skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>High end professional fashion and fancy watches are nowhere to be seen in my office

Do you think the status drive is the same, just replaced with different signals?

I've often wondered if a lot of it is almost generationally defined. Boomers grew up in a time where cars were a major status symbol, but there's a high percentage of younger generations that don't even care to own a car. Based on what you stated, I wonder if the materialism has just been replaced by an experiential sense of status (e.g., who has the best Instagram-worthy vacation to share, or who has the coolest start-up story to tell, or the most 'artisan' career). I'm not claiming to know, just curious if these are just different means to the same end defined as the esteem of our collegues
The article really is about the question in its title, though: it's not a book review.

I dislike as much as anybody the fashion of judging historical figures by today's mores, but that's not what's happening in Boswell's case. He's being retconned as an idiot and a terrible person not by people in pursuit of 21st century social justice, but by the likes of Borges and Thomas Carlyle. Though the author has gone overboard by calling him "the worst man in the world".

Personally, I like the Borges interpretation, that it needs to be thus for the narrative - the noble and brilliant Johnson contrasted with the base and feeble Boswell. Though I don't get the Don Quixote comparison - isn't Sancho Panza in some ways the smarter one in that relationship?
A single copy and paste isn't likely an issue. I've worked in code bases where that pattern ends up happening in dozens or hundreds of places - all with slightly different style/layouts. It becomes a night mare to change anything consistently across the code base because it's done differently in every place.
Ah I was not aware of the general term and its' meaning. As you say, quite the abuse of the expected meaning.
The effects of the One Child policy has actually been pretty much as intended.

There are two hidden goals of the One Child policy that aren't communicated very often in the West.

The first is proletarianization. Indeed, almost 30% of Chinese people are peasants. This is not efficient. Only around 2-5% would be sufficient; therefore 20-23% of the productive potential is wasted for the same consumption. And so, creating a situation where it would be possible to shrink the size of the peasant class would allow for the productivity per capita to rise, thus allowing for better surpluses and better living conditions.

In this view, a demographic fall is not an actual issue, because there is already 20-23% of "dead-weight" that can be eliminated.

Secondly, the issue is of human capital. This is not so well-known, but the retirement age in China is extremely low. Indeed, the average retirement age is at 58 (!). This is done on purpose so that the younger generation may enter the job market faster and learn more, reducing unrest and permitting the investment in human capital. However, this comes at the cost of enforcing early retirement, which also makes for reduced efficiency.

The solution to both of these problems can be to simply reduce the population, this will allow for a sharp decline of the peasant class and for an increase in retirement age.

In this view, the demographic effects of the One Child Policy, while they might have been disastrous for a developed, urbanized economy, actually fits into the demographic and productive plans. It is thus an incorrect to call them an error, and there will likely not be an economic collapse in response.
Make these people debug doyne old EDI documents and all of a sudden XML doesn't seem so bad.
Hmm, either option would actually lead to mass confusion; various intermediate locations wouldn’t know which cannon was which.
Copy/pasted code becomes technical debt at scale, especially if there's an unknown error in the original. Now you have 10s or 100s of variants out there, each individually tweaked and so not readily identifiable as true copy/paste repetition, all containing some variant of this subtle bug. You find out about for interface A, and fix interface A. Maybe you remember that B-C were copy/pasted versions of A and check them out and correct it there. But D-Z were all copies made by others, following your example, and you miss them.

It's not scalable, and produces severe consequences when used without care (which is most of the time, it seems).
PayPal – Epik Blog
Support for ||= and ??= is very exciting!
Researchers Pack 10k Metasurface Pixels per Inch in New OLED Display
I didn't read that as complaining about CAR/CDR, but rather it was making a joke: the section header is "Cons".
These simple techniques were really, really effective in 2D games.

When done well (as they were in SF2) they created a wonderful illusion of depth.

From a programmer's perspective, creating these sorts of effects surely gave you a true feeling of "racing the beam" - ie the nuts and bolts of the CRT itself.

The way scrolling worked on this systems was that you defined your tilemaps and then changed the scroll register to change the position at which they were drawn.

By changing the scroll register in the vertical blanking interval (the time between the bottom line was drawn) and before the topmost row was redrawn, you could shift the entire tile map left, right, up, or down en masse. That would move the entire tilemap like a flat sheet of paper.

However, if you changed the scroll register during the horizontal blanking interval - the time between individual horizontal lines were drawn on the screen - you could achieve fancier effects like the row scrolling effect described in the linked article.
I use the term to describe the introduction of unnecessary abstractions in the name of hypothetical future use cases. For example, using an enumerated collection of values where a boolean would suffice.

It could also refer to building resilience to load before it is necessary. Example, distributed databases with failover and recovery capabilities for a side project.

