skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, you've convinced me to go back to the doctor. I was on the cusp of taking one of the ADHD tests but my insurance couldn't tell me how much it would be and the doctor's office said they couldn't either. I was told it would be between $200 and $900 and couldn't afford the $900 risk. I ended up being billed $200 just for the initial visit of course.

But the longer I wait the more damage it's doing to my life. Out of your list I'd say 5/6 affect me, 5 being the odd one out as I can't sleep with anything but a fan on.

I'll be making my appointment today...well, probably tomorrow now. Let's hope I don't procrastinate.
> In what world is Rust a lower level language compared to JavaScript at this point?

The embedded one. Can't write bootloaders or kernels in JS. I mean, maybe you could but... why would you?

(On mobile here, bear with me if no newlines came through)
My strategy: Use dependencies, but don’t depend on them.
No problem. I was writing from my own experience, as well, so that's the first reason I immediately thought of.
While this seems largely factual, it's certainly not a generous interpretation.

I view Mozilla as a privacy leader in a very small market dominated by giants. Microsoft gets users for free thanks to Windows, Apple does the same twice as well thanks to iOS, Mac and the browser not being complete cancer. Chrome has Google and YouTube to drive its users, not to mention first mover advantage in the industry. What does Mozilla have to drive Firefox users? Nothing, it's not a tech giant.

The shear fact alone that they exist and can swing with the big boys is an unbelievable accomplishment in my book, certainly worthy of praise and a more nuanced interpretation of events. Privacy is their only angle as it's all that's left to them to compete. They're getting better and better and marketing this fact but that's also because the general population is getting more educated to the value of their data thanks to Snowdon and The Zuck.

To assert with confidence that they should have started charging users a subscription fee 6 years ago is ludicrous, you can't know that would have worked out. It still may not.

Additionally the VPN boom we've seen - and Mozilla is only now capitalizing on - is largely a symbiotic evolution which coincides with the rise of the streaming giants. e.g. The only reason my parents know what a VPN is, is because they want access to Netflix's US catalog which is far superior and geofenced.
> and I get an order of magnitude performance improvement

Have you heard the adage about premature optimization being the root of all evil? Yes, even with the second part. What is the premature optimization here, in your opinion?

Most of cases developers create something new - that's the state of industry now, not too good but it's how it is. If you'd be refactoring the existing code - sure, find the problem, design the solution, have reasons going from A to B. If, however, you're writing new functionality, you don't know if you'll have problems of this kind with this code - so optimize for developmentality. You can remove those excessive crutches later - if and when you need them. In my experience, having them trumps looking into code and spending time figuring what it does mere months later - your own code, that is.
This is actually a great example of why you SHOULDN'T use left pad.

I've not profiled it, but I'm going to guess that now-a-days this will be faster than the current implementation on npm.

function leftPad (str, len, ch) {
str += '';
len = len - str.length;
if (len <= 0) return str;
if (!ch && ch !== 0) ch = ' ';
ch += '';
return ch.repeat(len) + str;
}

Why? because the VM is (very likely) going to do exactly what the cache would have done. It can replace `ch.repeat(len) + str;` with a presized string allocation and a memcpy of ch + str characters.
And Colin isn't anything like that. At all. So aim that anger where it should be directed.
So true. Oftentimes I will look at the source of a simple ruby gem or node package and see that it is actually really just one single file, with 100 various .yml/spec/lint/test/cloud/coverage/cov/tox/blah landmines in the repo to confuse you. In those cases, I'll copy-paste the code with attribution back at the top of my source file.

The headache is not worth all of the pomp and circumstance for some of these tiny little tools.
I wouldn't consider a high number of open issues a problem on its own. All big popular projects with a history have a high number of open issues. There are some exceptions, who may be closing isses aggressvely, but it is more about a style of managing of those issues, not about project health.

Over time an issue tracker inevitably becomes a collection of hard-to-reproduce bugs, incomplete patches, underspecified feature requests, random tracebacks, etc. Maintainers can choose to just close everything which is not actionable immediately, or be in comfort with such issues, and let them live in the bug tracker. I personally like a style when an issue is closed only if it is fixed, or if it doesn't contain useful information, or if it is a duplicate.

A better indicator is activity and responsiveness of the maintainers in the issue tracker.
The 9/11 scare made everyone wary of airplanes but airport security so far has failed to catch mock explosives and weapons[1]. When they were tested again, they failed again[2]. They picked up their game when nothing less than a TV crew tried to repeat the experiment[3], but a whistleblower warned that flight security as of now is "hopelessly inadequate"[4] to prevent a second 9/11.

So, as far as security goes, they're not that good. For this mediocre protection, travelers pay in theft[5], sexual assault[6][7] and racism[8].

