skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Protobufs is just yet another structured data serialization format. There's nothing special to it other than "it's not one of the others". It's a bad reinvention of the wheel though. That's why there's new and better things like flatbuffers. The most important thing to take away from protobufs is that in a field full of literature and prior art, one should not ignore it.
Or, the revenue model can support the culture.

For example, offering a paid product to explicitly avoid the monetization creep found in free products.
Ask Fallout fans what they think of Todd Howard and how he disrespected gamers through the launch of Fallout 76. Better yet see it in full comedic affect in an internet historian video [1].

[1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kjyeCdd-dl8
One issue I've seen is that a person who devotes 100% of their time to integration can lose their quantitative engineering skill -- it's a "use it or lose it" phenomenon. The folks who manage to cling to that work end up becoming the only ones who can do it, resulting in a sort of caste system with no relation to actual productivity.

However, in my experience, the best integrators are worth their weight in gold. It requires a mental organization, patience, and discipline that I don't possess. The ones who do it badly are the ones who are racking up dependencies and technical debt.
> You’re out ~$150 if you trigger it. Small price to pay for keeping a finger.

You can also trigger it if your wood is too wet. That was one of reasons given against using it everywhere.
I can't judge whether the actual programming there is fun, but I can't imagine an environment where bugs get exploited to the tune of tens of millions of dollars can be all that fun, and the entire field seems to be built on fraud, scams, and finding greater fools.

I suspect a nontrivial number of programmers in that field will find themselves making license plates or exploring harbors with concrete shoes a few years from now.
It's a laughable claim to say one developer has replaced 15, and obviously not true. The vast majority of code was business logic and still is.

Today's 'process' is no more efficient than, say, deploying rails to heroku in 2007. And even before that, you'd spend half a day writing an automatic deployment script, and then deployments would take a couple of clicks and you'd never think about it again.
He made $70 million already. What's the likelihood he keeps it?
A lot of people claim that this is reducing competition but the gaming industry seems to be much less consolidated than many others.
The favorite tech stack for bozotyping, React/GQL :p
IMO "the business" is the root of the problem. Businesses tend to put money before literally everything else, and thus we end up with the awfulness that is the modern social media for example.

No matter how visionary, proficient, and user-respecting you are as a developer, if you aren't complicit in earning all the money in the world at all costs, you're gonna get replaced by someone else who is.
That's what I was trying to say.
> I know this is just an anecdote and it might not necessarily be true today, but this experiment always sticks in my head. At least the guy used the scientific method: created a hypothesis, conducted the experiment, analyzed his results.

I don't need a research to see the difference in how much logging journalctl generates immediately after I disable port 22.
Greg Wilson has a couple of books on this:

- "How to Teach Programming (And Other Things)"[0]

- "Teaching Tech Together", newer edition of aforementioned book.[1]

These books delve into how to conduct lessons, what to concentrate on, what to optimize for, how to construct quizz questions with embedded diagnostic capability so you not only see who gets it wrong or right, but on which concept/part they get it wrong.

There is another book "How Learning Works" by Ambrose et al.[2]

[0]: https://third-bit.com/2017/05/31/how-to-teach-programming.ht...

[1]: http://teachtogether.tech/ [there are two versions, English and Spanish]

[2]: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/How+Learning+Works%3A+Seven+Rese...
> If you're releasing with the help of a publisher you're no longer independent.

Dear diary, I was today years old when I learned that Stardew Valley is not an indie game.

> What does it mean to be an indie game developer?

There's no hard-and-fast rule, but generally speaking it means the devs are not subordinate to the publisher.

There are games for which the publisher contracts a studio, therefore the publisher decides and has the last word, these are not indies.

There are others where the publisher provides funding and / or assistance (e.g. managing distribution channels), but doesn't take much or any active part in the development process. These are generally considered indie games.

There are also games which are entirely self-published. These are also, obviously, indie games.

Super Meat Boy, Shovel Knight, or The Witness are self-published indie games. Fez[0], Stardew, or Bastion are not (published respectively by Trapdoor, Chucklefish, and Warner).

Hell, World of Goo ultimately self-published because they didn't manage to convince a publisher, would that have made them "not indie"?

[0] literally one of the subjects of Indie Game: The Movie
Yes, you're probably right. I can only affect change on those around me that will listen. Fortunately since I'm "the computer guy" people do listen. But for most people it's just easier to buy cheap junk and replace it when it craps out.

Sometimes I blame greedy computer repair people of the 90's and early 2000's for this mess. I remember my friend opened up a repair shop (I helped weekends as a side gig). There were companies in our town charging OUTRAGEOUS prices for very easy repairs, and doing a really bad job. Then we would end up fixing the "repair" and then the original problem, which of course was always more than the original problem. It was really sad.