Poke holes all you want, those are bad examples, but they should illustrate the point. Over engineering is a real phenomenon.
And how about highly congested multi threaded programs?

I've got a program with log statements like that all over the place. Since stepping through it with a debugger would not even be possible. My IDE takes care of hiding the debug statements, since they're all encapsulated in different regions and if-def statements to log different types of things.
A fixed hourly wage is not mandated by this rule, a minimum wage is. So you do this, ready? Everyone continues to drive exactly the way they do right now. All revenues go into one big bank account.

Next, you provide incentive payments for drivers proportional to the extra amount they brought in above and beyond the minimum wage for the hours they drove, as a slice of the pool of revenues after subtracting out minimum wages and benefits. Then you stack rank your drivers at the end of each half, and fire the bottom 20%.

I'm not even advocating this approach, I'm just saying there are ways of incentivizing this that are shown to work. This part here isn't rocket science.
> But the ones that fill me with joy are the ones that clearly were sick of the world being incredibly bad at things, that could not accept humanity embarrassing itself so poorly, and who could not live with a planet that had so much wasted potential.

Yeah me too, Eliezer Yudkowsky comes to mind - there may be others but I think they're quite rare. Even in these cases I suspect status is some component though not the driving force (how much of a role it plays I think varies depending on the person and what they value).

People want to do something important/have purpose - I think it's hard to disentangle this from status because it's so tied up in how we see ourselves and what we often consider important. Millions of years of selective pressure and social behavior/hierarchies of intelligent primates can't really just be ignored.

There are some outliers, but I'm generally skeptical. I tend to think often the DNGAF persona is done because it's a signal of high status to not care about your status. I suppose at some level it's real though.
Thanks for the reply. I was not hired as remote employee. Was hired in CA. So lets say that I got 10,000 stock options (strike @ $1.00) that vests over 4 years. 3 of those years I have been in CA and 1 year in Texas.

Let's assume my company goes IPO in 2024 (it's a lottery, I understand), and assume each share is worth $10.00. Which means my 10,000 shares will be worth $100,000.

So I will owe tax on 7500 of those shares to CA? Because I've been there 3 out of those 4 years? That is ($10.00 - $1.00) * 7500 = $67500 of my income will be taxed by CA? And remaining amount will be taxed by Texas?

Even if I move to Puerto Rico, where there are no capital gains, I still owe CA taxes?
I generally agree, though mostly as a failure of storytelling. An actual plague pushing things to the absolute limits isn’t implausible. Adjust things so the main character is freaking out about landing a cargo 20% over standard safety limits etc.

That said, what allows us to make such criticisms is an understanding of the physics and economics involved. We can’t reason about what say Iain Banks’s Culture is going to do on economic grounds because things aren’t fleshed our enough to make such judgements. Bat at least we can reason about distances involved. Even softer in say the Star Wars universe economics and physics is such an afterthought that we can’t objectively judge if say the Death Star was a sound use of resources or a pointless vanity project. Worse, because hyperspace lanes are so hand-wavy we can’t even reason about movement speeds and and distance.
That's fine. But there should still be options available for:

- Notify me that an update is available (and the download size), and let me decide whether to download it now or not. I know better than you do what the download will cost me, or I might have a specific reason you don't know about not to install this update (yet, or ever).

- Go ahead and download an update, and ask me whether to install it now and restart the browser, or wait to install until next browser startup. Because I know better than you do whether forcing me to Stop Right Now is too disruptive.

How would having those options available for people who choose to control their own computer cause any harm for the majority who leave the default setting? And what on earth makes you think that forcing an update right now, in the middle of what I'm doing, will keep me from being compromised by the site I'm already using??
To note, Japan is in practice a one-party state. The LDP has only ever not been in power very briefly, and even then they conserved bureaucratic power.
Trump has made enemies worldwide & ridiculed allies, is delusional as he has lied provenly 20.000 times, is personally responsible for promising the virus will go away when it has killed 200k and will kill more than half a million and is the perfect man to not give a damn about things going on in the mediterranean and other parts of the world that could start a thermonuclear war. If one starts ever, there is a great probability it starts during his second term. He has polarized America and endorsed terrorist & underground groups such as Qanon & white supremacists and can bring total chaos in usa which frankly I don't live in. If after all that you still don't get it I understand, it's how evolution made some humans. My comment will be downvoted but it's directed to you and I hope you read it and reflect.I wonder what made you think I am threatening something that's really interesting btw. You can't deduct this from my comment unless you are totally pro trump.Sorry I have forgotten climate change that will doom us and he opted out from the global effort.
> Doesn't instill confidence in that content.

It is pretty clear by the language used that it's all written tongue in cheek.
One questions I ask myself to bring clarity is,

If I am the one paying bills, would I really pay another developer for this refactoring? Yes: Technical debt it is. No: just busy work.
>we'd all be pretty disturbed if it ever really came to light.

