skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If all of a sudden, say, 50% of the people having children now, in developed countries, would decide to not have children, we'd probably have societal collapse. That's what happened in societies where the population went down by huge percentages in a short time span. Housing markets would collapse, education systems would collapse, healthcare systems would collapse, demand for a million types of things needed by babies and children would collapse (and taking with it many, many professions), etc.

Yes, and? Understand that a housing market "collapsing" means the price of housing becomes substantially more affordable. Same with education. This is a huge part of why Europe is able to subsidize its education so heavily on a per-student basis. The share of the population that is enrolled in university in Germany is about half the share of the US enrolled in university in the US (at least, pre-COVID).

Reduction in demand results in diminished GDP which freaks out economists, but it doesn't result in a decline in GDP per capita. There are fewer people producing, but there are also fewer mouths to feed.
I'll allow that American prisons leave a lot to be desired but comparison to the Xinjiang camps is really quite inappropriate. Labor in American prisons is paid, optional, and conducted safely, while the Chinese camps are actively working to destroy a minority's cultural heritage through torture, rape, ideological brainwashing, organ harvesting, arbitrary imprisonment without a trial, forced relocation, forced sterilization, destruction and confiscation of property, and extreme levels of surveillance.
From the article

> Mobile page weight increased by 337% between 2013 and 2020

that is a huge span of time, with the birth and death of stars in-between in the Web Development cosmos. So much has changed in Web Dev, especially for mobile.

The issue is not the Web getting slower. It's with the developers and their companies focusing on the time to iterate. We have traded consumer convenience for speed to develop and using shiny new tech/methodologies.

We have traded doing things server-side to having most things in an SPA; using tracking pixels and Google Analytics to now also incorporating New Relic, Optimizely, a host of CDNs, bot protection scripts, social media scripts for "better personalisation", CAPTCHAs.

I feel we are moving backwards. Back to when developers used ActiveX plugins because it was more convenient for them. Only ActiveX is now a combination of "Javascript in the browser, and a powerful enough laptop to handle it without choking".
Ask HN: Anyone made a USB driver for Mac OS 9?
I have a "Wallstreet" G3 Powerbook with a broken audio circuit (I can hear very faint, muffled audio when plugging in external speakers, so I guess there is a blown cap or IC in the amplifier).

I have tried plugging in a (modern) cheap USB audio dongle (the Wallstreet was the first powerbook with USB ports). It shows up as a USB device in the OS 9 system profiler but it won't make any sound. So I was thinking I would try and write my own driver extension for OS 9. I mostly only care about audio output.

Are there any old school classic/PPC Mac developers who have attempted such a thing? What am I getting myself into?

Are there any examples out there of open source OS 9 USB drivers (of any kind)?
Big difference between Napster and Spotify.

No gatekeepers with P2P. It is like two friends lending each other LPs, tapes, or CDs. That is how "long tail" music used to spread, pre-Internet
I strongly disagree. If you miss one meaningful vulnerability (SQL injection seems to be a known issue) and a bad actor takes a crack at it, you've suddenly leaked the PII for hundreds or thousands of individuals. "Limited to recruiters" is easy to say in the abstract—if you're the sort of person who's building off of a piece of software written in "old PHP" that hasn't seen many (any?) meaningful updates in the last decade, you're probably not the sort of person who is up-to-snuff on the right way to secure the application.
Remove an Exclamation Mark from the End of String Using Python
My parents got their first computer in the 90s so my mom could do freelance work editing medical texts on nights and weekends after her day job. She used Word Perfect and she taught me to type with it, I still remember the exact shade of blue and the white text. She’d use Reveal Codes and I thought all the special characters were so cool. I can still picture her sitting at the desk working on it while I’d play video games. I was maybe 7 or 8 years old. They’re vivid memories that are kind of meaningful that I haven’t thought about in decades, tied directly to that application. Weird how that works.
Rufus is great, but Windows only.
Something I find interesting is whether the better layout for a large store complex is an island of shops surrounded by car parking, or a donut of shops (with street frontage and displays) with interior parking.