Now I live in a town with NO computer repair shops, and the closest thing is the Best Buy which is the KING of overcharging for repairs and doing a crappy job.

It's no wonder people just started buying cheap computers after being ripped off.

/rant
It's possible to listen to someone without believing everything that comes out of his/her mouth and doing whatever that person says.
That's a GC-centric definition of "memory leak" that was invented to make garbage collection a tractable problem.

Memory that is retained that will never be used regardless of input to the program is effectively a memory leak, regardless of whether you can get to it through some chain of references.
It would, because Amnesty International has a stronger voice than Craig Murray (the only one currently reporting on this). Craig is a meticulous reporter, but he's also prone to a number of strange conspiracy theories that diminish his credibility (people should be considering that separately from the Assange case, but human nature doesn't work that way).

There are a lot of things going on in that courtroom that should alarm journalists everywhere (especially American journalists), but without a strong voice to raise them out of their stupor, no journalist will pay enough attention to understand the new danger they face.
> Every single day this is posted there is a raft of comments that either use ad hominems to attack the source without addressing what it had to say or red herrings

Those comments are getting really tiring and it's disappointing to see this place accept ad hominems against the source over and over in those threads instead of actually discussing the trial.

Ofc complaining about comment quality isn't new, that's existed before I started coming here.

Hn does a pretty good job of being off topic in threads but it's the nastiness of the comments that degrades the quality of conversation (I myself am guilty of this too, and I need to work on that).
Does COBOL translate easily to more modern languages? Anything tricky or odd about it? I’ve never needed to use it.
For me it was about the log noise. It was annoying to have to log those drive-by brute force scripts and scanners so moved it a different port. Still got some but it was 100x less.

However, I imagine once this becomes a popular enough technique, and I see it discussed on HN periodically, scanner scripts will start scanning other ports for SSH. So over time it might be less useful.
Both emperors are naked, one just has a much higher approval rating.
Something I seldom see listed here is simply the possibility of splitting the profile:

- My ISP knows all my normal internet traffic, and all the caveats that apply (HTTPS, SNI, IPs, etc)

- My VPN knows a much smaller subset of traffic used for a different purpose. Also, do this in a VM, or on a separate computer, or otherwise somehow containerize your cookies and browser and things. (no, I still don't think people are correlating between profiles using webgl in any large-scale way. If they were, I'd be getting fewer CAPTCHAs.)

Yes, the VPN could presumably violate their privacy statements and sell your information, but that still avoids the primary concern: an ad domain that lives on the two websites you'd like to visit (ie, the normal vs the private site) With a new IP, and a different host (VM, physical computer, etc) there's nothing to correlate. The website in question doesn't know it's you -- only the VPN does. And it doesn't seem likely they're going to sell your information in such a way that the website can figure out which cookie to correlate with which identity.

So, the primary tracking method of the internet should be defeated in this way.
If it turns out to be true that he was offered a presidential pardon if he went on record denying Russia interfered with the US election, would any of your opinions change?
> The “old ones” brought a lot of maturity, practices (TDD, tests, even XP at times) and loved mentoring the super enthusiastic grads.

You do realize that most people in their 20's have many years of experience and know all of those things? Young doesn't mean inexperienced.
It is a nice reality check where if you break something too bad, you have tens of thousand / hundreds / millions / ?? people breathing down your neck in like a few hours.

I never really considered that without that it would get too loopy.
There was a joke in the Soviet Union:

- How do you know the KGB is surveilling you?
- A new wardrobe has just appeared in your apartment.
Context objects need to be passed around, with dynamic scoping you do not need to.

You would normally use dynamic scoping for certain global parameters that apply to a lot of operations.

Unix shell scripts provide something similar to dynamic scoping with environment variables: If you write a shell script that sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH or TMPDIR, then all programs invoked from that shell script will inherit the values. And if your shell script calls another shell script, then that shell script can again set environment variables, and those are visible until it returns.

I would say that environment variables have been a great success story, and folks aren't too confused.
I have no objection to Amnesty observing the extradition hearing and I don't see a good reason that they should be excluded, but Assange should not have skipped his bail and run away to the Ecuadorean embassy.

