skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Now extend Tokyo an ounce of consideration in this context.
True. But there are more prestigious companies than the big tech firms which do this.
Customers, in my experience, want to have their cake and eat it too.

Nobody wants complex, cumbersome tools, but they do want every iota of flexibility they can imagine delivered in unrealistic timeframes for vanishingly small budgets. Complex, kludgy software is usually the result of customers prioritizing fast and cheap over good, and being given exactly what they asked for.
Have you looked into computer networking and other IT-type topics? I’ve often found that networking specifically uses different skills and is suited for different people than programming. It’s more about systems, rather than logic, which (personally) I find more in-tune with my mental makeup.
> COVID-19 is spread principally by breathing, which is unaffected by cleanliness.

Masks?

> I'm not saying New York is a paragon of cleanliness, but you will have to show some scientific evidence that curbside trash pickup or the occasional subway rat has anything to do with the prevalence of modern-day diseases. Because they simply do not as common knowledge suggests.

Initial reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rats_in_New_York_City#Disease,...

Diseases carried by NYC rats: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25316698

Hong Kong and literal SARS: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12932393/

"Urban Norway and black rats (Rattus norvegicus and Rattus rattus) are the source of a number of pathogens responsible for significant human morbidity and mortality in cities around the world.": https://doi.org/10.1089/vbz.2012.1195
If you think sticking to what the customer knowingly asks will lead to elimination of complexity, I'm afraid you're going to have a bad time.
"Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." - Einstein, maybe
I think the lack of auto layout is actually a pretty significant part of the problem. It is an unsolved problem in data viz on how to layout complex graphs in a way that humans can parse. That also means that most humans are not very good at it.

Personally my favourite VPL was Automator, which had the control flow primitives equivalent to the bash operators | and ;. This made layout and control flow trivial at the expense of expressiveness. However, as the goal of the thing was basically “terminal for the rest of us”, arguably those two operators are what most people end up using at the command line anyway.

Of course Automator failed because of a number of other issues (lack of abstraction and bad package management I think are at the top of the list). But I think tools like that have a good amount of potential.
TMOL/True Meaning Of Life

https://web.archive.org/web/2003/http://truemeaningoflife.co...

It's an oracle Web site. Questions are supplied anonymously by the users, answers are provided by avatars themed around video games, pop culture and Buddhism.
Excerpt:

"While the idea sounds simple, it requires overcoming many technical challenges to be effective. The audio quality of devices varies significantly. The speech signals captured by different microphones are not aligned with each other. The number of devices and their relative positions are unknown. For these reasons and others, consolidating the information streams from multiple independent devices in a coherent way is much more complicated than it may seem. In fact, although the concept of ad hoc microphone arrays dates back to the beginning of this century, to our knowledge it has not been realized as a product or public prototype so far."

Thoughts:

There's something deep here, not with respect to microphones and speech transcription (although I wish Microsoft and whoever else attempts to wrestle with those problems the greatest of success!)

There's a related deep problem in physics here.

If we consider signals that emanate from outer space, let's say they're from the big bang, or heck, let's just say they're from one of our past-the-edge-of-this-solar-system satelites -- that wants to communicate back to earth.

Well, due to the incredible distances involved, the signal will get garbled in various ways...

So here's the $64,000 question:

When that signal from deep space gets garbled, isn't it possible that it turns into various other signals, at various different other frequencies and wavelengths?

In other words, space itself, over long distances, acts as a prism (not really, but as an easy way to wrap your mind around this concept), for radio, and other electromagnetic waves...

Now, if you want to reconstruct the orignal message at these long distances, you must be able to reconstruct garbled radio (and other em) waves, which are moving at different frequencies, and may even arrive at the destination at different rates of speed with various time shifts...

Basically, you've got to take those pieces -- move them to the correct frequency, time correct them, speed them up or slow them down, sync them, and overlay them -- to reconstruct the original message...

That's the greater question in physics -- the ability to do all of that, with em signals from a long way off in space...

The article referenced -- is the microphone/audio/slow speed equivalent -- of that larger problem...
Yeah the good news is that if you find CRUD apps mind numbing then you are definitely smart enough to be a programmer.

Sooo... right now thanks to covid19 basically every class at your local community college is online try a GIS class, it's a little bit python, a little bit SQL, a little bit data science-y and sometimes you go fly a drone around.

Or you know something else, the point is there's plenty of fields that aren't explicitly tech adjacent that the ability to program at all gives you a somewhere between a head start and superpowers.

BUT also I'm with the other guys too, maybe talk to a therapist.
Which definition? WhatsApp, like a lot of things that claim E2EE, encrypts and decrypts at the clients. The problem is that we have no idea what the client programs are doing. They have not yet performed the required step of showing us the source code in a form that can be compiled to be the same as the distributed binary.
https://www.raphkoster.com/2009/01/08/database-sharding-came...