Former provides a quick view of accessible parking and minimises in-mall walking whereas the latter means stores can promote their wares to passing cars more easily.

A couple of recent big box store builds in Australia I've noticed (Bunnings in SA) are one-brand warehouses built on top of a single storey of car parking. Once in the store and even in the outdoor garden centre, it feels identical to older ground level stores. More compact footprint, car parking is protected from the elements, and the store has a branded facade on the street.
There's a pretty big contigent of people in the USA who claim that any sort of sanctions against China are "sinking to their level" and will just hurt the poor factory employees, or that it's just Trump being racist and making up political reasons to hurt Chinese people.
The modeRNA vaccine is an mRNA vaccine, a completely new type of vaccine. While theoreticall less likely to have adverse effects, it did have adverse effects, and its efficacy remains a question. These are completely new types of vaccine, that presumably would need even more testing than the relatively well understood attenuated viruses.
Yeah, I agree. I think the use cases weren't substantial enough so people just didn't use it enough to justify subscriptions in most cases. This means high customer churn, especially if they were selling to customers based on strength of their name (which I think they were, to digital marketers who conned themselves into believe it was a product they needed). They received funding from a PE firm (Insight Partners) who were probably eager to get a return.
“A bad COVID vaccine (one that doesn't work), or heaven help us, one that causes harm, could set public healthcare back decades.”

I see this a lot (and am not jumping on you), do you mind explaining why you feel this way? To me one of the few things that could restore my faith in public health after how this pandemic has been handled is allowing widespread early access to the vaccine with full access to whatever data has been gathered. In flight is fine.

This “hur dur the masses can’t be trusted to make their own decisions” shit has got to stop. It has become clear public health in the US is more politics than health so any sort of management on an individual level gets zero trust from me.
Nothing beats a high quality FAQ with ctrl+f searching shortcuts. Loads instantly, can be downloaded offline, etc. Now every game has its own wikia instead and you have to wade through garbage to find the info you are looking for.
Vaccine progress is of enormous practical consequence. Effective reporting of material information can move markets, and that means it's useful for efficient capital allocation.

Of course, there's diminishing returns and problems with many kinds of noise, and AstraZenica isn't strongly interested in marginal efficiencies in the broader market.
I dealt the Progress from about 2003 to 2008 or so. They were an absolute horrible company to work with and essentially held us hostage on an old platform because we refused to pay an exorbitant "platform change fee". And by exorbitant, I mean HUGE. Fortunately, we sponsored an open source OpenEdge ABL and DB replacement project (FWD - https://www.beyondabl.com) and have been running our converted project very successfully since 2009. We went from OpenEdge / Progress DB to Java / PostgreSQL in an automated way. For anyone else held hostage by Progress Software because of your reliance on Progress 4GL (OpenEdge ABL) I encourage you to take a look.

Perhaps the company itself has improved since then. I certainly (for Chef's sake) hope so.
> “...the closer graphics approach reality, and the more details their are, your brain begins to filter out those details, and notices the flaws”

This is often called the uncanny valley:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley
>But, we are in a pandemic now. So the rest of your argument is moot.

Firm disagreement, change the word pandemic with cancer diagnosis, it's the same problem from the parent point of view. My point is, when, exactly, should the company be going above and beyond for you if it isn't spelled out in your contract?

> Sure, maybe a broken leg, or mono, or some other health issue could force the child to be home for a while. But not all schools close suddenly, and all other childcare options as well.

What about summer, schools close for months at a time. I understand what you are saying though, for the record, I'm not saying this is an easy situation. The reality though, like all catastrophe, there is going to be a bit of chaos and headache finding methods to resume 'normal' life.

