skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Is maintaining/supporting old tech stack a profitable business?
In the past few years I noticed a significant speedup on the iteration of tech stack. Meanwhile, I observed that many legacy tech stack (already deprecated by their original authors) are still widely used, but few fresh blood have related skills/willing to learn them.

The similar situation of supporting short-lived software for a longer time has been proved to be profitable by Red Hat's business model. I was wondering if there could be similar business for things beyond system libs like old PHP frameworks, perl libs, Ruby on Rails (sorry to mention it here, but it's impacted a lot by Node.js) and even deep learning frameworks in older versions.
I’m not implying that at all. I’m saying the real secret ingredient is a combination of grit and focus.

There’s plenty of people in the USA presented with much more opportunity than this man received. Few have achieved anywhere near as much.

I’d wager that if he got his first job as a janitor he’d be running a cleaning empire rather than a donut chain.
PyTorch Static Quantization
I can rattle off half a dozen things to stop someone from doing that!

1. It ruins the Quantified Self aspect. You don't want to falsify your data.

2. You've set up an autodata goal and there isn't any (easy) way to cheat. Your Fitbit (or Habitica or Duolingo or Project Euler or whatever) just tells Beeminder how many steps got (or whatever your metric is).

3. Your graph is public, and ideally you've pointed friends/family to it. Are you going to lie to your friends and family?

4. It's just part of your identity as a Beeminder user. If you were the type to falsify your data to weasel out of a commitment, you wouldn't have signed up for Beeminder in the first place.

5. Beeminder does a lot of valuable things (reminders, graphs, community, generally making you awesomer) so arguably has earned the money by the time you first derail.

6. Cheating on Beeminder is a devastating precedent that ruins the power that it had as a tool to motivate you.

7. Think of the children! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB62AyZ6gHk (Those kids are so much bigger now, because your derailments pretty literally put food in their mouths!)

Ok, that's all I've got. Here's the blog version: https://blog.beeminder.com/cheating/
> SF doing "cloud" whatever use a Mac, probably around 80%.

A specific use case in a specifc place of the globe is your definition of "dominant"?

I knew HN was a bubble but this is hilarious.

Imagine considering macOS dominant because it's trendy in SF.
This answer is assuming you want to sacrifice collision resistance for length (seems dubious for anything that needs to be highly reliable) and that you don't want to use auto-incrementing. Assuming your UUIDs are sufficiently random, isn't this just a generalized birthday problem? Take the birthday problem and generalize the formula from 365 buckets to N buckets, where N is the total number of possible UUIDs given a length and set of possible characters.
https://mste.illinois.edu/courses/mat764fa03/folders/edwards...

You should be concerned with what happens if there's a duplicate -- you can calculate the probability of that occurring as long as you know the potential size of your dataset and set your UUID length accordingly.
Wow, the fire was about 5 minutes from me. The single family style house which caught fire was recently purchased by a former Zappos employee about 3 months prior. Tony was the only fatality, Fire fighters extracted him from the basement.

https://www.theday.com/local-news/20201128/tony-hsieh-retire...

https://www.redfin.com/CT/New-London/500-Pequot-Ave-06320/ho...
What were you compiling back then?
A lot of people on Hacker News are, I imagine, in a place of relative computing privilege. You probably have root / super user status on your work machine.

I do not. The IT department is the super user. Everything is a battle. Nothing gets changed without a multi-hour / -day back and forth with the “IT service team”. To be charitable they could be described as a very resource limited team who are forced to ruthlessly prioritize requests. Realistically they are power drunk gatekeepers. The answer is usually always “no”.

It’s a whole new world of bullshit that I’d forgotten existed. The last time I encountered this was in the education sector in 2004.
If you did that you might end up broke like him!
I feel the opposite way. I have a section on my website for blog posts, and other sections of my web page that get updated continuously (in theory). The blog section gets by far more updates.

For me, blogging means "just get it out there" and express your ideas clearly, relate your experiences, as you have them.
It's also written in Rust for performance.
Windows was not “well established” before 3.1, which was released in 1992. Arguably, even after that DOS was still important until Windows 95.
There are enough people in tech industry evidently passionate about work to work nights and weekends. I've actually seen all combinations on the spectrum of fun work / BS work (e.g. calling your engineers at night because something on a web page mostly used in the same time zone is not pixel perfect and being mad in the morning they were not available); young / old; and doing good work / crappy work while at it.

So there's definitely something genuine to it, but many more have to fake it. I am working at a place where you don't have to fake it nearly at all and very happy about it...

