skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First of all let me start by saying that all my lash language is tongue-in-cheek. If you need a visual, you can imagine me poking you in the ribs at the bar and having a laugh. I have nothing but respect for Daniel and his work.

That said:

* Narrower is easier to read

Yes, for prose. And no one actually said easier, they said faster. Code is typically full of parenthesis special notations and characters. Nobody's speed-reading code. That doesn't make sense.

* Side-by-side works better

Marginally. Most code is pretty succinct anyway and you can easily compare it side to side. In real life, this is almost never a problem.

* Better diffs

Don't conform your code to fit your tools. Use tools that fit your code. There's plenty of good diffing tools and git clients and editor plugins that make this a breeze.

* It encourages shorter names

Arguably an anti-patern.

> I know especially Java people object to this as they’re trained in a different culture and say that a method name should rather include a lot of details of the functionality “to help the user”, but to me that’s a weak argument as all non-trivial functions will have more functionality than what can be expressed in the name and thus the user needs to know how the function works anyway.

You shouldn't have to read a lot of code to understand it and locate problems and botlenecks. If your code requires grokking and keeping vast amounts of methods in your head you're wasting valuable cognitive load

* Just a few spaces per indent level

ok, so I like this. =)

* Many indent levels is wrong anyway

Absolutely. Make methods and give them proper names. Go Daniel!

* Why exactly 80?

.. technically not a part of the argument, but I'm glad it's here. 80, 100, 120, 160, 200? It doesn't matter. Either full freedom to express myself to the best of my abilities or it doesn't matter.

* Enforced by a tool

The root of all evil. A tool for stripping away context and making hackily written code under pressue and time limitations and carefully planned out code look the same to the naked eye.
On a form factor similar to a Macbook Air? I'm sure it is possible to have 24h+ battery life on a Linux laptop; if you ignore the other parameters (battery size and performance) it is meaningless.
> Modern social media is cold and hostile.

Υou misspelled "monitized". I tried to play TribalWars. I remember playing this game a decade ago. It was fun. Stil it. There are so many things that could be done with 2 clicks, instead of 10. But, hey, they can be! As long as you buy/spend "premium points". I deleted my account after two weeks playing 30mins per day. To grow further I would either have to spend 1h per day (then 2h, 3h, and so on) or buy the click-reducers. I will go back to my AoE2-AOK)!!

The internet/websites/services have vastly improved. AND the pricing model has too. There are plenty of discussions in HN about "setting the correct price". That sweet spot that will yield YOU (the maker) the most profit. You don't want 1bn customers giving you $1. You want 1k customers that will give you $1.5m instead. This way you got less costs and more revenue. And you got better marketing ("everyone has an android but who can afford a cool $1k rose gold (puke) iphone???)

You want that cute guy/lady? You have to pay! (See Ashley Madison and their business model/practices)(https://gizmodo.com/ashley-madison-code-shows-more-women-and...)

You don't pay? It's ok, someone else will and will get ahead in line, and you then will suffer from FOMO (ok not exactly but you still reduce your opportunities)(gotta make it rain to the company!).
At 80 lines I can stack comfortably 3 windows of code on a medium-size screen. At a large screen, 4 windows of code.

It is actually very useful. Function takes parameter that's a class instance, then you call a method on the return value... and you can see the code to all those at the same time.
As a startup founder in Europe, who works what I think of as a lot, but also finds time to make dinner for my kids and read to them at night, this type of article always gives me anxiety and/or guilt. Am I hustling enough? Is it wrong to watch Netflix on Saturday night instead of coding? What about that walk/workout - was there time for that?

We have users for our service [0], they're happy and they're paying us but it always makes me wonder if the competition is doing more and out hustling us. I guess there's no way to know and at some point you need to draw your own line in the sand in terms of work/life balance.

0: https://kitemaker.co, the super fast, hotkey-driven product management tool/issue tracker that has deep integrations to GitHub, Figma, Slack, etc.
> It's funny you mention Stockolm syndrome, then continuing on with an anecdote how Windows always works for you.