> and all other childcare options as well.
It's an absurd notion to say that _all_ other options closed, maybe businesses are but this isn't the only option.

> What would planning for that look like exactly?
With first hand experience, it's quite straightforward. Parent coordination work hours, family members take care watching the younger members, close friends/neighbors pick up slack from the line. I guarantee you that there is someone out their willing to watch your kids for a few hours a day if you look hard enough.
> We already heavily subsidise child-rearing through taxes and other benefits.

The US and most other Western countries run huge budget deficits at essentially zero interest costs. This is only possible because creditors have full faith in the ability of future tax payers to meet debt obligations.

In light of that, I’d say the overall balance is that those with children are massively subsidizing the childless.
> The frontend dev using half of the React ecosystem on a static site + simple form is to blame.

I once saw a website that took a full minute to load, and it was literally a page with images, text overflowing around it, and then some download links. But the way it was built... my god, the way it was built.

That company brought in a new "CTO", and his solution was to dump the entire thing in google cloud. I shit you not, this CTO initially installed an EOL version of PHP, and when errors started happening, he started submitting PR's to revert the PHP code to be compatible with the EOL version of PHP.

Dumpster Fire.
You don't need to hack anything. This is from Tesla's Privacy Policy;

> For Vehicles other than Roadster, you may opt‐out from our automatic collection of
Telematics Log Data by sending a written request to Tesla or by adjusting the privacy settings
through the touchscreen of your Vehicle, if such functionality is available and has been
enabled on your Vehicle. If you opt‐out from collection of such Vehicle data, please note that
we will not notify you of issues applicable to your Vehicle in real‐time and this may result in
your Vehicle suffering from reduced functionality, serious damage or inoperability.

> You may also opt‐out from transmission of any data between your Vehicle and Tesla as
follows: (a) for Roadster, by switching off the modem in your Vehicle, or (b) for other
Vehicles, by sending a written request to Tesla pursuant to Section 11. If you exercise this
opt‐out, please note that we will be unable to notify you of issues applicable to your Vehicle
in real‐time and this may result in your Vehicle suffering from reduced functionality, serious
damage or inoperability and it may also disable many features of your Vehicle, including
periodic software and firmware updates, remote services, interactivity with mobile applications,
and in‐car features such as navigation and location search, Internet radio, voice commands and
web browser functionality.

Alternatively, you can remain fully plugged into their cloud services, get all the latest software updates, and that could come with new notifications in the UI that third-party modifications have been detected which could damage the vehicle.
maybe we re more likely to find a cure rather than vaccine. most epidemiologists think a vaccine won't even be possible considering past experience with coronaviruses
They also know how to ship cocaine in CIA aircraft and have US soldiers defend poppy fields to pay for illegal wars and black ops too.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/drug-war-american-troops-are-p...
All medicines were new at some point in time.

Your anti-vax fear mongering doesn't belong here.
An old colleague of mine in the 90's used to say "Software is like a gas. It expands to fill available space."

The behaviour of desktop software developers in 1990's was a prelude to web frontend and app developers today. As the resource capacity of PC's increased through the 90's, software developers grabbed it for themselves; for the end user, the experience of using the software never got any faster.

As the storage, processing power and network speeds have increased, web frontend and app developers seem to have grabbed it for themselves as well; the end user experience has generally not gotten faster (if the user follows the instructions: use popular, Javascript-enabled browser, enable images, video).

In the 1990's, users were asked to upgrade their computers so they could run the new, larger but not experientally faster, desktop software. Today, we see the same sort of OS and device upgrades; "unsupported" versions of software that will not run on newer version of the OS. Plus we have a culture of allowing automatic, remotely-controlled installation of new software. Automatic upgrades. Telemetry. "Field testing" of new features. A sizeable amount of user choice and necessity for user consent has been successfully eliminated.

