skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
i tend to flag and move on, but i'm making an exception to note that simplistic, identity-based tropes like this are so damaging to real discussion and should be flagged and ignored because the post was not made in good faith (in short, it's a troll).

gdp (national wealth) is a made-up metric, it's aggregate, it's dynamic, incomplete relative to its stated rationale for existence, inapplicable to the discussion, and a whole host of other irrelevances to a real understanding of wealth and its distortions.
I think giving others the chance to create competition would even the playing field.

If you look at what these larger companies do, they embrace complex regulations.

Individuals and smaller businesses with innovative ideas cannot enter the marketplace because these complex regulations act as barriers to entry.
What magic would enable that? I don't think the VM is likely to cache a string of 6 spaces, it has no way of knowing that would be a common parameter, and no heuristic to determine that it's likely.

It may specialize or inline, but that's a separate matter.

P.S. I think there's a bug here.
I would agree that the persona they're projecting tends to align with your last sentence.
I knew which video it would be before clicking... But to your point they're often not really "store-bought" bricks though. More like bricks someone was giving away on the side of the road, you're free to use them to build your house but with no guarantees they work and the instructions are missing or incomplete. Oh and they're the wrong shaped brick but you only figure that out later.
> he gave away all his wealth, which would be about $60 to every household in the world.

No one is asking for such naive approach to redistribute wealth.

It's to find better ways to utilize the wealth, which Bill himself would also agree in principle.

What exactly the format requires discussion. But the first step is to allow such discussion to happen. And we are sure that a lot of the world people are not believing the meaningfulness of such discussion...

And that's a big problem.
That is a hypothesis that may be true in some cases. In other cases it may be better to have two redundant engineers at 150K than one at 500k.

The idea that there is a single solution is absurd.
AFAIK it’s a stock grant with a vesting (going to assume 3 year, 1 year cliff) period. So after 4 years at BigCo I own $200k in BigCo stock.

I agree, options would worthless. They only seem valuable for startups where you’re paying pennies against the potential of a $10/share IPO.
But you do trust search from Google?

If Google decides that it wants the Libertarian party to supplant the Republican party, and begins aggressively tailoring results to that end, what consequences are there? Why wouldn't they do that if they could get away with it? We didn't elect google executives, we have no recourse beyond political theater like the recent congressional hearings.
Haha. But yes, maybe, even if it's sad to see the US government at the level of a 6 year old.

Well there's 45 days to lobby. Apple will be inconvenienced even by Americans with Chinese background and iphones. A large chunk of them switching to rooted Android versions will not be good news to Apple (or Google, for that matter.) And I think they will, seeing how dependent many are on weChat.
Well, one special edge-case would be where you only need to parse some extremely tiny subset of JSON (for example: you only need to parse dictionaries whose keys and values are positive integers, like {1:2,3:4}). Then, depending how expensive the full json parser is, it might be worth your while just writing the limited parser yourself.

Of course, you might say, inevitably feature-creep will expand the list of things your parser needs to parse, but that's not a law of physics. Sometimes in certain limited, well-defined projects, it really is true that YAGNI.
But I keep hearing billionaires wield the power to do whatever they want.

Bloomberg couldn’t even get his parties nomination.

I guess billions doesn’t get you that much power.
Wages are a bad metric because they exclude various non-wage compensation, tax transfers, etc. Consumption is a more direct measurement of whether things are getting better. It’s also better because it naturally excludes the super wealthy that making a bunch of paper income from the growth of equity value, but it actually consuming proportionally to that increased wealth. The idea being that I don’t really care about how much Bezos’s stock is worth except insofar as it impairs my own ability to buy stuff.

Inflation adjustments are tricky because it’s not really obvious how to measure inflation. But even adjusted for CPI inflation personal consumption expenditures have been steadily increasing in the 20th century: https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/series?seid=A794RX0Q048SBEA
I don’t think it is quite that bad.

As I understand from their site, while you can trade euros for the local currency at a rate of 1:1, you cannot trade your local currency for euros.

They have a FAQ [0] (in French, sorry) that states that the national financial autorities do not allow for you to exchange your local currency for euros. What’s more, if you pay for something in the local currency you cannot receive change in euros - the vendor needs to give you change in the local currency, too.

It sort of seems like once you ‘buy’ your local currency, you can spend it but you can never trade it for euros again. The peg of the currency to the euro 1:1 seems to be convenient more than a tax dodge, but I have never used it personally.

[0]: http://www.lagonette.org/utiliser/
> Except that, in this analogy, you're a carpenter.

