skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's going to be the same during the next elections in Russia. It's really sad to see the declaration of the main opponent (Tikhanovskaya) (1)

Protesters are in jail (more than 2000 people), a guy has been killed by a truck, etc.

1: https://twitter.com/TadeuszGiczan/status/1293127604330016769
Looks very cool and I want to try it out for some workshops I help run, but I'm struggling to create an account on Firefox––it doesn't seem to be working for me.
We had a baby-sitting-club kind of thing with its own currency, nice middle/upper-middle-class neighborhood, and some people just couldn't seem to get around to 'earning' credits by babysitting other people's kids...

So there was forgery.

Of course, in such a small community, it was immediately obvious who had done it, so people stopped being available to babysit their kids.
As someone else from the UK, we're so far removed from anything that the Romans did that I doubt anyone has an emotional response to it (as you point out). I wouldn't even consider it correct to say that we're ethnically or culturally the same people as those who were subjugated under the Roman empire considering the subsequent Anglo-Saxon and Norman conquests!

In fact, it's hard for me to name something explicitly that the Romans did in Britain other than lay the foundations for some towns and cities, and built some roads. All of this was over 1000 years ago, so I doubt (other than the exceptions that I can think of on the spot; some roads, towns and 'Roman Baths') that anyone from the UK is walking around and interpreting what they see as a result of Roman occupation.

On an objective level as someone who obviously never experienced true Roman Britain, sure, they built some things that were pretty cool at the time, but at the same time you can objectively look back and say "yeah, slavery is really bad, I wish the Romans didn't enslave people and use that slave labour to build the things that they did". I think the real layman answer is "who cares, it was over 1000 years ago, and I don't really understand how the people of the time relate to the world/culture I take part in".
When you place a value on something, invisible & intangible, how do you know whether you got it or not?

What better way to celebrate a festival which fleeced thousands of people by getting fleeced yourself?
I've long since wanted to make it easier to find uncommon content on HN. Many popular posts hide the less mainstream ones. Rather than complain, I made Hackerer.news. It has also allowed me to spend less time on the site playing dopamine roulette as it appears far more static when not sorted by age + score.

The first version displayed two columns per day: Niche & Popular split by number of votes. Both lists were still quite long and trending content still shaded other posts.

This v2 update shows a single list of one day sectioned by tags. The tags were manually[0] defined to separate out current trending content. Clicking on the date cycles: today -> yesterday -> older. I expect to continually update the tags to group frequent posts on trending topics.

Comments wanted and any/all feedback welcome.

[0] https://gitlab.com/karmakaze/hackerer-news/-/blob/master/src...
one thing I only started doing recently was to (in firefox, not sure chrome even gives you that control) disable the option to use fonts.

I set my serif/san-serif fonts (ubuntu, ubuntu mono) and disable "allow website to choose their own font"

It's incredible how having a standard font all over makes reading easier.

Only downside is a handful of sites that uses the neo-windings (fontawesome et al) for icons. But it's not hard to click the button with an "S" instead of the one with a magnifying glass.
Counterpoint: Firefox is the thing they're best known for, but it's been inexorably losing market share for years to a direct competitor with vastly more financial muscle and access to very prominent advertising space. At the same time, they're dependent on that competitor for most of their revenue.

It's hard to imagine they could give Firefox a significant technical edge over Chrome, no matter how much they focus on it. Even if Google plays entirely fair - not optimising things like GMail & Google Maps for Chrome at all - it has the resources to keep up with anything Mozilla can do.

Throwing all the eggs in one basket and praying is not a strategy. It makes sense for them to diversify. Inevitably there will be some failures (Firefox Phone seems like a bad idea with hindsight, but hindsight is always 20/20), but some things are having a bit of quiet success, like Firefox Send or their 'Privacy not Included' guides. How they create revenue, I have no idea, though their new VPN is one idea.
How to Securely Run Your DevOps in Slack? Don't.

Hmm, yes, let's use a typewriter to screw in a nail...
This is IE6 all over again...
Another huge win for SQL is that it's easy to construct from parts. You can very easily run and debug your subquery or common table expression on its own before combining it into a larger, more-complex query. If you (as I usually do) create plenty of views while analysing a dataset, the approach can be extremely powerful.

Doing the same in JavaScript is possible, but it's slow and cumbersome by comparison.
Ah sorry, that wasn't my intention, I don't even use smartphones or social media, smartTVs or closed source operating systems/software (1).

My point was, if I have to be concerned about privacy (in fact I actually am, see above) why should I fear about a foreign government while my own one is without any doubt more interested in knowing what I think?
Of course should one day I become an important public figure, or a key person in some critical environment, all the data about me would suddenly become gold; that's a very valid point by another commenter. Of course my post was from the point of view of someone who doesn't plan, nor could even choose, to become one anytime soon.