Nice article from Raph Koster. Especially if you played Ultima Online by any chance.
How about a Chrome extension that makes Gmail look like that?
The fact that my other comment -- which is completely true, btw -- was flagged while the insipid, patronizing comment above isn't: Beautiful, classic Hacker News.

I'd never leave this place, though. Where else am I going to read AGW denial or see hilariously tenuous attempts at defending whatever insipid thing the POTUS said recently. This place has more far-right anti-science imbeciles than InfoWars.

When HN puts its collective genius together and repeatedly gives their take on SARS-CoV-2, it truly is a sight to see. I mean, it's ignorant nonsense by a bunch of over-confident clowns who think that the accomplishment of throwing a shitty webpage together makes them a Great Thinker. It's stupid as hell, but also incredibly funny.

Just earlier today some fans asked me, "hn_check, being so handsome and so gloriously smart, not to mention so well hung, how do you tolerate such antics?" It isn't easy to answer, though I received sight-unseen contracts from six major publishers to tell my tale. I'm above that, though. Truly, a selfless, zero-self-promotion genius.
> "an attempt to psychologically manipulate the public".

So does a persuasive essay, but I don't see any calls for bans for those.
> Deaths per 100,000 population: 2.0

Your 0.002% number is the POPULATION Fatality Rate not the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR).
yeah, their stuff is good! They had a video about Celeste last year that was really fantastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yorTG9at90g

That stuff is very in-the-weeds on the mechanics of platformers. If you like that video, Itay Keren's article on the history of how cameras work in 2d sidescroller games is one of my favorite pieces on 2d game construction: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ItayKeren/20150511/243083/Sc...
>> Make a simple conceptual model.

simple, simple - ok I get it.

>> This model should cover all aspects, so also the key business aspects.

a simple model that covers all business aspects?

This is where the complexity comes from. Your all-encompassing "simple model" is likely a high-level abstraction that is not implementable.

Software systems that model complex domains by definition are complex or incomplete or, and this is what we should avoid, both.

This post is either naive or intentionally glosses over why we end up with complexity. All good software starts will the ideal of a clear & simple integrity; the only software that keeps it is likely not used.
Of course customers don’t say “I want complex software.” They say “I want software that works well for my use case.” Except their use case is slightly different than any other customer’s use case. You only have to have a few customers like that before things start getting complex.
This is neat. More broadly, wonder why a tubing system isn’t used for common waste and recycling?
I'm on the "yes type checking" side of the perennial "which is more efficient" programming language debate, but when we talk about "formal methods" in the context of eradicating security vulnerabilities, the subtext is "formally proving correctness", not simply any tool that increases rigor. I agree, boringly, that there are PL tools that apply rigor to increase development speed.
Bullshit.

This article does not have any arguments. I don't even understand what the supposed objective of this "total war" might be? Total annihilation? Can't do that without MAD consequences. Occupying Iowa? Be my guest...

In terms of evidence, it just lists rather generic aspects of China's economic success. Of course they build network equipment and power plants. Because that's what you do as an industrialised country. Finland built 3G without feeling the urge to start "total war".

Colonialism was a distinct period of history. It's not some step every country goes through. That's why it mostly happened at around the same time, and then stopped when it became obvious that it was morally and economically bankrupt. The British turned an island's worth of forest into ships at the bottom of the Indian Ocean and all they got for it was a good long drink and three or four cricket teams to lose against.

Economic value today is being generated almost exclusively in manufacturing, service, and creative endeavours. Possession of territory has become almost worthless, or at least far less valuable than it did when people still thought wars were a good idea. You want to be Switzerland, not Equatorial Guinea or Venezuela (two of the resource-richest countries on earth).

You also can't gain anything by conquering some foreign lands and oppressing the locals. The US profits far more from prosperous Europe than it ever did from its various impoverished protectorates in Middle and South America. Turns out selling iPhones and Tiger King is far more lucrative than all the bananas a government you own could ever cheaply send your way. You want Mexico to become Canada, not Canada to become Mexico (and Mexico today is closer to Canada than it is to the 1980s Mexico of your stereotypes, anyway).

The article even recognises as much when it mentions that China's ascent is fuelled by selling their products all over the world. Than what imbecilic Chinese imitation of an alt-right incel would be as moronic as this author, and think it's a good idea to start a war with those customers?

As to hostility, it might be worthwhile to consider the perspective from outside the US if you happen to be wearing a confederate flag face-mask right now: the US has spent the 20th century invading/bombing/regime-changing dozens of countries. China, which has been at least a regional power for quite a while, has not used its military outside its borders even once in the last 40 years. Even before that, Tibet remains the only offensive use, 70 years ago.

