skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
yet the book doesn't feed or cloth anyone. This is generally done by the sun (and stored energy from it in the form of many fossil fuels). Also, for a finite population, all the other books can not be consumed anymore. So yes, it is a zero-sum game.
> But Mozilla is not a 'programming languages' company in the mold of Microsoft or former Borland.

What? Microsoft is nothing like Borland. Sure they make some money from Visual Studio Enterprise or whatever, but their languages are mostly there to attract devs to Windows/Azure and are making $0 directly.

You missed my point, Rust does not need to directly make $$ "on the market place", ever. All it needs to do is enable Mozilla developers to make Firefox more competitive, easier and faster than other solutions. It is doing that, see "Firefox Quantum", WebRender, Servo etc.

And BTW, the Rust staff paid by Mozilla is relatively tiny, (dozen people?). The fact that this is a major focus is pathetic.

EDIT: Not a dozen, more like 3-4 people.
I disagree, it's a federal jobs program under the guise of security theater.
That's because he tried to play fair.
Look at Sheldon Adelson, I won't talk about US politics, but during the last twenty years he pretty much changed the entire press landscape of Israel subordinating it to Netanyahu. He made a huge impact on Israel politics and public opinion.
Obviously democratic capitalism is better, such as what happened in Sweden in the 20th century, or America in the 19th century. But authoritarian capitalism is better than socialism of any form for poverty reduction.
It’s been at least a decade since I read it, but isn’t there a whole chapter on using a mouse AND a keyboard to increase productivity? :D

So yeah, some of it has dated, and some of it I disagree with, but it kills me that a lot of the lessons are still not learnt 45 years later.
Power comes from:

a) coworkers respect your competence & judgement so they align with your decisions on technical matters

b) engineering manager believes what you have to say about what the project needs, which may include staff allocation & performance management
I did not assert that wealth is a zero sum game, I was replying to this:

>> Immediately, the author assumes that everyone is playing a zero-sum game, which is the root of the problem with his viewpoint: "We've got about 400 people in this room.... Imagine if dinner was carted into this room, and four people got half the food. The night would end in violence,"

"economics is not zero sum game", "correlation != causation", etc - certain ideas seem to be kind of like catnip for humans.
I come from a poor south asian country. The idea that western countries like US, Canada etc don't have "food and shelter" is absurd. I can understand examples like Flint's water issue but that's the fault of the very politicians people keep voting in again and again. It's not the fault of all the rich people.

Everyone who's willing to put a tiny bit of effort can get food and shelter thanks to food banks, shelters etc. Back in my country, we don't have that luxury yet but a lot of religious places are trying their best at providing that.

I am not religious myself but I do think they should play an important role at feeding those who don't have the resources yet.

Once your basic necessity like food and water have been solved, it's up to you to work your way up.
Ask HN: What accounts for the update-happy nature of modern tech?
I struggle to think of an internet-connected device that I own which has not required an update in the last month. My phone (Android), my computer (Surface with Windows 10), my game console (Playstation 4), my tablet (iPad), my /light bulbs/ (Philips Hue), all needed to be temporarily bricked and to install either a security or feature update, generally without seeking my permission to do so. Also, essentially every major app on my phone. I know HN is frequented by people from across the range of specialties within hardware and software development; I'd like to hear everyone's take on why this has come to be the paradigm, and their sentiments on the matter.
I still remember the leaked Nuland's call saying "F* the EU" implying that US was the main change agent and the other caller expressing views that EU was too weak to do anything and they had to act. It looks like Russia has learned from that, manufactured consent to get rid of Lukashenko utilizing his weaknesses and expected actions (i.e. unable to resist corrupting the elections, suppressing protests by force) and had trained people in the background ready to take over. I guess Russia decided to preempt any potential US/EU action by simply replaying the same scenario they saw in Ukraine, Georgia etc. with the ability to steer its outcome at a time that is favorable to them (COVID-19, economy down).
I'm the opposite. I always think I can solve it in an afternoon and always realize there are a lot of intricacies.