I think the goal of the TSA is noble and just, but as it functions right now, the system is broken. There is the potential for the TSA to protect the US from terrorists, but the truth is that terrorism targeting the West isn't that common in airplanes anymore. If the TSA cannot or will not be fixed, I'd say yes, the world is better off without the TSA. The price to pay for protection is too steep.

[1]: https://abcnews.go.com/US/exclusive-undercover-dhs-tests-fin...

[2]: https://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-...

[3]: https://fortune.com/2018/01/19/fake-bomb-newark-airport/

[4]: https://www.ocregister.com/2019/12/13/flight-security-hopele...

[5]: https://www.flyertalk.com/articles/the-tsa-stole-over-2-bill...

[6]: https://filtermag.org/tsa-sexual-assault/

[7]: https://www.denverpost.com/2020/02/24/tsa-agent-adams-county...

[8]: https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/tsa-employees-vent-...
But how have they done that?

We _do_ live in a democracy (well, a republic -- in the USA). The government/legislature does seem, to a large extent, to be beholden to the wants of the immensely wealthy, but that's only because the electorate at large won't hold their representatives accountable for that behavior.

Despite having more resources and more leisure time than has been possible throughout most of history, people don't stay informed, contemplate policy, engage in activism, interact with their legislators ...

The laws of human psychology may simply not afford people people enough agency for a large democracy to be fair and effective.
That's what I figure, I saw that Bevy does support UIs, which is how Godot makes their own UI, and how RPG In a Box[0] was born from Godot itself (I'm not affiliated with RPG In a Box nor Godot, just someone who is learning Godot). I think it's going to be wonderful to see a spawn of powerful and open source game engines in the coming years.

[0]: https://www.rpginabox.com/
On a second read I see what you mean. I didn’t make the connection between the comparisons of motivation where the amateur is motivated to “suffer” and the pro is motivated by something unspecified. The closest thing is when he says the pro “wanted to feel good and strong and the moment that stopped, he stopped.”

It probably would have been more charitable to point out the fact that the pro is probably motivated by continuing to pursue his livelihood instead of feeling “good and strong,” or even that feeling good and strong is required for his day job.

I also bristled a bit at the contrast of running as a professional sport versus an extreme test of body and mind. It seems to me that pro athletes are definitely engaged in an extreme test of body and mind, and likely moreso than the weekend warrior looking to suffer occasionally to escape the doldrums of modern work or whatever.
Thank you. This is the heart of the income-inequality debate and majority of those arguing are missing the point.
SSL stripping is more of a downgrade attack than a decryption. It relies on the fact that most website URLS are still http by default and the webservers just use an http to https redirect. If you can MITM the http request you can prevent the redirect and just present the HTTPs content through HTTP with all the MITM tampering you could ever want. It's the kind of attack HSTS is designed to try to prevent, but even that requires the victim visit the website once legitimately.
This is not good advice for these reasons:

- Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. -> It's gonna take longer than an afternoon. Always

- Opportunity cost: Your app needs to DO something, and spending time building dependencies steals quality from your core business proposition, even if it's a small (Haha: see previous point) dependency.

- While there are a ton of crap libraries out there, there are also a lot of good ones, which include hard lessons learned, about even simple tasks. You _could_ rewrite a very simple http client in an afternoon (telnet hostname 80\n GET / HTTP/1.0\n\n), but you'll probably have a ton of glaring flaws just waiting to bite you _badly_.
> Haha, this is what it looks like to cater to the privacy/security crowd. They have a picture of ideological purity. They don't actually use your product. Essentially if these were customers you'd want to fire them.

Precisely this, and it's been apparent for a long, long time. The lesson that organizations should learn from watching Mozilla's reception in tech circles is this: never, ever, ever market to power users; casual users are more numerous and less demanding. Chrome won the war a decade ago when it decided to focus aggressively on casual users, leaving Mozilla to deal with the fractious dregs of the power user market.
> Cherokee, a project which last stable release was 6 years ago

Its last CVE was 10 years ago[1].

It's not actually necessary for software to change if it already does what you want it to.

1: https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-1005...
I think you're focusing too much on the metaphor. The example the person above gave using LEDs is very good.

For the sake of simplicity, I'm just going to stick to the United States. As the previous commenter explained, the introduction of LEDs (along with cheap methods of manufacturing them) lead to much cheaper and more effective lighting. Undoubtedly there were companies and individuals that stood to profit quite a bit from these inventions. I don't know whether it helped create any billionaires, but certainly there are similar examples which have. On the other hand, although it created more wealth for those individuals, it created wealth for the entire country. Now every American has more money to spend because they don't have to spend as much money replacing their light bulbs.

In this case, the fact that some people gained much more wealth from this series of inventions is not a bad thing because everyone also benefited. In fact, the reason that inventions like this even come into existence is precisely because there is high reward for the individuals or companies doing so.