I didn't say "Windows always works for me", but rather that these imagined conversations about issues like these aren't a regular fixture among Windows users. The perceived polish of Linux that supposedly made things like these much rarer is just that, perceived.

Windows doesn't always work perfectly, it just works for hundreds of times more people way more of the time than Linux. You seem to take someone calling this a "meme" as saying it's not real. It's not a joke as much as it's just something that is and something that naturally happens in an ecosystem where nothing is made to work with anything else.

> I had win8 installs that would search for updates for hours on end with no result, weird error codes from windows update, windows 10 updates that left the system unbootable, broken .NET installs that couldnt be fixed without a windows reinstall.

I've had equivalents of these (unbootable computer after an update being the most exact match) with OS X. It doesn't mean that OS X isn't all-in-all a much more well put together operating system than Linux + userland or Windows. Does that mean it's perfect? No. But let's at least establish that Linux is nowhere near close to offering the same quality experience overall as neither OS X or Windows, even in a ballpark sense.

As an additional point to this: Do you believe, once non-enthusiasts start using Linux, that issues will be more or less visible? I know what my bet is.
Internationalizing and Localizing Your Flutter App
A wired phone (POTS) doesn't have "bit rate", it has bandwidth. It could very well be that VOIP uses a lower bitrate than Skype, or Skype uses a better algorithm, but I would lump VOIP in the "Skype" category, not the "wired phone" category.
I already have it, alongside Windows laptops, Android phones, Windows phones and set top boxes, thank you very much.
Then you don’t really understand, because Apple couldn’t have pushed x86 this far, even if they had gotten a license.

Also go pick a bone somewhere else man, how sad do you have to be to multi-downvote on HN? This isn’t Reddit.
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Naming is difficult. Naming requires intelligence. There is no simple set of rules to follow to do it right for much the same reason there is no simple set of rules for writing a novel or any other creative work. Being good at it is partly due to experience and partly talent.

Is a single-letter name for a function ever correct? Absolutely. Is it always correct? Obviously not. Knowing when to use shorter names versus longer names is a big part of being a good programmer.
> you can book courses to lose your your local Swabian accent to increase your chances on the national job market

Are there courses for newcomers to learn Swabian so they can fit in better with local society and improve their chances on the regional job market? (I'd guess that there aren't, because the market for Standard German education is much bigger.)
> I used to enjoy a game of chess back in the day, although I was never very good. And I always imagined myself playing chess with a remote opponent by post when I was a dusty old man [as featured in a few period dramas].

> It's a shame that the advent of the internet has simultaneously increased your chances of finding someone to play with remotely but, at the same time, [for me anyway] pretty much removed all inclination to do so, as I'd never be sure my opponent wasn't just putting the moves into a computer and playing whatever it told him to play.

I play on ICCF servers that are the past postal federation. Centaur games (Human + Computer help) are allowed with large time clock (50 days for the first 10 moves, and so on). I play for my fun and taking my time to dig into the problems of the position without hurry. You have to be registered at your national federation to play there but it is fun and very different of the general online chess experience which tends to be centred around blitz games.
Ask HN: Can GNU Octave be used as full MATLAB replacement?
When I left university and did not have access to MATLAB anymore, I spent many a nights hacking away at GNU Octave. I have fond memories of Octave.

I thought Octave will be a valuable skill when I enter the industry but I could not have been more wrong. Does anyone still use Octave? Is it worth learning?

What tools or languages would you recommend as alternatives to someone graduating from university today?
Even worse, in CSV the chosen separator may, depending on locale, also be used in number values which do not need quoting.
Look into Larabee's architecture: https://tomforsyth1000.github.io/larrabee/larrabee.html

It's another one involving Michael Abrash and it has inspired many research papers. For example, Intel developed a CPU rasterizer to handle occlusion culling and it can be faster than the GPU equivalent as it doesn't need retrieve data back from GPU to cull the draw calls: https://software.intel.com/content/www/us/en/develop/article...
Shipping Progressive Web Apps everywhere
You have heard of Single Page Applications, well now we need Single Function Applications ;)
> (2020-11-15) There won’t be any support for native ARM Homebrew installations for months to come. See both #7857 (comment) about CI infrastructure and #7857 (comment) about GCC for details.

