. Important shit.

Day 1: do some basic hoisting. O(n^3) => O(n^2). Tokenization times for a 10k line file go from ~15s to 500ms. Sweet.

Days 2-30 [1]: ideate, develop, bug fix, iterate on, etc, a novel (to me) data-structure to speed up the program even more. O(n^2) => O(n x log(n)) (expected). Great! Runtime on 10k line file went from 500ms to maybe 300ms. Oooops.

But hey, all the people working in 500k line files must really love the couple seconds my month of toiling (more importantly, my month of not doing other, more impactful things) saved them.

Learned a lot from that experience, and writing this out now I can see how that impacted engineering decisions I make to this day. I suppose thats the real point of an internship, so time well spent, in a way.

[1] It probably wasn't actually a month, but certainly a significant chunk of the internship.
For the next 2 years? You understand that there are antivirals being tested as we speak and vaccines in trial for a 12 month release right?
I'm a CS grad with some work experience (1 year dev, 1 year coding bootcamp teacher). See me as a junior that ramps up quicker than the average junior (e.g. last month I owned a lot of boxes at hackthebox.eu for fun and was a top 5% after 2 weeks of non-stop playing [1]).

I wrote my thesis related to Engelbard. So I think we have a cultural click. Which is why I'm writing all this.

The reason I'm not applying but simply writing things here is because I'm tired of applying (it's hard to hear more than 100+ "no" while at university you were a top student). But I do want to know if you guys think I'm worth considering.

Which is why I'm brutally honest with the following:

Companies tend to reject me due to lack of experience, and (in my opinion) undervalue how quick I can pick things up and how willing I am to work amazingly hard, especially at the beginning of a job. When they hire me they tend to be surprised with how wrong they were about me.

My strength is that I'm a generalist, much more so than most people. My weakness is that people have the perception that I can't be a specialist. But anyone that gave me a chance in hiring me during my freelance time know that I am capable of performing one role as a specialist (full-stack developer with a business and security mindset).

During my good days I tend to have an Elon Musk mindset. He says that working 80 to 100 hours per week means you learn 2 to 2.5 times faster, I mostly agree -- I think it is sometimes more because the interconnectness of things pushes the multiple a bit higher. During my bad days I simply want to work 40 hours per week go home and relax. During these times I sort of don't want to work due to stress, but know that I have to work because it keeps my mind sharp.

[1] I was in "Elon Musk" mode for a month.
I'm not familiar with that one, but I just heard on the radio about something called Covid Care, which is more what I had in mind. Of course you wouldn't want to encourage people to be walking around knocking on doors asking for random things right now. Online makes more sense. So that might be an opportunity for an online but only super-local forum for things like help taking a meeting because your kids are bouncing off the walls.

Maybe that's Nextdoor or Craigslist. But those aren't sufficiently local to reach only the 100 or so people who live in your apartment building.

Judging from the downvotes, this isn't a need that resonates with many people. But it does seem that this new situation would be a little more tolerable if people actually could communicate with the person who lives down the hall. Yet right now it's not safe to introduce yourself (at least I wouldn't open the door if someone knocked; I'd just talk through the window, which wouldn't make those introductions very comfortable).

Edit: looked up Peerspace. That's more formal. This is more like "anyone mind if I do a videoconference in your living room for 30 minutes? My kids are doing their schoolwork and we don't have a place to move them" and broadcasting it to just the couple hundred people who live in your building. Same idea but residential for WFH rather than B2B.
Tale of OpenBSD secure memory allocator internals – malloc(3)
What am I doing to fight COVID19? Here are some tips
Autonomous ‘Pandemic Drones’ Can Detect Coughing, Fever and More
Yes, that would make it trivial. But Zoom gives you the option of using a green screen or not.
> Why are users expected to pay for manuals?

...why shouldn't they? They take extra time/money to create, and not all users will necessarily need them. If a third party wrote a book on Affinity and charged for it, we wouldn't bat an eye. Shouldn't the developer get the same privilege?
Super leaky chess? Looking forward to an implementation so I can try and wrap my mind around how it works. What's to prevent both players from pushing all pawns through the leaky sieve and promoting everything to Queens right off?
Bjarne Stroustrup: “I Did It for You All ”
From my quick reading, it sounds like he's proposing that there is no such thing as "nothing", that what we call "nothing" is in fact like an empty set. There's still something there.

I kind of see what he means - in his view, it is turtles all the way down, and the bottom turtle, what seems to us empty, is made of the same being/existence.
Thanks for the context. The example you describe supports the meme better.

Sorry for being harsh, I got triggered by that code inside the printer, because I've dealt with a lot of dumb "I don't know how SQL joins work, so I'll use my ORM to do it and filter the data in code" cases early in my career, and I have sort of an allergy to that now.
Here's why this seems unsurprising to me. The switchover from slavery to non-slavery will (if it's not forced from outside) happen around the time when the forces for and against this change are evenly matched.

One way to move that balance is to bribe some of the powerful people who are on the fence, or close to it. (For instance, people who are starting to see the moral case, but are also pretty concerned about their 401k, or its 18thC equivalent.) Of course this bribe was tempting to those pushing for change, they could have victory now, instead of waiting another generation.

On the other hand, attaching to the bill to free the slaves a huge bill to pay them each compensation, this would clearly push the balance the other way, and thus delay the date until it could get a majority (of those with the relevant power).