skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>And probably some clever logic to deal with the randomforum.php?fid=12345&tpcid=984.3&page=5 goop that is still all-too-common... :/

You say that as though websites like that are random small sites. HN has that kind of a URL, so do YouTube and Google.
Yes, basically a 12 month extension on your typical US copyright assignment agreement.
I've not programmed a lot of JS, so this might be obvious for someone who did, but:

Why does he first use Math.abs on the parameter and then type check the result of that? I'd think if you do an argument type check, you'd do it before using it. Just to make it not throw on null? I don't see the sense in that...
All part of your wider culture which considers corporations more important than real people.
OK, so this is for a CEO type job.

In my software engineer job, I can't come up with any task for an assistant to do, because there aren't any.
Show HN: Display and control of Android devices (no root required)
It's difficult to dip in and out of, you really need to be focussed on it to become productive. It's interesting to compare it to C# which I learnt by opening the IDE and writing code. There was far less to trip you up in C# despite it also being a fairly big language.
Scaling with Common Sense
"This PC > Downloads" may point to the same directory as "C:\Users\Wyatt\Downloads", but Explorer may also handle or display differently or with different options. I've had various issues with this, such as not being able to copy the full actual path from the address bar, a sub-folder in one of these "This PC" folders or libraries showing no columns with no option to show them, and sometimes being indistinguishable from the Public folder. The full path matters in Explorer, Finder, and browsers, and should never be hidden without an easy visible way to show the full path or have it always show.
A narrow grip results in less torque if you need to control steering. It's true that will be faster, until and unless you lose control. Then it is extremely dangerous. It also positions your hands away from the brake levers (on road bikes).
The world would not care. Amazon may look like big, but in the ocean of all employers and employees it's a small drop.

Political and cultural shift needs more than just fixing one small place. It needs political and cultural action, simple example won't suffice.

I.e. transforming Amazon could be a small facet of such a campaign as a template and example but mostly worthless without that other work.

You can be an entrepreneurial genious and still not understand how to create political and cultural shifts. So... the program you are suggesting would be quite remarkable and would require remarkable skill and vision. Redistributing profits wont suffice.
There are a lot of people who simply don't have the resources to fight a non-compete clause. Do you think a fresh grad working at Amazon 1-2 years in an SWE role is equipped to take on Amazon's undoubtedly massive top talented legal team if they choose to litigate? The law may be on their side but the resources to pursue it may not and any reasonable doubt of being incorrect could be financial or even career suicide.

If a business can get even a small fraction of its labor to follow unenforcable/essentially illegal requirements, they've made significant headway, even if they don't ever choose to attempt to litigate. Over time, those practices can become normalized and set industry standards where they become more and more successful.

I think it should be illegal to even stipulate such requirements in contracts to begin with to prevent businesses from eroding labor rights over time. There should be massive fines in place that penalize even stipulating those sort of clauses to make sure businesses only include reasonable language/requirements.
To be clear I wasn't making the "noisy" critique myself, it's just a qualifier I've seen, in my opinion unfairly, applied to the syntax of certain languages in the past.

I think the problem is not whether the language is really noisy or not, it's more whether the language is familiar or not. Nobody complains that "(x + 1) / (y * 4)" is noisy, even though it's more symbols than numbers or letters. Everybody is familiar with mathematical notation.

I think deep down a lot of the "noisy" complaints are really about unfamiliarity, and that was my point: most coders aren't familiar with Smalltalk but most coders are familiar with C-style syntax, so it wins by default in the marketability department.

It's a bit like when people who are first exposed to Lisp say "oh my god all these parens!" or when Python-first coders have to code in C and say "wow, I can't believe I have to put semicolons everywhere". Yet when one is familiar with these languages the parens/semicolon kind of fade away because you see the structure behind the tokens, so to speak. I don't even consciously notice semicolons anymore, and I type them without thinking as naturally as I hit "return" at the end of a line. But if you're just starting it does take a while to get used to them.
It's like that in Germany, you can happily sign contracts with these clauses as they're void anyway unless they actually pay you for this period.
For the record, 120k weekly downloads isn't really _that_ large in this ecosystem.

That's 120k instances of people or scripts doing `npm install is-even` or the equivalent.

For comparison:

* Lodash - a general purpose set of library/utility functions by the way - has ~26M weekly downloads.

* request - an HTTP client library - has ~19M weekly downloads

I wouldn't add is-even as a direct dependency either, but I think people are underestimating the size and diversity of the JavaScript ecosystem as a whole.
I'd be conservative extrapolating from lessons of government and biology to software engineering principles. Software doesn't change via random mutation and natural selection pressure; most open source projects are benevolent dictatorships of some flavor or other.
Virtual Teams and Remoting Working; a research based perspective
That description sadly applies to every apple product, software or hardware wise, except for iPhone hardware maybe.
>Clearly Apple makes a profit from the App Store, but also clearly it wouldn’t be able to remotely cover these costs at 5%, their break even is closer to 15%.