There are absolutely certain markets where things are much messier, but overall it's certainly not zero-sum. The issue is that many Americans do not have high enough wages or benefits to meet their family's needs. We should be working towards addressing poverty, not towards some moral tirade against billionaires.

Edit: I honestly can't express these concepts nearly as eloquently as xoa has in their comments, so I'd suggest referring to those.
They've grown too big to do the thing we all want them to (focus on a high-quality open source browser), because they don't need nearly as many people as they have to do that, but also can't cut 75+% (I suspect more like 90%) of their staff because it would be tantamount to suicide for the current organization and rebirth as a new one. They won't do that voluntarily.

If we're lucky the thing we want will be spun off of them before they wind down. Like, you know, how Firefox (Phoenix/Firebird) was born in the first place.
You're disregarding the negative examples. Free markets have been tried and failed in Argentina, Russia, and to various degrees everywhere in most former 'communist' countries - they quickly turned into cleptocracy and corruption. China showed that you can get very wealthy without rule of law and without liberal democracy, and with massive government intervention in the market (but not with a planned economy).

In my own country, free markets only started bringing prosperity after getting at least some semblance of liberal democracy and rule of law - before that, in the absence of a strong state, it was a very literal robber barons' paradise.
That almost never pans out because they all end up pinning different versions of the same library.
I think "don't use a dependency" is premature optimization anyway.
I, too, am even more confused than when this rebrand was announced.
Driving a car means operating a machine. Flying a plane is analogous to that. Being a passenger on an airplane is not analogous to driving a car.

Do you not have a right to be a passenger in a car? Does the government have a right to prohibit you from accepting rides from your friends, or paying a licensed cab driver?
Most Optional implementations are kinda terrible, though. They cost more than they save. If I have a function with a param and I release it with it required, but later I change it to be optional (loosening a requirement) does rust require everyone calling that function the old way to change their code? If so that not an improvement!
Nothing you cited are one percenter problem, they were branded as such to keep you from emotionally involved, which in turn might give you the mental strength to push for the right things to happen.

Any of these problems, can directly affect your children.

Let me tell you one example, my parents generation suffered much higher cancer rate than normal. That's caused by 40 years of rapid industrialization in China.

Think about it, these issues let limbo, will very likely make your retirement miserable in 20-30 years...
I guess my remark with 1000 years, while valid, could end up sidetracking us. My point is, countries like the UK, France, Germany, the US, besides having a militaristic side during their history, also brought us the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, all sorts of advancements in science and culture. Their progress was closely protected by their military force, but was not a result of the military force only. Russia on the other hand was always expansionist and belligerent. Sometimes the fortunes acquired via military conquest were reinvested in science, mathematics, technology, culture, but all these things followed, didn't lead. The Soviet Union built satellites, rockets, great jet fighters and world class tanks. Peace-oriented technologies, not so much.
I don't know. However I would guess it's because the main portion is a sphere and that's easy enough to show on the 96x64 pixel screen of the 83+ series calculators.
Taxes, as an instrument, are multiple orders of magnitude more precise than rate hikes. Whether it is implemented well or not is an implementation detail. As a matter of essence, taxation is more precise than control of the directive rate. It is possible to wield taxes in ways that create confusing effects, or in a clear, concise way.

As for what the Fed is supposed to do, in practice, the Fed does much more than simply control the amount of money. The responsibility of the Fed is to control monetary policy and to maintain the health of the economy by doing so. Which is why they have such an important role, right now, in preventing the complete collapse of the US economy.
I remember some complication with the elevators not working or homing properly at one place so we must have had an outage. it was probably at 3am, scheduled, and with incoming patients diverted. All our tests are and I’m in the electrical room so they all looks the same to me. An actual outage to vital loads would be done once and then you shut the door and walk away as there was never any question that it was going to work.

FYI where I’ve worked the tiers of loads are metered individually and picked up in order of priority and with a check to verify the combined capacity of the generators which are online is great enough to pick up the load. Likewise loads are shed in order if there isn’t enough generation such as one generator tripping.

I don’t really see that much difference between opening a breaker and bad quality power. It is the same sensing and logic in both cases: is the magnitude and frequency of the phase to phase voltages in the acceptable range or not?
"What they want is for Mozilla to solely focus on Firefox, on the technicalities, and shut up about everything else."

Yes, you have perfectly described what I want.