Fuck making popup positioning in browsers. That shit is hard to get just right.
I'd extend "afternoon" to "half a week", but in general I agree with OP.

> Yes, I can write a hashtable implementation in an afternoon, but it's going to have bugs that I'll spend the next year fixing, and still not achieve the performance of the pre-built version.

The meaning of "afternoon work" should be considered "of good enough quality". Tests, structure, reasonable docs, all that. It shouldn't be a fastest written something, it should be a normal code.

> and still not achieve the performance of the pre-built version.

Some losses in performance are acceptable for greater visibility and better fit for the project. If you need non-trivial performance gains - well, those are also achievable by code, are you sure you can actually write such code in a few days?

> Find a bug in the dependency? Submit a patch.

That's the point. To submit a good patch, you have to internalize the system. It's easier to do if the system is yours - doesn't do much except what you need.

> Worried about the dependency changing? Lock the version.

Now you've locked yourself out of upstream bug fixes.

> Don't reinvent the wheel.

Here is a wheel patented in 1972 in US, with noticeable benefits over the traditional idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mecanum_wheel :) .

We do reinvent the wheel whenever we need to have an actual wheel for a device, not an abstract concept. Similarly, we write for loops, "reinventing" them for our specific purpose. Those are all different wheels, loops and needs. Don't mistake the "idea" of a hashtable with an implementation.
To be denied a career opportunity just because the gatekeeper is biased is unreasonable if you ask me.

That's why I strongly prefer reaching out to companies without any middlemen. The more people are involved, the worse for me.
> Signal started as any other startup. And yet

Not sure what you mean here. To me Signal is just another startup that wants to keep control over the market and uses excuses such as "federation leads to fragmentation and bad UX" in order to put its own interests ahead of the users. To me they are no different than FB or Google.
Oh, yes. It assigns a small number of 'moderation points' to random users, and a larger number to trusted users. Essentially their algo picks out random users to moderate just a little, which lets the diaspora bump up visibility of what they like. In addition to up and downvotes the mods label a post "+1 Informative", "+1 Funny", or "-1 Flamebait". Users can assign more visibility to something which has been voted Informative twice than once Informative and once Funny. There is no "-1 I disagree". The purpose of the votes are obvious.

There is meta-moderation on top of this which has users check the moderation of other users. I assume people who repeatedly abuse their privilege are given sub-naive priority for mod point assignment.

This scales with traffic and requires the minimum of admin oversight.
Oh that's cool. I stand corrected :)
Rust can be stand alone, Thunderbird is already stand alone and the way Mozilla handled that pretty much killed Thunderbird in the marketplace.

I also think that Thunderbird's position can no longer qualify for the adjective 'huge' when coupled with community value, it is well below 1% of the market.

After using it for years I gave up because the bugs were no longer fixed timely, the performance simply terrible and the upgrades were just as likely to cause you trouble as they were to fix something.

Rust has the future, I'm pretty convinced about that. It will take a very long time to materialize, but let's be honest here: without FireFox Rust would have never even seen the light of day, it only exists because a large amount of money earmarked for FireFox was diverted into developing Rust which led to further diminished marketshare for FireFox. The breaking change around plug-ins was another big negative in the near past.
> I am hopeful that Rust can achieve what Elm did not.

I am hopeful we can see the web ecosystem evolve into being capable of 'Single Language Web Applications' like Rust seems to be capable of, and C# as well. Of course there's Flutter, but it seems to just pain on a canvas instead of reusing the DOM.
Making the author's point: "If only...."
Well, 99% of "the Internet" is the web, so a free web browser is the vital part in that. And not some tool about "remixing HTML" or open badges or something [1]