Think about it... it might seem unfair, "unfair" towards e.g. me. I'm usually only passionate if the work happens to be very interesting for me in particular, otherwise I'm going to do good work with passion about quality/etc., but only 9-6, after which I'll go be passionate about other things.

But, I've worked with quite a few engineers similar to me in ability, or better, who would totally work 14 hours a day for no reason, no pressure or crunch. If a business had a choice, why would they hire me over these guys?
Unless your job requires a smartphone app. Or just a smartphone. Money is optional, right?

Or if your friends are on Facebook, and you have a "choice" of either losing contact with most of your social network, or using Facebook.
> The company should not babysit the employees, and should call the police.

Sexual harassment is not a crime, it's a workplace tort (and always a tort by the employer, regardless of who the active harasser is.) It's true that some acts which would also potentially make the employer liable for sexual harassment are also crimes, but it's also worth noting that, even where an act creating potential harassment liability is also a crime, that (1) the burden of proof in a criminal case is higher than for a civil tort, so there is no guarantee, even with the same evidence and the same jury that a criminal conviction would be rendered when there would be harassment liability, (2) the police and public prosecutor have no obligation to take action even if there is a crime, whereas the company does have an enforceable legal obligation to take effective action to prevent harassment, (3) even if the police take action and the prosecutor files charge, and a conviction eventually results, criminal process takes time during which the accused may be free, and, in the absence of effective action by the employer, continue harassing and increasing the employers harassment liability.
You can teach beginner programming with a subset of what python offers. Same with Ruby. Printing to console, assigning to and mutating variables, looping, conditional, and basic arithmetic require few keywords and very few extra symbols.

Those two languages make easy things simple. Basic does too, but with a not more noise ($).

You also don't need top install any language these days if you just want to learn. There are web based environments like repl.it where you can learn and practice basics.
My experience in the last few years has been the opposite. I've recently found that my stubbornness has resulted in me investing in alternative solutions to my problems that are hand-tailored to exactly what I want. Some examples:

- I take notes profusely, but I'm dissatisfied with every note taking app. I have rigged up Typora (a Markdown editor) to an Alfred workflow to build exactly the solution that I want. I guess Alfred is the "saving grace" here.

- I can't find a good podcasting app (I want to listen on my Mac, not on my phone). Eventually I just settled on The Old Reader subscribing to the podcast RSS and download the files manually to play in VLC. Works great, if you don't want a seamless UI.

- I, like I'm guessing everyone in this thread, have a very customized terminal shell. The customization environment here is thriving more than ever before and doesn't show signs of being trampled by any integrated solution.

What's the common thread? GUIs. GUIs are hard to make customizable, and the returns on doing so rapidly diminish with the number of non-power-users. If you discount GUIs, there's tons of customization to be had on your computer right now.
Quicksilver was just updated in June.

https://qsapp.com/changelog.php
I was only saying that it seems pretty likely Apple took inspiration from Growl. Not that they didn’t take inspiration from other prior art, or that Growl didn’t either. They’ve taken similar inspiration from other things on their own platform even where there were multiple inspiration sources available. Spotlight took design direction from Quicksilver even though Enso existed. From Mac OS 8 (or was it 9?) through most of the OS X/macOS span, it took inspiration or cues from WindowShade even though a zillion other minimization styles existed. They literally bought CoverFlow even though a ton of other presentational equivalents existed. It’s not that these ideas don’t flow around everywhere. I was just observing that they likely observed what was already at home on their platform.
Any time you traverse a firewall or a NAT you’ll run into issues if you have a massive amount of open sessions and you are dealing with a stateful FW.

Just because you haven’t encountered it doesn’t mean it’s not there, it’s probably just properly tuned and balanced for the load.
How children worked for free. And he was successful, not just "for a time" the only reason he failed was a gambling addiction.
https://makandra.com sells maintenance plants for Rails , outdated/EOL instance
Mobile git workflow person here..... ouch
Seinfeld The Pen:
Part1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3Vm_ksWreM
Part2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrvSKIfccwQ
This was my second site.
http://www.v2.bobbydreamer.com/

I spent too much time designing the site and wrote only 2-3 posts and never touched it.

This year again i started taking this pandemic as an opportunity. Over the last two years, I collected all the things I liked which my new site should have and hour should look. I have made post about it here.
https://bobbydreamer.com/things-that-my-new-site-should-have

Later decided too stop all this and use a static site generator and make content and not worry about designs that was a bit hard thing to do for me. But reality is how many posts am I gonna write. I chose Gatsby for its speed. So went through all the Gatsby themes and picked one and started. As everybody, I made a post about "how I made this site"
https://bobbydreamer.com/how-i-made-this-site

I like colors, I am not good at picking them, but I like them and at the moment all the design I do is change the background color of my site.