The only reason for war-mongering chest-beating idiocy such as this article is the current kakistocracy's inability to come up with any ideas beside xenophobia.

The British phantom pain of losing an Empire has become an often-mocked phenomenon. But it's funny because the British have style even in their greatest loss. I shudder at the thought of what the American Id will destroy, thrashing in fits of infantile rage as it is staring into the abyss, still in possession of remnants of its power but no longer capable to muster the civic spirit to use it responsibly.
I am biased because I contributed actively to Apache Traffic Server when I worked at a past employer.

It has its quirks. I played a major role in migrating our company from ATS4 to ATS5 and then ATS6.

There are many developers eager to help, especially if you're hosting or able to show up at the ATS summits.

Envoy has native middleware support but as far as I know you have to build the middleware with the server.

With ATS, you can use TS API or atscppapi and create shared objects that are dynamically loaded middleware.

We had considered Facebook's proxygen at one point too but we already had way too many middleware targeting ATS that it didn't make much sense.

However the hooks that they provide match almost 1-to-1 so it would be not that challenging.

Even to this day, my past employer uses ATS in their PoPs. And then at the next layer of reverse proxies, and then the layer after that.

So imagine PoP (level 0) to pick the right colo -> Level 1 to pick the right service cluster -> Level 2 to front the service instances are all ATS. After that you get to the origin servers that are discovered by a service discovery plugin loaded into ATS, just like all the higher levels. Each level discovers the downstream hosts over zookeeper back then and I had migrated that system to use Consul, so Consul now.

For some context, we were probably handling 8000qps on each ATS, with extremely heavy use of middleware plugins to do everything from auth to dispatch to spam filtering with dynamic rulesets pushed from internal hosts. I benchmarked ATS with and without plugins. With no plugins, our configuration could push over 80000qps.

We had ~36 PoPs, 20-30 instances at each PoP. That's around 8.6Mqps handled with ATS. Part of this was realtime bidding for ads [0], and the rest was actual user traffic, part of it static content, part of it dynamic.

We had our own CDN but also had Akamai on the side to fallback to. AFAIK from my conversations with people in these summits, iTunes is behind ATS. Comcast also pipes your unencrypted traffic through an ATS instance of their own with some custom middleware.

[0] - https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/6366577?hl=en
Search ads have been the canonical leading way my clients have ever seen malware. I find Google search ads less regulated and less filtered than spam emails.

I'm really glad they're finally doing this, but it still feels way too irresponsibly late considering the amount of damage they've caused.
You were faster than me. Yes, CRIU does checkpointing in userspace on Linux.

They contributed a lot of patches to the Linux kernel to support this feature. So there isn't any support for checkpointing in the mainline kernel. Rather, there are many kernel features that allows building such a feature in userspace. For instance, you can set the PID of the next program you spawn on Linux thanks to CRIU, because CRIU needs to be able to restore processes with the same PIDs as when they were checkpointed [1].

CRIU is used by OpenVZ, which, if I remember correctly, are moving or moved away from a kernel-based approach.

[1] http://efiop-notes.blogspot.com/2014/06/how-to-set-pid-using...
You listen to all your fans and they always say "You should add this" or "You should add that."

They never say "Take this out, take that out." They say "add more, add more!"

There's an old saying that I love about design, it's about Japanese gardening actually, that "Your garden is not complete until there is nothing else that you can remove." -Will Wright
What we were trying to do was to get the portion of the population that doesn't take this seriously to actually wash their hands, wear a mask (properly) in public to reduce their viral shedding and limit their trips out as well.

The why, as Washington State Governor Jay Inslee said, "The penalties are you might be killing your grandfather if you don't do it."

It's innocent others; our grandparents, those with known compromised health conditions, and those, even young and likely uninsured, with unknown health conditions, that are being saved.

Putting this another way, I don't care if someone is a smoker in isolation. That's their choice. I care when it spreads and affects others, including myself. The balance of freedom must be considered when conflicts exist, with a bias towards preventing tragedy of the commons.
There seem to be a lot of different sentiments / topics built into the article. On top of a big dose of emotion, there seems to be a question presumed / begged right in the first sentence. I had to ask myself if somebody _really_ asked for complexity, and if so, who? Maybe they meant something other than what the author is thinking? Well--them's the risks of starting an article that way.

This was pretty complex to sort out TBH. I'd say personally I don't mind complexity as an outcome as long as the work environment is flexible and allows for a winnowing-down or a reorganization of the product.
Here is how I think the app should have worked.

Instead of requesting codes from a central government server to be distributed to people you come into contact with, your phone could have generated its own codes for distribution.