So, in their simplicity, they only apply a mere 100% markup on costs, if I get this right.
Man I hope they did (just forget the closing tag). Poe's law in action.
Timeline for a Pandemic Disaster
Imagine having your CPU linked to memory or data-bus over a single fiber connection instead of complicated multi traced connections. One day perhaps.
This is true, but then again absolutely all browsers are being funded by ads. We are talking Edge, Safari, Brave, all of them.

Did you know that Apple does in fact get more money from Google than Mozilla does, for keeping their search engine as the default? 12 billion dollars in 2019. Do you think Apple would activate ad blocking by default and risk losing that many billions of dollars? Speaking of which, Safari's ad blocking is the joke of the industry.

You could make the case that Safari might survive if Google cuts its funding, but judging from the history of IExplorer, I have my doubts. One could make the case that Safari is alive just because Apple is making a shit ton of money on it.

Did you know that Microsoft's Bing Ads platform made them 8 billion dollars in 2019? Do you think Microsoft would do anything to jeopardize that ads revenue? Did you know that Windows 10 has an "advertising ID" used to personalize ads, that via Edge is transmitted to Bing?

Did you know that Brave, that leech which is piggybacking on other people's work, that's supposedly blocking ads by default, is effectively replacing publisher ads with their own, then forcing those publishers to enter into deals with them for a piece of the action, while making it really hard to detect and block Brave? All the while pushing shady cryptocurrency affiliate ids straight in their source code?

---

Mozilla might not push for ads blocking by default.

But they do block trackers by default and their browser is afaik the only one that has legitimately supported uBlock Origin on top of Android. And uBlock Origin is the best, most aggresive ads blocker available and given Google deprecating the blocking ability of the WebRequest API, Firefox might remain the only one with a uBlock Origin implementation.

Could Firefox survive without Google?

I don't know, but can any other browser survive without Google or Bing? I have my doubts and you'd be naive to think otherwise. Plus this is just whataboutism.
Wouldn't it make sense for them to expand the VC arm until the ROI becomes the same as other departments?
Duckling (a Haskell library that parses text into structured data)
Thank you for writing this. I saw how well ASP.NET Core performed in the 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey and I was curious to hear from people who have had good experiences with it.

[0] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-mo...
lying is just never a good strategy. everyone talks.
On modern hardware running fedora 30/31/32 i’ve yet to have any serious tearing issues like you describe. Either way if you’re not willing to tweak a few settings then mac would be your best bet.
I have signed a similar non-compete without knowing the 18month clause is there when I moved to Austin to work for Amazon with an L1B visa.
My plan once I leave Amazon is to move to California and work out of there for 18months before moving back to Austin to get around this issue.
GNU did great things for UNIX. It hasn't really demonstrated much utility in the user experience improvement space. The flow there, in general, appears to be that the big, closed source commercial interests devise new approaches for user interface operation and the open source community copies the ones that work.

The only space I can name off the top of my head where my open-source architectures have outstripped Windows and Mac in UX is virtual desktops.
yeah. i’m pretty sure stuff like this is completely unenforceable. this sounds like being forced to sign it so you can easily make the argument that you signed it because you had no other choice and you were threatened with termination.
> JavaScript really needs a proper standard library.

Well, Deno (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deno_(software)) has that as one of its explicit goals. As well as fixing a lot of the other grown idiosyncrasies.
I work with companies < 50 people and do not hear this. Most of them are first looking for stability and velocity, then security.

Where I do see compliance come up is from customer demand or niche applications (healthcare). Even so, compliance is more about people and paper than technology, so yeah it takes longer, it's bureaucracy!
It's a minor problem until it becomes a major one. All it takes is one common dependency to go rogue or a bug to be exploited without the maintainers being around to fix it and a large part of the ecosystem becomes unusable. Using a dependency implies an element of trust and now we have a huge web of trust between thousands of maintainers that we really have no way to check. The larger that number grows, the higher the chance of catastrophic failure.
10 year iOS developer here. I don't have any answers for you (not a compiler expert either) but yeah, auto-complete of Swift in Xcode continues to suck in a lot of different ways. It's a shame because autocomplete in Obj-C was so good for so long (I'd put it up there with VSCode/TypeScript with some caveats), and is still pretty great, but seemed to get a little worse itself when Swift showed up.
Awesome! FWIW I currently use a clone [1] of Andy's notes website [2], to which I've added KaTeX support. The biggest feature is the Roam-style bidirectional linking. But your system is sufficiently simpler that I think I'll give it a try, at least for some use cases.

Roam-style bidirectional linking would be cool, but I wonder if it's better to keep it simple for everyone else rather than add very specific features for the few people like me. Your call...