I am following footsteps of other web developers like "Flavio Copes", person writes 1 Post a day. I know I cannot be that consistent, so initially I started like one post a keep then it became month.

Basically what I am doing in my site is moving contents which I have saved in notepads, word documents and Posts all my learning into my site at the moment.

https://bobbydreamer.com/blog

The approach I am following currently is working for me.

I have seen many people from hn their blog doesn't have more than 4 posts and one or two posts they written were excellent, I wished many times, it would have been good if they continued to make more content.
Unflag this! People need to see this
Yes, I did say we would benefit from a bit of Stalinism.
The cell design strikes me as strange too. According to the patent, static cells require "excessive space", refresh is inconvenient, and previous self-refreshing cells can accumulate erroneous charge. The patent claims all sorts of advantages of minimizing clock voltages, minimizing vias, using a single address line and single data line, etc.

My interpretation is that in the pre-CMOS days, a static cell used too much power due to the load resistor. (The Intel 4004 and 8008 used dynamic storage for registers.) They didn't want to implement a counter for stepping through refresh addresses, so they developed this cell.

(How much did they not want to implement a counter? The program counter is actually a linear-feedback shift register, so it steps through addresses in a pseudo-random order. This saved a few transistors compared to a real counter. The trick is you permute the data in ROM according to the same pattern and everything works just like you had a normal program counter.)

https://patents.google.com/patent/US3876993A
Investigating this should be your part. The fact that the democracy itself is threatened with nationalism ideas should be a big warning sign. Look at their political scene, seems like there is not much opposition left and without it the future is dark. Maybe your headaches are a good thing, signs for a bad decision.
What about turning the Raspberry Pi in to a USB gadget?

https://www.adafruit.com/product/3945
NeoVIM works fine after adding a compilation target. See: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/pull/12624

It hasn't been merged yet as some of the dependencies aren't available, one of them apparently being LuaJIT, but if you build it yourself without that it shouldn't be a problem.
Some of us have been going even longer (I'm been blogging for 20 years now [1]).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21768264
The first “turn” this object makes is almost at a right angle. Seems entirely unintuitive to me. How does this happen?
First doses of Pfizer coronavirus vaccine has flown to US from Belgium: report
I've somehow pushed past "authors of custom static site generators" inertia and now I'm publishing blog posts regularly. My tooling for publishing my webpage is... well, terrible-ish. But one choice that did work out for me was to make the articles not much more than plain HTML.

What I'd like to do is pare down the static website generator I have so it's more dumb and fast. Make it more close to plain HTML. One problem is that I do a full build every time I deploy, and that means that the website is taking longer and longer to deploy as I add to it. But I'm too busy doing things and writing articles about what I do to also work on the tooling!

Optimizing to make your server setup simpler, it turns out, is the wrong optimization!
Gluing yourself at the hip to homebrew is a bad idea IMO. It's trivial to install things yourself. It's just a matter of `./configure && make && make install` and you're done.
> Linked to US intelligence services. Makes you wonder how many VPN services are run by governments?

I don't recall details, but IIRC, there are (or were) a few popular VPNs in China that were used to circumvent the firewall that functioned fast and reliability despite the anti-VPN crackdowns. I've read speculation that they were likely collaborating with Chinese police/security forces to help them keep tabs on the VPN-using community in order to better anticipate threats to their power.

Facebook ran similar free VPNs for a similar reason: to gather intelligence on users to anticipate competitive threats: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo.
* Regarding "life-hacking": "In an effort to keep up with a world of too much, life hackers sometimes risk going too far" [1]

* Regarding "meditation": "The Varieties of Contemplative Experience Study catalogued 59 different types of meditation-related experiences that can be distressing or associated with impairment in functioning." ... " As many as 1 in 4 meditators reports negative or unwanted effects from meditation" [2]

* There are "significantly higher mortality rate among people who regularly sit for prolonged periods" and "long term complications of prolonged standing" [3]. What's left for us? Floating? :-)

I guess my point is that for each piece of "life-improving" advice there's a counter ... I don't really have much of silver lining to offer :-/. I guess we are all different and need to find through time, enormous effort and trial and error, the sweet spot of a routine that works for us.

1: https://hackinglife.mitpress.mit.edu/

2: https://www.cheetahhouse.org/faq

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_desk#Effect_on_health
This might seem like exaggerating to many, but this is more true than not.

fun fact: tarof also exists in Turkish culture, they just don't have a specific word for it.
gopfridli!
I think the most important performance benefit of the M1 is having all RAM within a few millimeters of the CPU. Can you do that with a Ryzen?
I don't think frequentism is "bad"; just insufficient as a gold standard interpretation of probabilistic claims. I liked an analogy from the reference by Rathmanner & Hutter: the most "correct" chess-playing program involves a complete search along the tree of possible games. In practice, we try to approximate this ideal.