Everyone sucks here?
Tail Call Optimization and Debugging
That's why it's just better to have time-based pricing, like a monthly subscription. As long as you keep paying, you'll be able to access it.
The recordings and actual story: https://www.fastcompany.com/90541084/this-unheard-steve-jobs...
Jellyfin seems like it might be just the thing, thanks for the tip!
Wikipedia is a game. It's a MMO kingdom builder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_is_an...
Thanks! Don't have plan for an app soon. But I would be working on making the website work relly well on mobile.
When the US presses hard many countries suddenly start behaving like a lapdogs for one or another reason.
The full story is actually here: https://www.fastcompany.com/90541084/this-unheard-steve-jobs...
This seems unlikely. We don't have many, if any, extremophiles which could actually deal well with Venus (extremophiles are normally a product of extreme environments on earth, and, if nothing else, we don't really have anything as acidic as Venus) and even if we did, it hasn't been a long time for them to establish themselves.
China air force video appears to show simulated attack on U.S. base on Guam
"Past performance is not a predictor of future results."

I still upvoted your comment even though I disagree with the sentiment because I see this a lot when risk management is considered by many. Unless risk management is your domain expertise, or you've been to lots and lots of different organizations to observe what works and what didn't, it is a very human perspective.

Risk management is not performed by saying, "Nothing bad has happened even less, therefore let's keep with the status quo or make it more lax to save money." Reactive risk management based upon the rear-view mirror is a great way to invite extinction-level tail risk into the organization's house.

We could play an exciting game of Cognitive Bias Bingo [1] with such a perspective, though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
Crunchy Bridge: A modern, multi-cloud Postgres as a service
Yikes! I'd assumed you might reach toxicity before running out of digits! If you post the "share" link from the notebook I'll take a look. Or feel free to email me, my address is in my profile.
The fact that Zenimax corporate, and likely some unknown exec in that machine, had a long standing grudge against John Carmack made me loose so much respect for them. I may not always agree with Carmack from what I've read on twitter (he works for Facebook now) but I have the utmost respect for him, his transparency in his key note lectures, and his supremely engineering focused priorities. His leadership at id Software led to open sourcing of game engines and building modding support in all their titles. This openness and community building became a trend in the PC gaming industry though the 90s and 2000s and ushered a creative golden age that jumpstarted many game development studios and careers. It seems like Zenimax took whatever excitement those early days of PC gaming generated and started extracting consumer dollars with over-produced sequels that treated PCs like another console. They were able to make much more money, but we all came out intellectually impoverished in my opinion.
It occurred to me that if you want to see fewer ads and be generally left alone by marketers, get your IP and online data footprint associated with pariah topics like fringe news sites, weird subcultures, edgy politics, drug use, and privacy.

Basically like being a hacker in the 1980s and 90s, or even part of early rave culture, where the sort of people who work in marketing would be afraid or uncomfortable with being associated with you before the culture is gentrified by people preoccupied by their reputations, and you can be free to create and innovate without being co-opted.

No doubt they still have a category for you, but it's marked as a minefield, which is as good a moat as any.
Yes in the another profession but thankfully not so much in SWE world.
As much as I enjoy the thought of a Netflix where I'd pay for how much I actually watched (like how cloud hosting is billed). I think it also opens the possibility that they'll be creating content that abuses that notion. Like, longer content for pay per minute. Or longer seasons for pay per episode.

But the idea sounds great to me.
>Fun fact: Apple tracks your location and keeps its history, too: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207056, see "Significant locations".

isn't that opt in?
Thanks, that works. That's what I saw FWIW: https://imgur.com/a/ZeuoQrq
Of course, it won't be his decision. It will be Microsoft's decision.
> I don’t see how this is functionally different to passing an object that contains references to the relate to variables; which I’ll call a context object.

It's the same difference as using environment variables vs command line arguments. Imagine all programs having to pass TERM, DISPLAY, HOME, etc. as arguments in case some descendant process wants to use it and the user override. Like passing TERM, DISPLAY to git in case you want to override them for the configured pager or editor.

In other words, the issue is that when you have project A using project B using project C, project A has to manually carry around the context of B, and C in case the user wants to override them.
Digital dominance: new global ranking of cyber-power throws up some surprises
I don't think it's protectionism.

Europe doesn't have that much of a directly competing industry. Also, since we're not unified in terms of political culture, most people outside of (eg) Poland wouldn't consider a Polish company to be any more local than and American one. The EU is protectionist in some regards (especially agrifood), but these are structural and foundational.

I think it's motivated by anti tech-monopoly sentiment, which has been growing everywhere in the West.

In the sense that it's protectionist, I think the "TikTok affair" is a low-key tidal shift. It essentially the US taking a position similar to China's. An Chinese entrant into US media is seen as a political and intelligence threat, like China sees western media. Also, "*why should we allow their stuff when they don't allow ours."