Tbh it’s kind of weird to me that Apple didn’t sponsor the work needed for this, and would ensure that it happened sooner.

I mean, Apple work closely with Adobe and other software companies to ensure a good experience for the end users. At least I think they do.

And there are quite a lot of people using and depending on Homebrew.

Take myself for example, an Apple customer. I use an iPhone and a MacBook Air. But many of the tools available through Homebrew are so essential to me that without Homebrew I likely would have stuck with Linux and FreeBSD for my laptop too like I used to instead of using a MacBook Air at all.

And it’s not just one laptop either. In the future when I can afford to I am going to buy more Apple computers.
It can be neither. You can always split existing code into a series of smaller patches. What they submitted initially was closer to an extreme lack of awareness.
Gotta have money to make it go, baby...

We can't crack fusion because we can't get all the first-world nations to throw 1% GDP at it. I guarantee you, if we threw $250 billion a year at fusion, we'd have it in 10 years.
I think at one point homebrew had to crowdfund buying Mac minis, so not surprised
Not too sure about that. They are also introducing negative effects that can inhibit real investigative journalism, which already has become rare and the want for authoritative sources can be detrimental here.

They also politically aligned as we have seen in hindsight of the eternal election campaign we see for a few years now. Snopes and Politifact come to mind.

I can sympathize with positions like that, but I calling it fact checkers is way too much and they should have no authority at all, not even a larger audience.

Truth holds people accountable and this just ain't it, chief. They have already violated the basic tenets of honesty.
> the remaining 1% is stuff that you should migrate away from

I'm not following. Compiling and media editing depend on a fast platform, are you really suggesting people should avoid doing those tasks?
Show HN: Predicting Zoom’s Stock Movements with Online Review Data
I mean it's literally a board that caters to engineers and technology enthusiasts.
Nice! I'll take a look to it.

Usually, for something like that, I would use Orthanc plus a bit of Python or Lua scafolding. What advantages does WolfPACS provides?
Yes, it predates CRT displays:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card

“A 12-row/80-column IBM punched card from the mid-twentieth century”

The hardware was produced to match the fixed limitations.

Note: even with 12 rows a punched card traditionally stored only one line of the source text. That allowed editing by replacing one or more cards.

Also, even more details:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Characters_per_line
Archive.org hosts plenty of Nintendo content, they just don't show it off - I assume that is exactly because Nintendo is the only one of the orgs you listed that still goes after people hosting their 30 year old games, because they know full well that they can rip their fans off to turn them into cash again every 4 years.

When ROMs are more than a quick Google away, and they have been for a period of time last year until new ROM sites popped up, spending 45€ on some lousy "Nintendo vault" remakes is getting quite a bit more attractive.
Trying to read more about it, I cant get to the website they have listed: https://age-encryption.org/ -> NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID

"You cannot visit age-encryption.org right now because the website uses HSTS."
True. It can also have surprisingly good strength to weight ratio if used correctly.

I'm no carpenter but I'd suspect the downsides are that it's biodegradable (and hence it will rot and things will eat it), it's a biological material and so its properties are going to be somewhat inconsistent, and it's very labour intensive to build with.

I'd also be curious just how cheap it is per strength (not weight or volume) compared with steel. I'd suspect the comparison comes out heavily in steel's favour or we'd be using way more wood.
My favorite example is from MIT's Intro to Probability and Statistics course:

> Definition: The probability mass function (pmf) of a discrete random variable is the function p(a)=P(X=a).

This only makes sense if you already know what the definition is.
https://www.servethehome.com/falling-from-the-sky-2020-self-...

There you go! It was linked just below the video -- was it that hard ?
At least 3 other Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed by car bomb or similar[0]. And Fakhrizadeh had a security detail. So presumably they were well prepared for such a threat.