[1] https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/artifacts/
Well 386, but 286 compatibility would be nice also. I'm still annoyed that AMD dropped virtual 8086 mode from x86_64- I liked it because Windows ran MS-DOS programs better than MS-DOS ever did and I would still use this facility if it was available in 64-bit operating systems. Virtual x86 mode in Linux was also pretty good, but the graphics modes were better supported in Windows.
I think that may happen if you aim it full in your face. I don't do that, it's uncomfortable to my eyes.
If you copy the code into your project you at least need to keep track of the original authors and licensing or you're in violation of the copyright 99% of the time.
A few countries have tried that and it’s hard to do without applying the jackboot to a few million people’s’ necks.
Note that the twitter I linked to is not Sowell's actual twitter. He doesn't use Twitter. It's an account which tweets useful passages from his books.
If I may fix a major assumption, I'd like to acknowledge it:

> If it was because they [enslaved or underpaid people who] planted the crops, tended the fields, and did all the work to harvest and prepare it, I don't think any reasonable person would complain. We feel like that is a fair outcome because most nations have collectively agreed that owning property is a fundamental human right. In the US it's the 5th amendment.

All of a sudden it doesn't sound so reasonable and yet comes off a fair bit truer than the original.
...and that's a good thing.

The utter waste of resources that is the mindless trendchasing of the "modern web" is in desperate need of some strong opposition.
> Deep down, most people aren't pawns that you can simply acquire with a number and expect the highest quality work from.

In practice, it is extremely rare to find managers who effectively practice this. When you do, it's pretty amazing to watch in action.

I've only seen one such manager out of hundreds I've encountered consulting. That manager's team members won't leave the team for even 2X pay increases, because they figure the additional anticipated stress and job insecurity is not worth it. The amount of trust between that manager and the individual team members is higher than I've ever seen elsewhere, and that manager redefined for me what was possible with people skills superpowers. RDF doesn't even begin to describe it, and this field was accomplished without Jobs' infamous tantrums.
If the end solution relies on hundreds of lines of JavaScript... its JavaScript. I will just write the whole thing in JavaScript instead of messing with something like this.
well, a hundred other people of similar circumstances not liking him?!
We're not all blind to the trap certain Mozilla users (and certain Floss users in general) set up for authors who try to be sincere Floss players but naturally need to make real world compromises.

Just wanted to let you know I appreciate what you and Mozilla are doing, regardless of these certain purity-zeolots. May Mozilla live long!
> but Google or Tesla or someone might offer them $600K just to prevent competitors from having access to them

This arguments fails on so many dimensions that it must just be a meme. I’ll use Google as the example. For it to work Google has to be able to monopolise the buying of talent.

Most damning, the premise itself is self defeating. Somehow Google is picking the most talented people (delivering far in excess of say $1M marginal returns), yet somehow it is paying well below that to steal that talent and furthermore Google is then wasting that talent (employee delivering value below their pay+overhead). To assume Google chooses to waste talent merely to achieve some low value outcome (damaging a competitor by $1 doesn’t magically enhance Google’s returns by $1 so the factors are way out here) seems to assume the Google is somehow acting against their best financial interests. I don’t think Google is as poorly run as that.

Also:

1. Occam’s razor: Could it be that a Google is actually getting good value by paying very high salaries?

Yes. The average revenue per person for Google is about 160G$ / 115kiloemployees = 1M4 per employee. I do note that using an average is silly because the value distribution is not flat, but neither is the employee salary distribution flat. But the figure is so large, average does say something useful for back-of-envelope calcs.

2. Can Google monopolise by buying power alone?

No. Other companies have similarly high returns per employee (Apple is 260G$/160kiloemployees, Netflix is 20G$/20kiloemployees) so for Google to outbid them, it needs to outbid above the marginal revenue per employee, which clearly is well above a 600k$ salary.