The number of outgoing TCP connections made by today's average websites, usually triggered through cascades of Javascript files, is simply staggering. It would never have been acceptable to do that with the networks and server software of the 1990's and 2000's. Users were not involved in the decision of developers to grab the newly available network resources and CPU for themselves.

I do not use a popular browser for most web use. This allows me to only make a single TCP connection to a website when I access it and can retrieve dozens or hundreds of pages over a single connection, thanks to old, standard features of the web documented in RFCs (pipelining). It is very fast and efficient. For me, the web has gotten much faster, but only because I choose the software and I decide whether and when to upgrade. It is my computer, after all. I am not really impressed by the popular browsers of today because it does not feel at all like the user is in control. Users of these programs have been reduced to guinea pigs.
Predicting pugnacity: How to forecast armies’ will to fight
> - given this benefits a tiny fraction of people in the US, why doesn’t a particular party/politician take a stand on it as a policy to win a chunk of votes?

Because national politics in the U.S. in 2020 is big business. It's not about votes or public policy, it's about redirecting funds to party coffers, paid consultants, and ideally the office-holders themselves (or at least their advisors, family and friends).
What is going on here? Why have none of the commenters read the article? Perhaps because it's phrased as a question and people didn't realize it's a link?

Anyways, this matches my expectations--people tend to be overly negative and only remember the good part. The mobile web as a whole has gotten faster due to network speeds+cpu improvements.

It is worth noting that pages are doing more after loading now than they used to be though. This won't show up in onload or first meaningful paint, etc. So the first paint is fast, but then if you try to scroll immediately afterwards you'll probably hit some jankyness while the rest of the page loads asynchronously (but only kind of asynchronously since there's a single main thread).

Some other things that could cause the regression are that more people own a budget Android phone now than before. People may not realize how slow these phones are. The single core performance of the top budget phone, the Samsung A50, is comparable to an iPhone 6 which came out in 2015.
"E" can also be a surname or given name in Chinese. It's pronounced like "uh" in English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(surname)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cai_E
I think it is partly due to the software development industries prioritisation of “developer speed”/“developer experience” over everything else.
Based on your tone, it sure sounds like you care what they think.
> Others bring up the very valid point of right to repair—but does that also include right to modify?

Yes.
macOS's man page says "The stpcpy() function first appeared in FreeBSD 4.4". I believe FreeBSD 4.4 was released in September 2001. So that's approximately 7 years before it was added to POSIX. Given that timeframe, it seems unlikely that POSIX has much to do with its presence in FreeBSD. A much more likely explanation is to ease porting of GNU projects (and software developed on Linux) to FreeBSD.

From checking opensource.apple.com, I conclude that OS X added it in 10.3, released in 2003, so that's around 5 years before POSIX 2008. Again, given the timeframe, it seems hard to argue that POSIX triggered Apple's action here.

Given Linux, FreeBSD and Darwin all already supported it, I wonder to what extent NetBSD/OpenBSD's decision was motivated by formal POSIX conformance versus improving compatibility with Linux/FreeBSD/Apple. It is hard to say, but I think the later was likely just as important as the former, and given the importance of the later, they might still have added it even if it had never formally made it into POSIX.
My experience is that it's just as relevant today.

I had a front-end developer come in and add node, bootstrap, and SCSS as a dependency to a very simple app. We went from having a super simple build chain to one that now needed maintenance. And part of his argument? he "thought better" in SCSS.

People have zero respect for the risk of dependencies, complicating the buildchain, or long term maintenance.
As one of the developers on this, and the first game that I worked on, it made me smile to hear that you and others liked it. I’m glad it brought you good times, even if it took 25 years to find out!
Safe Ubuntu NordVPN aliases for preventing connection errors (useful for bashrc)
It’s disingenuous to call it “the Moderna mRNA vaccine” when it was more accurately “one early Moderna mRNA vaccine candidate, which was ruled out for being far too high of a dose”.
If this is real, an update may be in order:

"Suite for Twelfth Night, for piano (1949; MS lost)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_compositions_by_Glenn_...
100% with you there.