(1) hence my comments where very often I argue about closed device drivers and blobs, which are the best possible place for planting spyware.
I remember back when people generated html with native code using CGI.pm and it was considered a bad idea. Don't mix languages they said. The current CGI.pm deprecated all of the HTML generating parts in fact.

The official justification:

The rationale for this is that the HTML generation functions of CGI.pm are an obfuscation at best and a maintenance nightmare at worst. You should be using a template engine for better separation of concerns. See CGI::Alternatives for an example of using CGI.pm with the Template::Toolkit module.
"Fred long ago learned that refactoring tickets always mysteriously sink to the bottom of the backlog, so he doesn't make them anymore."

Exactly this. Maybe Fred understands that if he creates a ticket to do a required refactor then it will never get prioritized and when things blow up in production 2 months from now it's his phone that's going to ring in the middle of the night.
Well, that's definitely a sweet-spot, but as a by-product of that, Rust is still a well-thought through language with a strong and logical type system, some very useful features for expressing domain models, etc. and a model of memory management which maps very well to WASM. So if you already know Rust, this is a short and logical step. If you don't already know Rust, I wouldn't learn it just to write web apps in - but if you do, you now have all the advantages of "same language client/server side" as well as the advantages of safety, good libraries in certain spaces, etc.
They're decaying to a stable middle region. In theory, they're decaying into nothingness, but that's like saying "in theory, things reach absolute zero".
How work is changing at Figma
Don’t National Security Letters and a Secret Courts bypass that?
> 250 FTE's is probably in the neighborhood of $25 million/yr

Mozilla is very engineering-heavy. While I don't know other people's salaries, I do know that the fully loaded cost of a developer almost anywhere is much higher than $100k/yr.
If the firsts comment, https://lwn.net/Articles/824494/, is correct, and this can be made secure, I'm excited that this could mean a much more maintainable/easy-to-upstream version of Capsicum/CloudABI.
> Can you imagine if you got punished for writing bad code or not making a project deadline by having your salary cut?

But I do get punished as part of the regular Performance Review, if I don't do my job right. Luckily, I am very good at my job.
Based on that strawman story, all other developers despise Fred. So maybe his refactorings are not that great? And if they are great, where is tech lead or other developers in all that that should protect Fred?
Yup, I’ve found that even when pretty much every engineer on the team knows that velocity is slow because necessary refactors have not been done, refactoring is often not considered real work and real progress. It’s the kind of thing you’re supposed to do in your spare time, off the roadmap. Also, people who find refactoring difficult or unpleasant will try to get you to see things from their point of view! Or they and their teammates have tried so many times to get the green light from leadership to pay down technical debt that they have given up.

It’s underappreciated that developers have different strengths and interests and could be doing different kinds of work rather than being treated as interchangeable workers, even at a relatively small start-up, in my experience.
It's almost like supply and demand is a thing and the only mechanism for overcoming it is the jackboot. Karl Marx has entered the chat.
Yeah, Mathias and I already exchanged on this. (I know him from working on V8). The GIF in that repo doesn’t work as a favicon:

https://twitter.com/billticehurst/status/1288721150780964866...
I was sitting in one of my college classes one evening when I was passing papers up to the professor, and saw this guy's name on the page. Figuring there weren't many "Albert LaFrance"s around, I chatted him up afterwards and found much to my delight that he indeed was the one.

Nice guy! I asked him how and why he decided to start putting the page together. He told me about how he'd grown up in Northern VA and wondered what the Tyson's Corner tower was for. (http://coldwar-c4i.net/Site_E/index.html ) That took him down a rabbit hole of research into that and other things, and ended up where he is today. At least, that's the story, to the best of my recollection.
Practical AI turns 100 [audio]
Thanks, you gave me some great starting points to delve into this. Had never heard of music set theory, will take a look
This must be how people feel when I talk about databases, I am speculating on meanings from context.
I would pay $100 or $5/month or something for Firefox. I don't really understand why they don't have a pay-if-you-want model. I donate to nonprofit news organizations I read even though I can get their news for free, and I pay for a couple Android apps I want to support even though the "premium" versions don't have any meaningful extra features.