3. Can Google corner the market for talent by restricting supply?

No. We know that there are plenty of talented developers because Google isn’t the only company making over $1M revenue per employee. Google employs about 115000 people. Let’s say 50000 of those were “overpaid“ to remove them from the competitors. If the total pool of equivalent talent were as small as 250000, then Google couldn’t monopolise talent. Yet other companies with high revenues per employee have a sum total of employees higher than 250000. Furthermore Google’s returns per effective employee become ~$2.8M/employee, so Google can obviously afford to pay $1M for talent it really wants!
It's very JavaScript-heavy though. What I'm thinking of would be HTML/CSS only.
Is that really 5 minutes? (For when left-pad was relevant)

var cache = [
'',
' ',
' ',
' ',
' ',
' ',
' ',
' ',
' ',
' '
];

function leftPad (str, len, ch) {

// convert `str` to a `string`
str = str + '';
// `len` is the `pad`'s length now
len = len - str.length;
// doesn't need to pad
if (len <= 0) return str;
// `ch` defaults to `' '`
if (!ch && ch !== 0) ch = ' ';
// convert `ch` to a `string` cuz it could be a number
ch = ch + '';
// cache common use cases
if (ch === ' ' && len < 10) return cache[len] + str;
// `pad` starts with an empty string
var pad = '';
// loop
while (true) {
// add `ch` to `pad` if `len` is odd
if (len & 1) pad += ch;
// divide `len` by 2, ditch the remainder
len >>= 1;
// "double" the `ch` so this operation count grows logarithmically on `len`
// each time `ch` is "doubled", the `len` would need to be "doubled" too
// similar to finding a value in binary search tree, hence O(log(n))
if (len) ch += ch;
// `len` is 0, exit the loop
else break;
}
// pad `str`!
return pad + str;
}
I've heard it from people working for airlines that they are prepping for august to ramp up. I don't know how accurate that is but it's from my experience the plan.
Asia is a growing economy. I have no trouble believing that the tide is rising and the boats are floating in Asia.

In the United States, it's a different story. The tide is rising, but most boats have not been rising with the tides for about 40 years, and that's troubling.

https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2019/

The figure you linked does not indicate adjustment for inflation and does not segment expenditures by wealth, which is important, because the US economy as a whole is growing, but more than 100% of the growth is flowing to the top. The rich get richer, the poor (and middle class) get poorer. You have to segment by income to see this trend.
Government misapplication of funds is the reason so much is wrong in this world. The idea some government politician or worse a group of them could better employ the money of a Gates or Bezos is ludicrous. They have all already proven they cannot. Gates does better with his money because he isn't doing one thing politicians love to do, punish by giving and taking money from groups.

Governments routinely punish the poor for nothing more than being poor. In the US this is done through fees, penalties, licensing, direct taxation, and embedded taxes. Government routinely targets the poor for enforcement efforts because the officials know they cannot afford to fight back, hence why so much forfeiture in the US is of that class.

You can take all the wealth of every US Billionaire and not fix anything because the political class will not fix what is already wrong with their spending. More money just means more likelihood of more money spent wrong.

The only source of wealth that can pay for all the promises being made this cycle is from the middle and upper classes combined.

TWO TRILLION Dollars comprise Social Security, Medicare, and Medicade, tell me who giving them more will solve anything when they cannot care for Americans with two trillion dollars. Worse this is on top of state aid programs and programs coming out of another nearly 1.5 trillion dollars in various aid programs.
i'm not even sure being good at instructing yoga has anything to do with selling online yoga classes. online engagement is hard, it almost seems antithesis what it would take to sell yoga classes online to the practice of yoga.
> Easy to do when you cherry-pick three companies.

* Netflix vs Blockbuster

* Uber / Lyft vs taxi cabs

* Airbnb vs hotels

* Blogs vs print media

* Youtube /Instagram vs TV

* porn tube sites vs porn studios

I could keep going.

I've also tried the corollary - companies that are successful while cutting cost in tech, but I can't think of any successful companies that are cutting investment in tech.
Everything is beautiful so far, the website is nice looking, the overview is self-explanitory. If I wasn't so in love with Godot I would use this. I think one thing that would sell this would be an editor like Godot has, it's one of the strongest selling points with Godot for me.
I never said anything otherwise? I'm unsure what you're trying to get at. Are we just agreeing with different words?
I assumed he was describing the infamous "Iran Contra Affair" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair

Also see: John Poindexter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poindexter#Iran%E2%80%93C...
You haven't looked deep into Ukrainian situation, do you? Western European countries have continuously expressed their frustration at the fact that Ukraine does not follow the Minsk agreements to no avail. They would like for mutual sanctions between them and Russia to be gone as soon as possible and Ukrainian unwillingness to follow Minsk agreements silently supported by US (and not so silently via supplies of lethal military equipment) makes it harder (since the civil war is still ongoing).