Then when a COVID infection is found, the gov could simply publish a list of all codes collected by the infected person.

Your phone could request this public list daily and you could choose to get a COVID test if your code is in the public list.

The government would have no way to link any codes to a particular phone or person. A lot less data would need to collected, stored, and managed.

This app is designed to allow the government to find and collect anybody they think needs testing. It can also be used to find and punish anybody breaking social distancing laws.

(Updated for clarity)
Are you suggesting that impotence is an invented ("medicalized") condition? I should start a physicians of hacker news blog... Prozac and premenstrual dysphoric disorder is a better example.
That actually makes me think that a lot of potential invention/innovation is locked away behind cumbersome user interfaces. Imagine if all email clients were split between models and controller + view. People who want to improve the UI would be able to do so without necessarily affecting people who like the way things currently are. Once a sufficiently effective and intuitive user interface comes along, then a user would be able switch to that at their own pace. If the model part of the email clients had an common API for manipulating said model, then the same controller+view code could be used across multiple email clients e.g. a Eudora interface to the latest version of Outlook for those who want it, and the same Eudora interface for Thunderbird. In addition, it would be possible to both have OS-specific versions of the controller+view if someone wanted a truly native experience, or have OS-agnostic versions using Java, QT, or Electron if someone wanted to ship something faster and/or have a common code-base for controller+view.

NB. I might have confused MVC a little in my idea above.
Yeah, I'd argue the issue is largely one of awareness. There simply aren't good established mechanisms for even competent managers to notice the people preventing a problem. The manager only has so much mental bandwidth, and part of being a good subordinate is not consuming too much of that. There's an ideal of "the team runs itself" with the manager only providing overall direction/resources/big picture stuff.

While this can be great for team execution, by definition it insulates managers from the nitty-gritty of design/development, which is where most of the preventative measures happen. However if you try to remedy this and bring the manager into the fold, you invite micromanaging and harm execution, as well as preventing the manager from doing more managerial things.

It's when things go wrong and heroes emerge that people get raises and promotions, if simply because the manager can point to those highly visible efforts as rationale for why this person gets more. Also in large orgs a manager might not know all their direct reports personally so those incidents make the person stick out, like how a professor knows the kids who sit at the front of the class the best.

I suppose the ideal would be a technically experienced manager who understands how to promote good design practices and lets his team do so, but on sheer educated faith with no metrics. Given that metrics are the lifeblood of large-org management careers, the incentive structure isn't there to produce such people en-masse.
If you want to be an engineer and deal with tech culture, sure. We can be a little myopic about that here on HN. Engineering is not "status" oriented, and going to a nice school doesn't have the weight it does, if you want to be doctor and heal people, for example. School still matters. We can't all start startups.
> So what? It's still "an attempt to psychologically manipulate the public". Advertising is adversarial

So is what you just wrote. Should we ban discussion on HN because it is (or can be) adversarial?
Is this for a single client, or consumer software with lots of customers? When I use modern consumer software I feel like I'm dealing with a lot of what somebody else asked for.
We’re learning a lot about virology during this time. Infection and immunity are not binary, and now we have enough data to recognize that. We will also learn a lot about mutation, things like carrier recombination. I think this will change everything about how we attempt to control things through vaccination.
Because of the misguided response to Corona. So at least for the US, "could have" may be more correct.
There are now highways where there used to be fields, rivers or just empty land.

I mean this as much in a figurative sense as in a literal one.
Partially its about getting you to just talk to your doctor about your health issues.

A lot of people have arthritis, but don't go to the doctor. They'll pop some pain killers and deal with it like humans have forever. But a Humira commercial is designed to get them to ask their doctor about it.

Partially its get your doctor thinking about maybe updating your treatment. A lot of people just coast on whatever they've been taking for a long time. I've heard occasionally Doctors find patients who are medicines that are quite outdated.

Now all that might be worse than no advertising, but there are reasons behind it.
Anything smart enough to pass a Turing test is smart enough to fail it.

There's a story from a few years ago about how Target knew customers knew themselves, but they were smart enough to mix the diaper discounts in with some lawnmower specials so it would not arouse suspicions.

I would not be surprised if the algorithms know more than they seem.
> The Desktop/Laptop segment peaked in 2011.

Where is the data on that? I just googled around, I don't know if this site is reputable but it would indicate mobile didn't overtake PCs until 2016 and even now the gap is not huge:

https://gs.statcounter.com/platform-market-share/desktop-mob...

I know I've read that PC sales went down pretty severely around the 2011 date you cite, however, it could be that sales of new PCs are down much more than actual usage because PCs need to be replaced less frequently.
First direct image of the closest exoplanet
If you really don't trust the the information the person has provided to give you money you probably should not be accepting their money.