It did, though. I would've expected more attention.

Edit: so what, then? Did a massive sex trafficking ring that delivered underage girls to some of the world's most powerful people just get exposed? Did the head of it just die in a Manhattan jail. Was his partner just finally found after months on the lam? Or am I crazy?
Here is the full text of the email: https://community.expensify.com/discussion/7632/protect-demo...

It looks like he used his access to millions of customer emails to spam them with his political views.

> I know you don’t want to hear this from me. And I guarantee I don’t want to say it.

This whole thing just reeks of narcissism and delusion. And that's saying something, since I mostly agree with him otherwise. I can't imagine this did anything but piss off a lot of people.
FWIW, I recently tried a branch where I migrated our existing repo from Yarn v1 to v2.

The immediate issues I ran into were lack of Yarn v2 support for some features critical for internal enterprise usage: no support for the `strictSsl` / `caFile` config options from NPM / Yarn v1, and an inability to read lockfile URLs that were pointing to an internal NexusRepository instance for proxying NPM package installation.

Both issues were resolved very quickly by the Yarn team. I then ran into a problem where the post-install build steps could not run in a locked-down corporate security environment, and that issue was also addressed very quickly, with the Yarn team putting up a PR that tried different process launching approaches and iterating until one worked for me.

Having sorted out those issues, I was able to move on to actually following the steps in the Yarn v2 migration guide [0]. The steps worked basically as advertised. The `@yarnpkg/doctor` tool identified several places where we were relying on imports that hadn't been strictly declared, so I fixed those. Starting up the app caused some thrown errors as other non-declared imports were hit, so I kept iterating on fixing those.

I also used the `@yarnpkg/pnpify --vscode` option to generate some kind of settings file for VS Code, and added the suggested "zip file system" extension to VS Code. That allowed me to right-click a library TS type, "Go to Definition", and show a file that was still packed in a package tarball.

I had to switch off to other tasks and haven't had time to go back and finish trying out the migration. But, parts of our codebase were running correctly, and it looked like I just needed to finish out the process of checking for any remaining non-declared dependencies.

Can't vouch for how this would work out in production or a larger build setup, but things looked promising overall.

[0] https://yarnpkg.com/advanced/migration
The insight that people care about outrage is not particularly novel. You yourself care about outrage - it's the reason you left the comment you left. If I care about outrage, on the other hand... What? I'm like you and most other people?
A commenter to the wikipedia page I posted about the vancouver 9 o'clock gun makes a compelling point: it was all about providing a time signal for ships in port to set their onboard clocks.
There doesn't appear to be a completely authentic source. It's cited to be part of a 1988 graduation speech at Bristol University, and appears to be more correctly "live modestly and do serious things". As far as I can tell, no printed copy of that speech exists, so it's all hearsay.

The closest I can get to an authentic citation is a quote of it by a colleague in an obituary published by the Royal Society[1]. It rings authentic, in that it seems like something that would be said in the context of a graduation speech, and as such it may not have left a written record.

[1] https://vdocuments.site/dorothy-mary-crowfoot-hodgkin-om-12-...
The issue with XML is that it was mostly pushed upon developers without any deeper understanding.

So there's a ton of utterly crap XML applications out there with no rhyme or reason, and these crap XML enterprise apps are most developer's understanding of "real world XML". Similar to how terrible C++ code being all over the place is making people hate C++ the language.

-------

XML can be used very well however: its use in Jabber / XMPP is clear and concise. XML Namespaces are needed due to the extensions of XMPP, and various programs can interact with the protocol. Specifications are clear, the ability to "stream" data is proven, different parser strategies have been implemented. Its clear that XML in this instance works, and works pretty well.
i'm certainly happy that citroën is expanding our general conceptions of transportation. i'm more lamenting that it's not as practical where i live (a fairly walkable neighborhood in LA), and providing the main limitation in that regard.

incidentally, i think we could quadruple density in LA (with mixed-use and other techniques) without any loss of "neighborhood character" (unless of course, one's definition of that excludes diversity of race and income). the weather here is perfect for multimodal transportation year-round. that kind of density means more construction projects could (better) afford to put parking underground so that we could convert street parking to dedicated bike/scooter lanes without loss of parking convenience. and smaller utility cars like the ami means that we could put more of them in that parking area, while needing fewer of them because of the higher walkability of the neighborhood afforded by the higher density of commerce/employment as well.
Welcome Groovy Gorilla
Briar[1] supports Tor and works really well, but at the moment is limited to text-only chats.