The EU still operates within the US' "Overton Window." It doesn't do things outside the pale of US policy norms. That window now allows social media to be treated differently.
It's... fine. It's got some issues though. Like:

> Since Unsafe Rust may modify an arbitrary memory location, any use of Unsafe Rust in any dependency compromises the static guarantees of the whole library

With this definition, literally every Rust program is not safe, because:

1. Most operating systems don't have syscalls written in Rust, so doing anything at all ends up needing unsafe.

2. Even if you wrote an OS with safe syscalls, doing things with the hardware is going to require unsafe.

So, buried somewhere in there, unsafe will exist. So I don't personally think this definition makes a lot of sense.

To me personally, comments like this are more interesting, and tell a different story:

> The number of unsafe blocks per crate is small for the majority of the crates, more than 90% of the crates have fewer than ten unsafe blocks

This validates one of Rust's core propositions, IMHO. From eyeballing the graph, it seems that ~70 of crates have zero unsafe? Very interesting.
> I've wanted one-way data flow (React, Elm) forever.

How is that different from MVC patterns in desktop development?
How to Break Out of Your Social Media Echo Chamber
I've never had a job convincing people to click ads either in about the same amount of time. But when I look at the salaries being paid by those companies trying to get people to click ads I think I must've made a mistake somewhere. Not that I want to have a job getting people to click ads, but those jobs pay like 2X to 3X the highest salary I've ever made (or more).
This is honestly better acquisition than tiktok!
Suppresses a giggle
Agreed. I wonder if this will have more people asking questions about Tesla.

Tesla is a tougher one, because they do produce a good product, while exaggerating far more than they produce.
This is the most schizophrenic platform I've ever worked on. I've just spent an hour trying to make something work across the five different variants and web pipelines doing things underneath.

Edit: to be clear we have completely hung legacy stuff which is waiting resources (lots of $$$$ wasted) to port it to later versions of the frameworks because huge chunks of the ecosystem got abandoned by MS and the OSS developers who were supporting it.

On the positive side I'm getting paid danger money now.
Thanks for sharing your story!

Yeah, I also initially felt this is some kind of failing (I'm usually the "big picture guy"), but ended up accepting this as a coping mechanism. It's not that I forget about the purpose completely - just learned to think about it more when planning and designing, where the wider perspective also affects the task in a meaningful way. When deep in the codebase, I try to put it aside, so that I don't get in a depressive session of thinking "why do I have to shovel this garbage back and forth to satisfy some low-level requirement, instead of, I don't know, talking to people who'll use this on-site and getting some real feedback from them?". Rationally, I know that shoving garbage is an important part of getting quality software that helps others do exciting things. Emotionally, I just wish I was in their shoes (probably just as much as they wish they were in mine).

You seem a bit more positive than me when facing this reality, so I'm glad you have it in you to enjoy this. I almost have it, so I find ways to cope, and enjoy the opportunities to do something less mundane that come every now and then in such projects.
Seems unlikely. Translations aren’t that expensive. Different laws and regulations between EU members is a bigger problem. Take GDPR for example. One law, 27 agencies interpreting it in a different way.
https://archive.vn/NhcmV
The reasons are good for the business; not good for the customer.
There's also OpenHAB https://www.openhab.org/
How do you purchase or get access to other people's data?
Android 11 – Ars Technica Review
Preface: Might be easier to read my comment withOUT the parenthesis. Then go back and read with them.

I fully agree with you guys on a macro-scale. I didn't have this position years ago but now it's a firm position.

But my observation is that no one (read: a significant majority) is financially sovereign (FS), therefore they mis-calculate the time/labor costs and it's economic value/costs.

To think of this another way, if your (financial/material/etc) lives depended the Amish's* jam or chairs (or anything else they make). You can depend on their work, up to a certain scale. But even most software projects don't have this dependability because software is generally repackaged to fit a narrow use-case.

Iff (if and only if) the Amish were to embrace the automation technology, then you could depend on the Amish scaling for whatever you need.

Financial sovereignty is very powerful but the drawbacks are that the team, to do all the needed work, might not be FS. (Hence why I mention the Amish) This FS doesn't scale (this could with the Amish; if they wanted to provide jam to everyone, etc) with the complexity of the problem nor the robustness of the problem being solved. Another important drawback is that those that are FS tend to be myopic to those that aren't (i.e. their market/customers). This problem is pretty big as well. To find a product/service that solves all these criteria is immense and dare I say, improbable, hence my agreement to the two comments above. The simple solution is to try and align with the better alternative that have a positive feedback loop (i.e. monetary gain to improve the work).

* Note: I do understand that Amish charge money for jam/chairs/etc but the cost is tends to be nominal/small.
COBOL is quite modern actually, nowadays it support OOP, modules, cloud deployments, JVM and .NET backends.

https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/products/visual-cobol/overv...

Latest revision is from 2014.