Alright, and if you're a junior carpenter, are you going to be tasked with chopping down the perfect trees and whittling those down into the perfect legs and tabletops from which you will assemble your perfect end tables? Probably not; you're almost certainly gonna start off by, at most, going to your local hardware store, buying whatever shitty wood they've got, and putting that together into something that might look god-awful but at least functions approximately like an end table. Only after you've gotten good at building end tables with off-the-shelf wood are you likely going to have the requisite understanding of the limitations of said off-the-shelf wood to have any interest (let alone understanding) in going with custom wood.

Similar deal with software. If you're a junior programmer, yeah, you might be encouraged to develop your skills by developing libraries, if you're lucky, but in most shops you're probably gonna be tasked with, you know, actually delivering software, and that software will probably need to use existing libraries for expediency's sake. It's exactly why a hefty chunk of web development nowadays involves full-blown frameworks like Rails or Django (or even lighter-weight alternatives like Sinatra and Flask, respectively) instead of people hand-crafting HTTP request parsers / response generators and hooking 'em up to raw sockets.

"Store-bought" libraries, like store-bought wood, ain't perfect by any stretch. They still provide a reasonable starting point for getting a project done reasonably quickly instead of getting stuck in the weeds (literally) of growing your own trees.
And when you run into a bug or design problem in a dependency of a dependency of a dependency?

It often takes less time to write some code than to understand someone else's code.

Most programmers I've worked with get lost easily when jumping through layers of other people's code. I certainly do.

Solid, well tested dependencies that solve hard problems are worthwhile. But dependencies have a cost in debuggability and maintenance, so it's worth using them with care. And often, they aren't worth the time, when compared to writing a dozen lines of code.
That is because they are competitors, so this becomes an anti-trust case.

The scenario I'm talking about when you bring in a company as a partner. For example, we work with TCS and the contract states that we can't hire their employees and that TCS can't hire our employees, at least not to work within the partnership. We partnered with another company and as part of that contract we are transferring people them with the promise that we will not hire them back for a year or two depending on their position.
And then the developer switches jobs 1-3 years later to another FAANG or somewhere that pays in the FAANG range for $260-300k... seems like market rate to me
If Jeff pays his workers more money, his wealth accumulation will be slower and after a while he will have less wealth than he would have had if he had paid his workers more.

Also, if Jeff's workers have more wealth, they don't have to spend a lot of their disposable income on paying student loans or mortgages, and they will have more money to buy more stuff.
In a Rare Move, EA Shareholders Vote Against Compensation Package for Top Exec
> "No Russian"

Context: "a controversial level in the 2009 video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. In the level, the player can participate in a mass shooting at a Russian airport.".

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Russian
> a well known guy on SO wrote an answer that looks like a huge warning sign

For those who are in today's 10000, you might mean this piece of art:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...
Big discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24109565
While I agree that if you think it'll just take an afternoon, for the sake of this article it had better!

But conceding that charitable assumption to the article, I agree with its basic premise: dependencies cost a lot of time in diffuse, non-codey ways.

There are AAA dependencies you pull into every project, but most other dependencies require a good degree of due diligence, evaluation, risk, and their own long-term maintainance.

Its not that it always tips the scales all the way to 'roll your own', but
I think the cost of new dependencies is underrated.
Memoized Functions in Python
I agree with you.

We all too often forget the scope: requirements, developing, testing, to say the least.

My favorite example is NPM. While the author has a point, I tend to rely on the wisdom of the crowd. Sometimes there is a reason why a couple of million developers - in the case of NPM packages - seem to be lazy.

In my experience, we ended up copy/pasting and modifying some code and syncing it with the "superfluous" package. Good intentions, badly executed.

Leftpad was the right itch at the right time and people found better ways to deal with NPM. NPM got better after that, as well as native implementations.

Better cope with NPM than fight it, my 2 cents.
> They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME

I agree about the EME point, but for h.264 they did stand up and lost. I can remember h.264 not working in Firefox for a long time while it did work on Chrome. It probably cost them a lot of users, but at some point you have to stop and realize that you are harming yourself more than advancing the cause.
I'm sure there are lots of other engineering teams at Apple focused on security, build systems, developer tools, infrastructure, etc that the Safari/Webkit team relies on.

Then there are all the non-engineering functions like HR, marketing, etc.

Mozilla has to do all of that.
A lot of people refer to cancel culture this way, because they're bigots who don't like people pointing out that they're bigots (or fans of bigots who they don't like being called out as bigots).

However, there is another problem: a “dark side” of people being willing to call others out on their shit. Clickbait.

It's surprisingly easy to make it seem like arbitrary person X is an evil evil person, regardless of whether they actually are. If you're familiar with person X, you might be able to spot a lie… but being universally sceptical will protect you from legitimate call-outs as well as fake ones. The average person has no real way of knowing, even if it's occurred to them that they might need to check.