In the case of Kolmogorov complexity, a reasonable takeaway might be to use the shortest program that we're able to find, even if it's not the shortest overall.
> Despite the villa's armed security guards and guard dogs, one rainy night Ted climbed up a coconut tree and over the barbed wire and made his way in through a bathroom window.

Having lived in South East Asia for many years, this tale of SE Asian security guards sounds about right...

EDIT: Hard work, friends in high places, a successful food business, gambling, a Chinese contact with a lot of money ... this really is a South East Asian story for the ages.
Futures Explained in 200 Lines of Rust
Because it creates a narrative that makes the reader feel good.
Roblox pays 26% of its revenue to Apple/Google for payment processing
> was offered a post as liaison officer in Thailand by Suganthini's brother-in-law, Gen Sak Sutsakhan. Instantly acquiring the rank of Major, Ted and his young family moved to Bangkok, and every month he travelled back to Cambodia to collect the wages for his soldiers.

This ... won't have hurt!
Silicon Valley’s dirty data centre secret: carbon
That Mysterious Monolith in the Utah Desert? It’s Gone, Officials Say
Thanks, I had a quick skim through it and it seems really helpful. If I understand correctly, the claim is that the laws of probability as they are known comprise the only possible interpretation that satisfies the 3 desiderata set forth in chapter 1.
you can also use `t` command instead of `/x/b` or `//b`

$ echo 'coffining' | sed ':d s/fin//; td'
cog
$ echo 'coffining' | sed ':d s/fin//; //b d'
cog
According to the patent, the primary benefit is self-refresh, and doing so avoiding substrate charge pump effects.
It's hard to make money building for an OS like Linux whose users expect everything to be free and open source.

If you want to sell software for money, Linux app development is not the right business to be in.
The weird thing about QBasic is that it came out in 1991, when Windows was already well established. Windows wasn't that well established in 1991, and QBasic was a direct replacement for QuickBasic (and VB was the premium-cost replacement for the Professional Development System that was the upmarket companion to QuickBasic), which itself was the successor to GWBasic on PC and there's probably a fair amount of conflation of them in people's memory.

> it seems almost like a niche group of people who in the 90s were still using DOS a lot.

It wasn't really a niche group that was still using a DOS a lot before about Win95; Win 3.1 was separate add-on on top of DOS, and lots of important software still targeted DOS exclusively or had separate DOS and Windows versions.
I grew up in a building constructed as part of the series that just barely preceded the infamous Khruschevkas. This game feels quite real. That said, I’ve lived most of my life in a dilapidated building in New York. The models and textures would have been different, but the feeling remains the same. I’ve certainly had enough of cold, dark winters for one lifetime.
Thanks! :)

I wasn't planning to go there! While I enjoy the idea, for now I'm trying to focus on what's needed to make sense of the problem of induction. Is there a nice connection that I missed?
as far as I know, there is a non-formal rule of three.
If someone is refusing three times with the same "degree" of refusal, then they actually don't want it.

There is of course also "Be khoda tarof nemikonam" which is "I swear to god I am not tarofing", after this it is usually acceptable/expected to stop it.

Edit: Article also mentions the rule of three

> There is an unwritten rule of two or three rounds of offering and refusing in taarof.
"Misinformation is a problem that genuinely threatens society."
Misinformation is magnitudes of order less dangerous than restricting free speech.
The antidote to bad speech is more (hopefully good) speech, not less speech.

I like to be able to spot the idiots and know who they are and where they stand, not to put them underground where they inevitably fester into violence in their bubbles.
Of course it was because of the pandemic.

Too bad people are more focused on social identities than poverty. If the unrest was more about poverty there would be a lot more people involved, and people would have a harder time painting it as thing for restless black people. If the demonstrations were about poverty, and every group could see “people who look just like me” I bet there would be more success.
Or maybe I need to try uBlock again rather than assuming my Pihole is as good as it gets. Thanks for the suggestion.
(For anyone wondering why someone might not use GitHub, comments like the above are a good example. On GitHub, nobody recognizes the distinction between an error report and a support request.)
For me, I just started writing to local Markdown files without worrying about who's reading it. Then I started using Pandoc to convert Markdown to HTML and just post it as a static site folder on Netlify, liked via git. Only now have I created a custom site for my blog. The pattern is that I started writing first and worried about the site later.

Remember, writing != publishing. Just write for yourself.
Show HN: A rap song about becoming a tech lead