Anyway, it sounds like the remote-control-truck story is a pure fabrication.

[0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Iranian_nucle...
There is no such thing as "more" or "less" accent from a purely linguistic point of view. You can of course distinguish accents by how close they are to some standard accent, but English doesn't even have a single standard accent.

The idea that "some people have accents, but I speak the pure (or a purer version of the) language" plays right into the notion of accentism.
> One of the worst things about Zoom, a friend in finance tells me, is not being able to pick up the status signals and thereby knowing who you can ignore in a meeting.

Man, I'd be tempted to make Zoom compulsory then... Imagine a world where people have to discuss ideas on their merits purely with logical arguments, rather than relying on behind-the-scenes class-solidarity pacts and other unfair arrangements to dismiss the hoi polloi...
How to Optimize ECom Ad Budgets
Falling from the Sky 2020 Self-Hosting Still Pays
I've always preferred MATLAB to Python as the more engineer-friendly programming language. The interface was a plus as well. That being said, given the sheer amount of scientific libraries for Python and universities moving towards it as well, I'm wondering if the effort to maintain Octave is worth it.

One use for it could definitely be running older MATLAB scripts that have deprecated language features. Those were a real pain to make work again.
The thing is, most of the language courses I've ever been on do not focus on pronounciation. They'll get you to close enough, but not correct your errors beyond that. Same seems to be the case for my kid's language courses.

I don't think it would be that hard to get the pronounciation right in most languages, but it's just not emphasised in favour of grammar and vocab.

As for English accents, I find that one of the more charming things about this country. People aren't going to say you don't aren't native if you sound Liverpudlian, Australian, or American. By contrast in more localized languages people sniff a foreigner immediately on a missed vowel or wrong article.
"Imagine if the average programmer needs 5 highly specialized laptops to improve their job prospects -- not many will do that even when they have the money."

This may also mean that the average programmer will be stuck with a concrete platform, because the cost of migration would be too high.

There is a similar situation in a different highly qualified field - airline pilots. If you are a pilot and want to change to another airline, you lose all your seniority and begin at the bottom of the ladder, even if you are an experienced captain with a lot of miles under your belt. [0]

[0] https://askthepilot.com/questionanswers/seniority/
> this element (3e20 + 4e01 + e12) now represents [...] the point at (3,4)

Note that this is just the Hodge dual of (3e1 + 4e2 + e0), or, as you labelled it previously, (3x + 4y + w)...
> Tbh it’s kind of weird to me that Apple didn’t sponsor the work needed for this, and would ensure that it happened sooner.

They could donate something, but why should they? It’s community project not run by Apple. We, users, who actively use it to make professional work, should be responsible for supporting community projects like that. :)
The most notable trick in Quake I (at least IMHO) is the triangle rasterizer line-loop which schedules the divide needed for perspective-correct texture mapping to the FPU so that this expensive divide can run in parallel to pixel-span rasterization on the integer ALU. To my young brain who's only done 8- and 16-bit assembly on simple CPUs before this was nothing short of rocket science :)
To What Extent Do We See with Mathematics?
> Just a few spaces per indent level

> To make this work, and yet allow a few indent levels, the code basically have to have small indent-levels, so I prefer to have it set to two spaces per level.

I agree with everything else in the article, except this. IMO two-space indentation is the cancer of the JavaScript world. I find it extremely hard to read.
I do know that POTS is analog (at least the wire to my house is, I presume at some point it becomes digital), not digital, but the larger point stands.
My fav Udemy course is a bash shell scripting course[0] . The content is worth reviewing especially for any beginner/intermediate sysadmins/devops/backend devs.