So, yeah: overall, I think this is probably a good thing. But it's set back the lives of some good people.

(There's a rather simple way to turn this around: remove guilt by association. It should be okay to defend cancelled people. Defending bad actions doesn't need to be okay, but if it's costless to lie / “bend the truth” for social media clicks and costly to rebut them… calling people out on their shit becomes a much less useful force for good.)
20 afternoon dependencies -> now you have month of work, more code to test (and write tests), more code to support in the future, more code to understand for new developer. Add edge cases which you are not aware of, you are screwed

my basic rule if dependency has small code base (<300-500 lines) I will copy/paste that chunk of code into repo and refer original repo (assuming LICENSE is appropriate)
nothing takes an afternoon of programming if it needs to be QA'd. At least this is not good advice for a company. Possibly for personal projects.
> So because a homeless person today has $1, can sleep under a bridge in a jacket they got from Goodwill rather than $0.05 like 50 years ago or sleeping under a tree possibly getting eaten by wolves, this means the world is positive sum?

I'm not entirely certain what you mean by this question. the homeless person could even be worse off today than they were fifty years ago, and the economy could simultaneously be positive-sum. suppose you have an economy with two people that each start with $100k. if after 10 years, one person has $500k and the other has nothing, this is a positive-sum game because the total gains exceed the total losses. positive sum does not imply that everyone, or even most people, will become wealthier over time.

> Standard of living has improved generally over time, but day by day the world is a zero-sum game.

if you pick an infinitesimally small window of time where nothing can be produced, then sure, I guess you could say any changes in wealth would have to be zero-sum (assuming you could somehow transfer wealth instantly). I don't really think this is a useful analysis though. over the course of a whole day, the economy could be positive, negative, or zero sum. it depends on how much total wealth was created and destroyed on that day. even in an hour, I could create something of value that didn't exist before, or an explosion could go off in a port causing billions of dollars worth of damage.
You know, the longer this pandemic goes on, and the more I see the pain, suffering, and hardships around the world, along with the richest companies in the world being able to stay afloat while small businesses are shuttering closed permanently...

Maybe old and immunocompromised people should just stay home period. Everyone else should just open up and deal with the consequences as they arise.
Historically, and currently, slave labor is used.

However, I believe I've stated more than just slave labor. It's a very relative thing, but it appears many people are certainly underpaid compared to the wealth they generate for the few. It's starting to feel like people in tech believe otherwise because they're compensated better than average and therefore might be "above it all". I think that's alarming and short-sighted.
Amazon scoping out J.C. Penney and Sears stores for fulfillment centers
If by catnip, you mean fundamental concepts that are routinely not understood, then yes.
Yeah agreed the iPod saved apple. I have 0 clue how everyone has this pre-iPhone amnesia.
This sounds like pre-mature optimization. If the library does what you need it to do, use it. If it becomes a problem later, then optimize it.

That last thing you want to do is spend a bunch of time reimplementing code when: 1) It may not matter at all, 2) You might miss important edge cases, or 3) You got everything right but you still have to maintain it forever.

If it's going to take you three days to integrate the library, maybe it's not such a good library, or maybe it's really complicated because there are a lot of edge cases. In that case, dig into the code and see if you can figure out what it's doing.

But if you think you can spend an afternoon rewriting a library that would take three days to integrate, there is a good chance you might be missing something important.
Found the NPM user.

Dependencies have costs:

- Dependencies break over time. They have a nonzero maintenance cost.

- They impose API boundaries on you that may not fit your existing data structures

- It's harder to change underlying bugs

- They might introduce security issues

Sure, use dependencies. But there's a reasonable position between "never write any code" and "never take on dependencies". Of which NPM is one of the only ecosystems being at one extreme.
Intellectual purity isn't good for the end user.
Firefox is faster than it was, but it's still the slowest browser. I've gotten literally 2x benchmark scores from Safari on the same hardware, and the subjective difference is large. Servo propelled FF from "unusable" to "worth the tradeoff" but they didn't have the resources to make it fast.
I'm glad you're doing that! Feel free to email me (mistergeorgespencer+HN@gmail.com) if it would be useful for you to hear more about my experience or for you to share some of what you're experiencing. I have an iCloud note with every shared symptom I see someone else describing on the web, and it's getting pretty huge -- and makes me super happy that other people have had the same experience.

I put off the diagnosis process for a year and regret it, but don't consider that a pressure for you to do it. If you have ADHD, one of the things you can't really know (in my experience) is the feeling of a balanced ability to focus and be productive. Feeling compelled to seek a diagnosis is a big step.