Anyways, cool project! You're definitely making something people want :)

[1] https://github.com/aravindballa/gatsby-theme-andy/

[2] https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes
The Urge – why do we (or at least I) have this urge to create?
My vote is for lodash, if only to avoid the endless Abbott-&-Costello-style discussion thread confusion :P
> You can't temporarily have the role of "janitor" and go out and speak authoritatively about AWS at a conference with that role.

It is my understanding that you can often get away with being a lot more subtle than that. Things like throwing a proprietary product name in your title, a title that sounds more like a manager, etc.
Hi, perhaps you could be a little more explicit in the README about what you mean by "insertable stream" for people without the background. Is this like a dataflow-graph where you can combine streams using generic "operation" nodes/functions?

> The gist of it is that you have access to the video frames in the browser now!

As a total newbie in this area, it sounds surprising that this wasn't already the case. Would you access these frames from Javascript or WebAssembly? Would this be efficient enough (in terms of speed and power use)?
We used to have more options. There was Flash and Java. Flash is insecure, Java too (it's basically running code that can do anything a native executable can do). Java also has the competing JVM problems, backwards compat,... But instead of getting our hands dirty and fixing the issues, the powers that be decided to throw away all the hard work from the past and move to WASM which is incomplete, barely supported and will have the same security issues Flash and Java had once it gets more broader adoption. And so the circle continues.
> there’s not much you can do except be aware of what you add to your project ... try to avoid nested dependencies when possible

how? cultural expectations around transitive dep size?

I'm certainly making decisions about graph complexity when designing software in house (avoid circular import deps in code, be careful about call depth in service graph)

But I've given up doing this for 3rd party deps in JS, except maybe at the point where `npm install` starts to bog down and I'm like 'this one isn't for me'
All of his wealth is wrapped up in Amazon stock. If he tried to sell 2/3 of his stock, not only would Amazon's share price tank (the founder is selling most of his stock), but he would lose control of Amazon and his net worth would be cut in half or more due to the stock tanking while he was selling. Jeff Bezos' net worth is simply the amount of shares he controls in Amazon multiplied by whatever the current price of the stock is. It is entirely theoretical and there is no real way for him to actually obtain his "net worth" in cash.
I've done a fair bit of 2d graphics work (written a rasterizer, etc). Honestly it's because it's

1) tricky to shoehorn 2D graphics onto the APIs that GPUs provide and
2) really not needed. I can easily render eg: a world map with hundreds of thousands of lines at hundreds of frames/second with one core.
I'm pretty sure regular people can tell the difference between a regular page and an AMP page. The AMP page simply doesn't work right and it's quite difficult to miss that.
Which other countries are we talking here? I'll guess Europe. The United States covers ~1/3 of a continent and has ~1/3 of a million people who make up probably the most diverse ever polity on the planet. They can't adopt approaches that don't scale really well.

Compare that to, say, Sweden. Small physically, small population wise, although they are a lot more diverse than they used to be. Nevertheless, they can reasonably adopt policies that do not scale and target a group of people with very similar experiences.

For the US to provide Schools/Hospitals/Houses services comparable to the European countries it would be done at the State level. At the Federal level it is to some degree unprecedented to provide services at the level of quality and at the scale.
> they can eliminate their biggest cost; paying drivers.

and incur new costs of buying, maintaining, parking and cleaning the vehicles
You are right. And if you buy metal and rent some space in a DC, it is still more cost-effective.

You need a few people who understand a little bit of hardware and IPMI and you are set. That's not a big deal.

The cloud gaslighting is nuts.

Tons of companies now exist to give you insight in your cloud bill because that's the last thing cloud provides want you to have.

So in the end you must decide what kind of pain you want. Cost pain, tech pain, and that all depends on your company's particular circumstances.
With the recent push on HN about blogs, I wanted to revisit my own. This is a post I had lying around about my own urge create. For me specifically, this is art and music, but it might ring true for some people here.
I thought that the car-share model is pretty well established in Europe? I think it has basically died in the US though:

- Zipcar got bought out by Avis (big traditional car rental company), and many properties terminated their contracts with Zipcar

- BMW's car share program left both the SF and Seattle markets

- In SF, the problems preventing carshare were mostly regulatory -- they couldn't get permission to use on-street parking (made both public transit and car-ownership factions unhappy)

- Lyft started a pilot of traditional full-day car rentals(!)
By "holy grail" you mean it would produce a better result or just satisfy someone's OCD?
> and we didn't want to put miles on our car.

Surely the cost of renting a car is far, far higher than the depreciation on a car caused by driving the same distance?
"URLs as breadcrumbs" solve this cleanly. They've already been visible for years in web search results.

Here the address bar would show "(padlock) [Github Inc] Github.com > Name Of Account > Name Of Project" for example. This is much clearer for end users.