I'm sure they wouldn't get enough revenue to replace Google's support, but maybe it would make a dent? Why not try it?
There are agreements with kde that prevent the Qt company from outright dropping free licenses: https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php

As far as I can tell from that the LGPLv3 seems to be required under the current terms of the agreement.
This is cool, didn’t find this in my googling. Like with go-app (https://github.com/maxence-charriere/go-app) though, it is a front and backend framework that seems closely tied together. I would like to see a front-end GoLang framework that can be reused easily. Still awesome, will take a look later
Don't forget halfway refactoring. The worst case I've ever had was a project with 3 completely different and incompatible ways of accomplishing everything. Different packaging schemes, different DAO designs, different UI framework/libraries. The worst!
> I've been told that a large part of Mozilla's security team has also been laid off, which seems like a big issue especially after Mozilla launched a VPN offering last month.

https://twitter.com/campuscodi/status/1293200453736570881
I wouldn't say it's delegated necessarily, but we consider a tech lead's goal to be unblocking the rest of the team, and if there's nothing specific to deal with at any point (hah!), dealing with these points is often the most obvious way of unblocking for the future.

Which isn't to say that the rest of the dev team can't do any of these things, but the tech lead is almost always the most experienced dev, and a lot of the DevOps type points aren't concrete ticket items, and a ticket which basically says "Explore [X] to see if it'll help" is (a) potentially too abstract for a very green dev and (b) the tech lead is probably best positioned to judge whether there'll be any meaningful help in practice.
But why? Seems like anti-abuse is a pretty good reason to use one.
Absolutely, none of these are mental models by any definition that I can accept. These are advice or aphorisms, based on I suppose experience.
WordPress auto-updates and the importance of reading the changelog
Perhaps, but the long-term axis of geopolitical competition and spiralling armament was imperial. If you accept Hobson's thesis that imperialism was a way of off-loading the surplus capital consequent from European inequality, not only was imperialism the axis of competition, but the competition was necessarily imperial in nature.

There is no possible narrative explanation of the war that does not centre on the scramble for Africa. Would there have been a great power war between Germany and the status quo powers at some point absent the scramble for Africa? It is very difficult to say. Had it occurred, it would have been radically different in shape. This goes back to my initial point about the uncertainty factored into any big counter-factual like this.

As for the Nazis, my point was that the very ideology of racism was a direct product of European imperialism. That it was primarily directed at Jews and Slavs is besides the point. Hannah Arendt - one of the most prominent Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century - famously made the case that the Nazi holocaust was an outgrowth of European imperialism in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

It's worth pointing out that the one of the main rationales of Nazi imperialism was to create a living space in Europe in which to off-load Germany's surplus population. This had long been one of the main justifications for European colonialism, and the expropriation of Germany's colonies at Versailles made it look to Europe again to solve the problem. What are arguably the first two (imperial!) campaigns of the Second World War - Japan's invasion of Manchuria, Italy's invasion of Ethiopia - were both justified as means of creating outlets for their soaring surplus populations. Both of them faced profoundly racist immigration restrictions in the main destinations of migration, namely the United States and Australia.
The layoffs themselves show that Mitchell Baker is a leader. Layoffs are by far the hardest thing for a CEO to do. Assessing the reality of their market position, examining their future opportunities and revenue streams, and positioning the company to still be around in 10 years sometimes means deciding that the people you have currently aren’t the people you need to ultimately be successful and stay in business.

You should never give a CEO a pay cut for doing their job and making the hard decisions to help keep the company in the black.
> It only took us 15 years of being flamed every time you pointed out you didn't like Javascript

I don't think that has ever been an unreasonable reaction. Nor is it all that unique: if you want to do iOS development in something other than Objective C or Swift then the iOS dev community is going to tell you that you're making a mistake. And they're often right.

I've used Rust. I like Rust a lot. But one thing I don't see mentioned in this article at all: "debugger". Or "inspector". The web development stack has some incredible tools to aid in development, debug code, memory usage, etc. etc. Can you still use them with this single page app? If not, what strength is Rust bringing here that you can't achieve with the standard web dev stack?
I recall in the early days of mobile apps downloading an ipad app which had this neat idea that kids could share their drawings, made in the app, with each other in a sort of random way. It did not take long for me to realize that meant seeing an endless stream of inappropriate, or sometimes potentially harmful content (e.g. from adults interested in exploiting children).
Isn't most wealth hoarded in non-currency investments? How might this effect those?
> Civilization emerged around settled agriculture, not to wage war.

The point of central agriculture was to produce more bodies, to wage war, if you're to believe the argument in the Origins of Political History, and I do. This necessitated bureaucracy, hence Civilization.

> Arguably this was a movement away from violence, as compared to nomadic tribes constantly competing over hunting and foraging territories.

Well we have a cleaner record of the violence after that point in History, the scale for which got more brutal and concentrated over time. When your population is small, territories over the globe are vast and plentiful; I fail to see an angle where centralization was necessitated for peace, as opposed to conquest.

> How exactly do we “calibrate our compasses” without reference to our past?

To be clear: it's not a question of reference, as the past shaped and developed the morals you and I have today. Though judging it broadly in a detached sense, through our morals, renders most of our past evil, which is banal. It's not a person. Looking to the past can help identify and inform what we deem to be wrong today, which is different than saying the past is evil.