To be fair, I also want this from typical, corporate, for-profit entities ...
You actually do not own the capital until it vests, and the amount that vests (which could have greatly appreciated) is all taxed as income.
Depends how your dependency management system works. Some times it can take an afternoon or more just to integrate it into your build for c/c++
In Soviet Russia, if developer go to Netflix, developer get hit with bus.
Running seems like its own thing. I often suspect runners are doing a kind of public penance. Not as many CEOs or executives sailing, skiing, playing rugby, let alone power lifting or martial arts these days. If choice of sport is a reflection of the culture, I'd be interested in what it might mean that so many of the people we elevate have taken up running.
Computers are powerful enough these days to have multiple browsers installed and running simultaneously. One could have used Firefox for general browsing and just used Chrome for Netflix.
Exactly. I'm not reinventing the wheel. I may write some convenience wrapping around Spring Security, for instance, but why would I rewrite auth-z when it's a solved problem?
I’d argue that the engineers where successful and the management and company was not.

But for some reason managers never takes responsibility.
This code checks for ch !== 0, yet the bypass branch afterwards calls .repeat. The Number type in JS has no repeat method.

Static typing would actually fix this kind of coding error.
It’s a grant. You’re given $x value of stock (say $100k). It vests, meaning you can do with what you want, usually at 25% per year, often with a cliff at 1 year and then quarterly/monthly after that.

You may have restrictions on when you can sell depending on your position in the company and other rules.

But that mostly sums it up at a high level.
Though QR codes are very interesting technically, they were designed to be used by devices with orders of magnitude less computational power than is currently the norm, and much lower resolution optics as well. This is a good thing from an error-prevention perspective, but I wonder if a more modern QR code could be designed for today's smartphones.

I think an interesting new standard would take advantage of higher resolution cameras and OCR functionality to make data transparent to the consumer. I personally wonder what the hell is going to pop up on my phone every time I use a QR code... Text? URL? Link to an app store? Who knows. A standard which marks text as "data" would let a user know what they're saving, and let them point a camera in the general direction of some text, and all the relevant info be extracted and organized. (Think addresses, receipts, etc.) I already use my phone to remember lots of things - like I take a picture of the back of my DSL router for the access codes printed there, or take a picture of my bike tire to remember the size of the tube I need, etc.

Or if transparency isn't important, given we have 4K cameras now, imagine if there was a popular standard using steganography! I can imagine movie posters having showtimes, director and actor info, URLs for streaming it online, etc. all baked into the image.
About 20 years ago there was this optimism that Internet is this new unstoppable thing that will liberate the world to have free communication and knowledge sharing. Unfortunate that turned out to be such a false idea. Probably the infrastructure of it all simply wouldn't allow it...maybe that's what needs to change.
Speeding up Gov.uk with HTTP/2
Work is done to unify them https://reasonml.org/
Mozilla (or the CEO) wants to be a large profit driven corporations. Right now Mozilla makes its money by saying it's a privacy focused non-profit. These announcements are about saying they are the former without making it too obvious to those who like them for being the latter.
Yes, particularly when you know the types that will be passed in. True that typechecking in JS can be a little timeconsuming, so it might take 10-15 for me to write a general purpose left pad.

Also I seem to remember that someone benchmarked the cached version and found it to be slower than the naive approach anyway. I could be mistaken there.
It's good at old-school "websites". 0 support for modern web, aka "webapps".
No. Some reasons:

1) As everyone else has said, we are horrible at estimating.

2) We think we might only need 1% of an external dependency, until we do not. Case in point: By this criteria, no one needs a grid/datatable library.So we write it "in an afternoon". Then we're asked for an export to Excel. Later on we're asked for pagination with large data sets. And then an export to PDF. How many afternoons did that cost you?

3) Writing new code is an excellent opportunity to create new bugs and implement bad design because we're on hurry since it took nowhere near an afternoon of code to write and we cut corners.

Anyway, those are just three that come to mind immediately.

This is not an argument against the "afternoon rule", but is really an argument against making simple-sounding black and white rules to solve to problems that are inherently complex, and are thus, gray areas.
> you absolutely should use every dependency you can that will save you time

> Find a dependency that will save you an afternoon? Grab it.

Agree. The point of the article, though, is that dependencies are often saving much less time than they promise - so much less that it's better to avoid them.
I have seen it. I see non-violent protestors and I see violent protestors.

I have zero problem with the cops stopping violent protestors. That’s a basic function of government.
You just had your servers hacked into and all your database are belong to them. The black hats demand X number of BitCoins as ransom, but you cannot pay because it violates certain laws. So you hire an intermediary who pays for you, thereby avoiding the legal problem.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/4/21353842/garmin-ransomware...
In a SaaS world the value stream is broken up and delivered as appropriate. What does it mean for a project to be late if there is a value stream constantly being delivered?

Onboarding is a real thing but Brook's calculations are absurd by today's standards. 1 Month to onboard someone? We have developers committing code in their first week. Sometimes day 1 or 2.

Read McConnell's essay. It's v. good.
To put this into context, population of Belarus is below 9.5m: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/belarus-popul...