Developers can always toggle an option to always show the URL or something.
>>and such a minor problem

It's not a minor problem. It's a huge structural and operational problem that nearly renders the whole stack unsalveagble, if not for all the infrastructure and legacy.

And the mere fact that you need half a dozen JavaScript bundlers and plugins and polyfills to reign the stack into the realm of salvageability should speak for itself.
Bad analogy. AMP is a Google content proxying technology, and Google isn't generally understood to be a "sketchy site."

Users with the level of paranoia that puts Google in the "untrusted site" space should be sidestepping this whole conversation by avoiding using the browser Google develops regardless of what Google does to its URL bar.
When you are on the the aero-bars your hands are not on the brakes and the your ability to perform accurate steering adjustments is greatly compromised.

There is a good answer to this question here:

https://bicycles.stackexchange.com/questions/10231/why-dont-...
Maybe it's shallow of me, but named/keyword arguments are now at the top of my list of things I want in a programming language.

For all the attention given to static typing and unit testing for increasing developer confidence, I think named arguments belong up there as well. Makes reading code so much easier, especially the way they are implemented and encouraged in Swift.

As someone stuck doing PHP for my day job, they could buy an awful lot of goodwill from me by implementing something like this in PHP (well, that, and separating arrays from dictionaries, but that seems far less likely to happen).
These guys have made a start: https://www.govirtuo.com/
yeah no. Bezos knows. you cannot “not know” based on how the show is run
Both macOS and Windows have ways for applications to specify whether they want to prefer a discrete gpu or integrated.
I agree that Jeff could spread his wealth around more and should spread his wealth around more. I think the driving factor is ambition and applies to a lot more people than Jeff. You need a certain amount of ambition to reach Bezos status, how do you turn that off when you get there?
I've read all your comments and like others, find your thought process confusing.

You started by saying, "I would advise care when reading it". Now you're saying you somehow "missed that paragraph in his essay". So you've been attacking Cotton without having actually read what he wrote despite telling others to read it carefully, but that's OK because "it's fine to be wrong". In fact you seem to be suggesting you ignored it deliberately: "there is a reason why that paragraph was missed"

In one comment you said, "Nobody is misrepresenting what Cotton wrote". Yes they are: that's what this entire subthread is about. You have been constantly mis-representing what he wrote and people keep pointing that out by quoting the article.

I suspect the core problem is revealed by this comment:

"Context is extremely important and words in isolation mean absolutely nothing ... that paragraph was explicitly designed to protect the outcome of what he’s really calling for."

Words in isolation mean absolutely nothing? Context matters sure, but not to the extent that actual words mean nothing at all. Your position here is that what people say they believe doesn't actually matter in the slightest, and should be ignored in favour of vaguely defined "context". Who defines this context? I guess you do. In fact in this world view Cotton can say something as clearly as possible and it should still be ignored, because what he "really" means is - obviously - the exact opposite.

But you're also trying to have it both ways:

"This is a US Senator whose essay was reviewed by his editorial staff before being sent to the times. He is saying exactly what he meant to say"

So now I think we're all hopelessly confused. Which is it? Is Cotton saying "exactly what he meant to say" or is he saying the opposite of what he meant?

Finally, you state "I’m trying to address the reasons why his op ed was deemed to be so revolting". I'm afraid you aren't succeeding. I can't figure out if it was revolting because of the words he wrote, or the words he didn't write, or if those words are meaningless and it's all about "context", in which case it appears no op-ed written by him could have ever passed muster regardless of what it said. This looks a lot like a slippery argument that Sen Cotton simply shouldn't be allowed to speak at all.
Those "suckers" are easy to contract out to, and a lot of colo providers provide managed services or "remote hands" themselves as well.

In practice, when I was responsible for racks in two separate data centres, I spent 3-4 days a year in the data centres (combined); everything else was handled easily via tickets or remotely. Overall I've generally spent less time on devops with hardware in colo's than with cloud setups.

But specifically the amount of on-call work tends to be down to code quality and higher level architecture not whether you host in cloud or colo or rent managed servers - the "low level" problems become part of the noise floor very quickly in any system with reasonable failover.
More so when you work out how much data is inflight, maybe we see fiber reels used as storage/memory. Kinda like what we had in the early days of wire memory. May well see that come back into play with speeds like this for some uses cases.
Unless you have some status car like a Lexus or Audi.
Fork+PyTest=new way of testing device
I've always signed them as a sign of good faith (sometimes amending with my own IP so there's no misunderstand about something I've already done if the company is in the same space) figuring that they have no teeth. In 30 years in the industry moving between small and large companies here in the Seattle area, having signed a NC everywhere, I've never even been asked about a previous NC, nor do I know anyone else that's had an issue. From what I understand, they are very difficult to take action on. Perhaps in the upper echelon's of management this is more of an issue, or for very narrowly-defined technologies or market-segments.