What we take for granted here is consequentialism, which is retrospective. Leading up to WW1, war was widely romanticized and considered virtuous and even the upper classmen partook (see: the War That Ended Peace), likened to skirmishes that ended fairly quickly, and of course it was a different animal by then, war was hellish once more. Colonialism in concept was not considered wrong, though perhaps consequences as a result (e.g. atrocities) would not have been considered good if you quizzed the average person. When we judge colonialism, we largely judge the consequence such that atrocities are unjustifiable no matter the other benefits. Sure. But I say to you: that's all of History, that's all of what led us here today, that led us to be "enlightened" (to be "good" as we understand it to mean today) and type on computers. We'll shift our course to avoid the bad stuff, and I'm sure in the future looking back we'll find evils.
With no clear rules set around the issue I don't trust the president to do random judging.
Oftentimes it is better to make code that is easily copy pasted/edited later than to make reusable code IMO.

I think knuth was the first time I heard of reeditable.

For example I had to recently write some code to center a form shown as a dialog based on the overlying window. Because we use a MDI. I had to take into account local to screenspace coordinates.

Once it was a usercontrol embedded in a form, once just a form and once the top window, etc. All of those needed just tiny adjustments, while rolling it into one function would be MUCH more cumbersome.
> Work on the bloody browser, forget about the rest.

Perhaps what they mean is "nobody is paying for the browser (except Google, our arch-nemesis) we need to build things people will pay for"
Ask HN: Buidling a Producthunt.com alternative. Any tips on how to improve?
Refactoring is the design phase in an agile process.

The old way, inspired by bridge building, I guess, was to first thing out a great design for your software, and then implement it.

This turns out to not work because, unlike bridges, software is always changing and needs new features.

So in agile, you just write the simplest thing that can possibly work to solve your next task. Then, when things work, you refactor the code to have a good design.

Designing something after it's built is a mind bending concept, but it's made possible by what we make being just text in files, not set in stone.
There are third-world sweatshops that solve capchas for a fraction of a penny. I imagine they provide an API, so your bot makes an http call and gets a solution back.
Careers in Academia vs. Industry: A Clash of Two Value Systems
You can't by Mozilla. It's a non-profit. There are no shares.
In fact you can, it's been this way for over two decades. W3C has been working on CSS and SVG print for that long expressly for cross-media print rendering needs.
At a startup, there's a good chance Fred's time would be better spent knocking out feature work (you only have so much runway, after all). But at a mature tech company, assuming he's good at his job, Fred is likely providing a ton of value by

- Keeping his coworkers sane (barely functional codebases that are difficult to work with have a way of killing morale)
- Having an intimate knowledge of the code base that can inform future feature work
- Paying down tech debt that's generally uninteresting to more feature-oriented coworkers

Having a whole team of Freds is probably not a good idea, but having one in a senior engineer or tech lead role is really useful.
exactly. it’s not so much craven as it is purely capitalistic. one should not be surprised. i think it’s fine. i welcome it even. it’s better to be beholden to capital than to the political whims of the day. (not in general, just for an industry that has such power)
Missing Cryptoqueen: Why did the FCA drop its warning about the OneCoin scam?
There's Mozilla Foundation and there's Mozilla Corporation (the corporation is a subsidiary of the foundation). For Mozilla Corporation:

> In CY 2018, Mozilla Corporation generated $435.702 million from royalties, subscriptions and advertising revenue compared to $542 million in CY 2017.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2018/ (I couldn't find a more up-to-date annual report)

For Mozilla Foundation:

> The Mozilla Foundation is funded by donations and 2% of annual net revenues from the Mozilla Corporation, amounting to over US$8.3 million in 2016.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Foundation#Financing
We could as well have used VirtualBox instead to sandbox applications on the web, and run them at near-native speed. No need for LLVM and WASM. The only thing needed would be to incorporate VirtualBox into the browser.
Startup Podcasts for Founders in 2020
I've been using windows for decades without antivirus software, and have never seen a virus on my system.
Protip:
Thoroughly vet the providers of any software you use, and do not open spam email.
waiting for a rails like framework that would let me use only one language full-stack.
Ask HN: Laptop for Programming?
I want to buy a new laptop for coding, creating content and editing video. Budget is less than $1000.

Please suggest me some good cheap laptop options. I am open to buy desktop also if it is cheaper.
> The Linux kernel is most certainly not a community of volunteers.

This depends on the definition of community. While most of the developers are paid for their time. Someone voluntarily contributes this developer time to the kernel.

Now you could argue that the companies don't do this voluntarily but are driven by market forces etc.

On the other hand, these companies could just ignore the the Linux Environment; and some companies do this.
Apparently, that wasn't sufficient.