1: https://briarproject.org/
China is not self sufficient in its food and energy needs. If China closes, there is going to be a famine and its industry will completely halt.
About the demographic collapse from the One Child policy, I'm going to volunteer an alternative analysis, since you've asked for it, copied from another of my comments:

The effects of the One Child policy has actually been pretty much as intended.

There are two hidden goals of the One Child policy that aren't communicated very often in the West.

The first is proletarianization. Indeed, almost 30% of Chinese people are peasants. This is not efficient. Only around 2-5% would be sufficient; therefore 20-23% of the productive potential is wasted for the same consumption. And so, creating a situation where it would be possible to shrink the size of the peasant class would allow for the productivity per capita to rise, thus allowing for better surpluses and better living conditions.

In this view, a demographic fall is not an actual issue, because there is already 20-23% of "dead-weight" that can be eliminated.

Secondly, the issue is of human capital. This is not so well-known, but the retirement age in China is extremely low. Indeed, the average retirement age is at 58 (!). This is done on purpose so that the younger generation may enter the job market faster and learn more, reducing unrest and permitting the investment in human capital. However, this comes at the cost of enforcing early retirement, which also makes for reduced efficiency.

The solution to both of these problems can be to simply reduce the population, this will allow for a sharp decline of the peasant class and for an increase in retirement age.

In this view, the demographic effects of the One Child Policy, while they might have been disastrous for a developed, urbanized economy, actually fits into the demographic and productive plans. It is thus an incorrect to call them an error, and there will likely not be an economic collapse in response.
Yeah you're right, I did. My bad.
If your argument is that we are approaching an aristocratic, low-churn society with a bunch of favored failsons at the top, then that would make more sense than trying to frame it in terms of Intrinsic intelligence. But I don’t think your comparison is accurate. The Chinese Party leadership and bureaucratic apparatus is plenty nepotistic while America’s more private-market-oriented economy is now dominated by (1st or 2nd generation) immigrant-founded or run companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Tesla. Read: https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1236343/son-also-ris...
Yeah, those all make sense. I guess I was thinking we'd probably need to wait a couple decades to see if e.g. emphysema also comes from vaping.

I also think that article is unfairly demonizing nicotine. In safe doses, it alone is not bad for you. In many ways it's like coffee; gives you a mild buzz. I'm actually surprised we don't have coffee infused with nicotine yet.
The tech governance issue here is that a commercial organisation used personal information provided for an unrelated purpose for political lobbying without consent.

Presumably some of the many recipients of the email are both US voters and EU residents with dual citizenship.

In that case would this be a breach of the GDPR?
> AirPods and Watches are gimmick.

People wrote off the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad as gimmicks. Even the Mac was written off as a toy.

It's the ultimate hubris to assume you know more than the millions of people who buy a given product and enjoy using it.
Also worth looking are EDN [0] (mentioned briefly under S-Expressions), Transit [1] and Fressian [2][3].

[0] https://github.com/edn-format/edn

[1] https://github.com/cognitect/transit-format

[2] https://github.com/Datomic/fressian/wiki

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JArZqMqsaB0&ab_channel=Cloju...
I want to believe it will but it seems like more of a rural play ... maybe that ends up being just stage 1 but it is really not clear to me how well this scales as far as competition in other places goes.
Does anyone have any examples of companies that died because of too much technical debt? For me its kind of one of those things I acknowledge exists but I try to avoid any projects where their goal is purely "decrease technical debt" or even when that goal is on the periphery. And I see that kind of thing way more frequently than you might think!
Finally! I've been hesitant to switch from spotify because of my playlists, but now I might finally make the switch.
I would like to see wild elephants in a national park in the US. You can't really say they are not part of the eco system when mammoths only disappeared during the last ice age. Its basically the difference between a hairless cat. There are still plants around that relied on elephants to propagate them (osage orange)
I don’t think so, building effective scientific institutions is incredibly time consuming. You don’t just need a slew of fresh graduates, you need an established cadre of experienced researchers to teach them. Where does this older generation of experienced mentors come from? Where do the deep institutional values come from? It’s not at all like building a factory.

Modern advanced scientific methods and technologies are incredibly sophisticated and complex. In the 1940s you could churn out a dozen new aircraft carriers, squadrons of fighters for them and send them on their way. With modern electronic warfare, sensor, weaponry and avionics systems that’s just not possible, especially if you dont have three generations of experience in carrier operations to draw on. That’s why China is still struggling to get one vessel even partially operational. It’s all new Chinese aircraft, weapons, electronics and systems. They’re trying to jump from 1940 to 2020 in one leap.

I’m positing this not entirely from speculation, but from observation of how things have gone for them so far and why. They will get there, absolutely, but the cutting edge is an awful long way away from the basics. You have to go through making a crapload of mistakes and dead ends before you find the right paths. That’s the difference between following a known trail and discovering new ones un-trod by others.