Another one I like is an intermediate js one JavaScript: Understanding the Weird Parts[1]

[0] https://www.udemy.com/course/complete-bash-shell-scripting

[1] https://www.udemy.com/course/understand-javascript
These project operate at a much different pace than the JDK. Actually, it makes everyones life easier: any sane project at scale already uses a dependency management tool, and it's just another entry there. Also, it makes it possible to nail down the JavaFX version that is used. It's one moving target less that varies by JRE version at deployment time and can ruin the show.
Max Howell should have continued to hack on KDE instead of creating homebrew ;)
Punched cards. The 80x12 format "IBM card" was introduced in 1928! [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punched_card#IBM_80-column_for...
While we're doing jokes, here's mine:

I paid for the whole monitor, I'm gonna use the whole monitor!
As I wrote, it's very subjective. I've been working at 40 Hz for 2 years and I didn't notice the difference. I press windows-fn-F9/F10 instead of only fn-F9/F10, not a big deal. Automatic brightness control as on phones? I would probably disable that anyway.

By the way, brightness control didn't work in 2014, then started working, then it stopped working again. Kernel versions / NVIDIA drivers, who knows.
I feel a lot better about giving edit feedback ~for free~ unsolicited from time to time now.
> We're talking about Apple, right? The company that made an entire software platform called Bootcamp, specifically to enable a competitor's OS to run on their hardware?

Let's rephrase that: The company that made a generic X86 computer and intentionally created a non-standard way to boot operating systems on their run-of-the-mill X86 hardware, so that other X86-compatible operating-systems running on the same hardware would have issues and make OSX look better by comparison.

Yeah, that company. I don't expect them to do jack shit for compatibility.
When i pasted text from my open office document i lost new lines/paragraphs. I am no fan of pasting styles between documents but at least the blocks should be kept. The wysiwyg should have an option to paste formatted text or maybe just add better handling of \r\n or \n because it looks like \n\n is just replaced with \n which loses the block structure.
It’s true that I lived there in the second half of the 90s and a lot (and not really much. It’s weird) has happened since.

I have often indeed been told that the younger (my?) generation is quite different on numerous aspects from the previous ones. From how they see foreigners to their relationship to work.
Despite what people say, I view the possibility that Microsoft might switch to the Linux kernel to run Windows as very much real.

NT is very much legacy code in maintenance mode, switching to something that's more modern that's also the base for Android makes a lot of sense.
My relatively new Nokia feature phone has very good voice quality.
Not sure I understand what you're saying in the last paragraph, but critique against lobbying definitely hits closer to home recently in EU at least; eg. just yesterday, French magazine Le Point has published a leaked Google memo detailing their strategy against new EU legislation [1]; paywalled, unfortunately, but [2] (in German) has some more details.

After all, politicians in democracies should be responsible to their electorate, shouldn't they?

[1]: https://www.lepoint.fr/high-tech-internet/exclusif-comment-g...

[2]: https://www.lobbycontrol.de/2020/11/mit-harten-bandagen-wie-...
I think that depends where you are. I'm a Londoner, and I can generally pick out who is or isn't a native speaker, but I don't remark on it. Lots of people here aren't native English speakers, and all I'd accomplish by pointing that out would be alienating them. I imagine you get a similar feeling in New York or San Francisco, not that I've been to those places.

Conversely, if you go to some parts of the North, people absolutely _will_ remark on it.
In my opinion it is absolutely 100% worth "developing" Octave (the word 'maintain' makes it sound like it's an otherwise static project).

The improvements from 3 to 4 were massive. The improvements from 4 to 5 equally so. I can't wait to try 6.

In any case, it is definitely not just a tool for running 'old matlab scripts'. It is a beautiful language and environment in its own right, and if academia manages to wake up at some point they would invest in it for the open source environment that it is, in a way similar to python, and help it get even more amazing.
sdf stands for "signed distance function". It helps the magic of ShaderToy [0] to obtain real time rendering in the browser. Note how the animations on the ShaderToy website aren't videos but real-time renderings. See e.g. how straightforward the coneSdf is implemented [1].

[0] https://www.shadertoy.com/

[1] https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4l3BW7

float coneSDF( vec3 p, vec2 c )
{
float q = length(p.xz);
return dot(c,vec2(q,p.y));
}
Apple fined in Italy for misleading consumers over waterproof iPhones