I personally think it's a bit insane to add node.js as a dependency to a simple PHP project.
One hypothesis I saw months ago from a techtuber channel was that the cheaper model will support a game streaming subscription business down the line, making the hardware itself mostly a content delivery box. If true, cheap hardware with a cheap subscription will upend the existing console biz models.

That specific idea works to the extent that streaming games over the internet pans out(so far, countless overhyped failures). But a version of the plan where devs are given two SKU targets up-front would in fact be an evolution of how the last generation played out, where a mid-generation refresh happened and turned out not to be a complete waste of time.

Being able to launch with price discrimination reflects on how gaming tech isn't moving all that quickly now. The graphics fidelity is still going up but in a controlled fashion: higher screen resolutions, bigger textures, heavier shaders. The biggest underlying technical change of the coming generation is an emphasis on fast SSDs, and even a $299 SKU can have one of those.
>refused to go on lockdown on time
Not sure if there was a definitive understanding when it was on time. As far as I remember, lockdown in Moscow started on March 23.
I remember that the FAT filesystem had a limit of 8 characters for filenames, so you had to be creative with document names.

I do not remember ever having problems with WordPerfect or Quattro Pro. The only friction I experienced was with the dot matrix printer I used at that time.

I remember WordPerfect 6 having a mouse enabled GUI mode in DOS, as well as the text UI.
Problems Investors Cause in Startups
Feels to me like right now/this last decade is a golden era as well. Factorio, rimworld, binding of Isaac, dark souls + sekiro, xcom, civ 6, Divinity, paradox games, Minecraft, subnautica, rocket league. To name a few of my favorites.
How to Read Fewer Books
> http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/links.html#obtain

Looks like they deleted the file ... now 404 not found...
Naniar, tidy ways to summarise, visualise, and manipulate missing data
Not sure it can be misrepresented when it's right there above the reply to it.
What you've got there is majoritarianism not strictly democracy.

We should hope that a democracy would consider not only whether there are more in favour than against but also other factors.

For example. Suppose there are two rabbits and three foxes and the question is what's for dinner? Majoritarianism suggests that the foxes can vote "Rabbit" and then eat the rabbits, all is fair. But I think we'd want our democracies to consider that there is an outsize cost to this choice compared to the 40% vote for "Fresh fruit and vegetables" from the rabbits. [A fox isn't an obligate carnivore, its digestive system is perfectly capable of obtaining nutrients from a meal of fruit and vegetables, although rabbit is delicious].
The 'donut' is also much more welcoming and safe for pedestrian traffic, who don't have to cross the parking lot twice to get to the post office/Starbucks/etc.
7 years isn't even close to a "huge span of time".
As someone who has lived in Calgary, I'd chuckle if anyone claimed to be a maverick or rugged for living there. It's a city of over 1M, which puts it in the top 5 cities in Canada by population. And it's relatively wealthy.

That's like someone from New York moving to Denver and claiming they're rugged individualists.
It's much rarer to see $_SESSION or $_COOKIE nowadays. Most frameworks have session libraries that have some validation checks built in, handle csrf/flash messages and easily plug into backends (being able to have sessions use redis, etc in 2-3 lines of config makes session handling soooo much easier. And you're less likely to run out of disk space :P).

The main issue with $_SESSION was that it is very easy to create a giant multidimensional array and have inconsistent logic creating fields. Another advantage is to bring the session variable in line with that of other languages so that devs switching languages won't be WTF as often
I've also messed around with browser video editing. WebRecorder's poor browser support (h264 only available on chrome) is one thing, but only being able to encode in real-time is just too frustrating, with frame drops and forcing the user to play back the entire vid. Have you tried any of the ffmpeg wasm ports floating around?
One person, maybe two weeks to build it. Not sure yet on maintenance. But certainly not $100k.