Meanwhile Derkach tapes have shown that Ukraine wasn't far from a puppet state and for current government just a little warning from US was enough to stop any investigations into potential Poroshenko treason just because it may influence US elections. Just think about it! Also US has a significant influence over WMF, which openly dictates how Ukraine should behave in certain key areas.
That's something for parents to do for their children, and for me to not care about.
Correct, business owners aren't required to pay themselves via W2 income; and typically aren't required to register for unemployment or workers comp insurance. These would be the main data sources for "number of employed people", I imagine.
> that you could completely replace in the same quality

And the quality of the original might be questionable for many cases.
But if you really cared about "election interference" then attacking media monopolies would be at the top of your list and you wouldn't make this argument.

You need to pick things that aren't directly connected if you want to deflect, or your argument comes across as being too obviously in bad faith.
I'm aware, my view is the court's current views are incomplete. Courts can be wrong.

What draws the most interest is the right to enter states freely. Combine that with the need to travel and participate in commerce and you quickly arrive at the conclusion the right to travel in general must also be protected, and indeed we can see the hardships brought upon people when they are unable to drive, etc.
That wasn't his analogy. "Imagine if dinner was carted into this room, and four people got half the food. The night would end in violence."

Hence my point that this is a bad analogy.
When DRY Doesn’t Work, Go Wet
> Worried about the dependency changing? Lock the version.

And get p0wned a year later when some security researcher finds a vulnerability in code that you don't even use, but pulled in as part of that dependency.
Indeed. And not only 'can' but 'should' :-)
Language design does not end with the release of the first version.
I just sent one, thanks for the offer.
The three biggest ones are people, scope of work, and future career potential.
Why is machine learning in finance so hard? (2008)
Vendoring dependencies is usually not the same thing as ripping off someone else’s code.

It usually just boils down to keeping a copy of the version of a dependency you used.
"Mozilla's contract with Google to include Google as the default search provider inside Firefox is set to expire later this year, and the contract has not been renewed"

Aka the browser will no longer bring them any money to sustain themselves. It's sad but we're basically seeing a chromium near-monopoly coming.
This caught my eye, from the article:

>A World Health Organization (WHO) report has also listed other barriers to adherence with hand-washing guidelines, including:

>[...]

>Sinks are inconveniently located/shortage of sinks

>Lack of soap and paper towels

>Male sex

>Handwashing agents cause irritation and dryness

Uh, what? One of these things does not belong.

I was actually curious about this, so I followed the link to the WHO report. It cites two studies as evidence of "male sex" being a factor affecting handwashing adherence. I looked through the full text both of those studies, and...they make no mention of any such thing. One has zero instances of the term 'male' or 'man', the other has three as it comments on the demographics of the studied patients.

All this to say...where did this supposed factor come from?
Now, I love the story about the biblical quantities of paper documentation that was produced, distributed, and consulted every single day during the development of OS/360. But broadly the book has aged poorly -- it's quite thoroughly misogynistic for example -- and absolutely does not get a pass since the author explicitly declined the opportunity to update it in later editions. Moreover, the writing is nothing special, and the ideas have seeped quite deeply into our culture, so it's not necessary to read the primary source. Folks today would be better off reading the Wikipedia page which does cover the main concepts, including the surgical team.
Can Reading Fiction Improve Empathy?
Cold War 2.0 Incoming
> There are many non-profits funded by elites that operate to advance societal good superficially while pushing ulterior political motives.

George Soros and his 'Open Society Foundation' is another example.