I had a lot of serious conversations with the doctor about the impact of medication, the causes of ADHD, potential neurotoxicity, neuronal elasticity, etc. before I committed to taking medication. Here if you want to talk!
Somehow here we assume a good programmer routinely makes errors in time estimation by an order of magnitude, yet conveniently forget cases when, say, a non-trivial GPL library is embedded as a dependency into a project, and customer is asking for code, and legal team runs with hairs on fire because company didn't plan to release the code...
Power users might do it, but most people don't.
> Are there any good resources to read up on for making sure accessibility is good in <canvas>

whatwg.org[1] is less than helpful when it comes to to describing how to make sure canvas elements are accessible; MDN[2] is a little more helpful. tl;dr: it's a lot of hard work.

I have found some relatively useful posts in various places (eg: [3]) for people (like me) who don't like being told not to do something. These articles generally date from around the mid 2010s but, given that there has been little development in the <canvas> world since then, their advice is still good today.

[1] whatwg - https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/canvas.html

[2] MDN - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Canvas_API/...

[3] - https://developer.paciellogroup.com/blog/2015/02/html5-canva... - including this link because post was updated in 2020
Surreal. Even the Servo team was disbanded. Mozilla Research effectively no longer exists. That alone says everything.

This is a dark day for the open web.
Ha! Systemic copyright infringement shouldn't be easy.
I think given the licensing model of Chromium, every major browser being Chromium-based† is still not really a Google monopoly on browsers, or even on browser engines.

† In practice, it's already true, given that Firefox is niche even on desktop.
Mozilla's ace up the sleeve, which I'm sure has been a temptation to them many times - and seems more and more inevitable the more they brand themselves as the privacy browser - is to make ublock origin a default and baked-in feature out of the box.

I see this as an if, not when situation. Google may pull funding immediately if they do so but the surge in users would be extreme, possibly forcing big G to reconsider or lose an ever increasing market share to Bing and DDG.
If the business can't turn a profit and pay engineers at the same time, of course they shouldn't survive, but I don't think that is what they were saying.

There are plenty of viable business solutions that don't require paying every engineer 500k+.
> This code checks for ch !== 0, yet the Number type in JS has no repeat method.

> Static typing would actually fix this kind of coding error.

That's not a coding error, that's addressing an oddity of JS coercion rules that a less experienced developer could easily have missed.

> if (!ch && ch !== 0) ch = ' '

That code says that if `ch` is falsey and not equal to 0, then set it to a space. The only arguable falsey value that should be excluded here is a literal `false`, but that's not a single character and is fairly ambiguous either way. I'd certainly fall on the side that a literal false should not be converted to `'false'` here.

> ch += '';

The next line converts to to a string by adding it to the empty string.

> return ch.repeat(len) + str;

So by the time it gets to this line we know ch is a string.

Static typing is great, but the bug you claim is there is not actually there.
obviously they must be thinking 6S=3(Ss) /s
I suggest HN to have a quick drop down list for down voting reasons, such that some form of thinking is applied while clicking the icon.
This is a bad rule and even worse advice.
How to create a sitemap and Robot txt correctly
Until you need TVs, refrigerators and anything that takes a nation to build rather than things a small community is capable of achieving.
With mobile native apps, there's no way that 99% of the internet is the web. Video accounts for 60% of total web traffic, and a good chunk of that is not through a web browser, I'd imagine.
Or make a comment necessary to downvote so hopefully there is an explanation. I have gotten downvotes and wonder why.
I have a very-soon-merging neutron star pair to sell to you.
For anyone worried about what will happen to Mozilla if Google decides they don't want to pay for being the default search engine in Firefox anymore. Their current arrangement is a lot of eggs in one basket.
> Additionally, the risk itself is fairly low. If it goes out of date or stops working or just turns out to suck, the most I risked is an afternoon of work.

Sometimes, the opportunity cost (time spent) is the largest term in the risk equation, but often there are other terms that might be orders of magnitude larger. For example, the risk of depending on the wrong abstraction, or becoming coupled to a hack.

What you're saying makes sense. My only point is that there's a lot more subtle judgment required in these decisions than often meets the eye.
Good point, their advantage has mainly been geographic distance based. Where being within X miles trumps being in the top 100 yoga instructors if you are looking to go to an in person lesson.

Virtual removes that advantage and now favors expertise over distance to instructor. Definitely moves more of the win to the top 1% in each skillset.

It's a big win if you are in that top quantile, but means if you aren't maybe find the thing you are top 1% of? Not sure...just seeds for thought
🧛 ️ Dark Wallpapers for Dracula
This, Microsoft helped out Apple financially in the 90's when they were being sued for being a monopoly. So this tactic isn't new.

Source: https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/08/06/august-6-1997----...
I will certainly be employing these methods, and doing manual verification at least initially- but if the project is successful, it will outrun my ability to manually verify everything.

Thanks.