skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As of right now, I end up with discussions spread across email, SMS, phone, and an issue tracking system (Redmine).

That's likely going to stay that way, because there are people on both ends, not machines. They'll write an FB messenger note about "coming with us to lunch?, oh, btw, we found an interesting bug in xyz, you really need to frobnicate the belzebubs"; And then they'll send you an SMS while driving (because their in-car system is older), "oh, and the original fix doesn't fix the bug".

This is a people problem, not a technical problem. It takes discipline, but at an old job I simply refused to respond to anything that wasn't filed in Jitterbug (ultra-low-ceremony issue tracking from the Samba project). And as a result, all was tracked properly.

Now that people have phones that take pictures and whatsapp, they take screenshots and send them to me, and I have no better workflow to offer, so I do accept those issues as well.

I suspect no piece of infrastructure will be the ultimate thing. What you described above will likely make a difference only if it can only receive SMS, WhatsApp, FB Messenger, and somehow do it without requiring your users to call/message/email a different address.
Depends on how her/his skills apply to such company / role.

I.e. at FB, you could be E7 by just technical work, but you had to be really good and be able to pick important problems and solve them (say that you are able to design and implement core systems for example). But it's easier to get above E5 by going TL way.
Juju Olli 8 pluie l8
I'm sorry but I find this sort of thing completely unacceptable. Companies who are caught doing this sort of thing should be fined into bankruptcy as a deterrent for others in the future who may consider trying the same thing.
I have a similar dream, but knowing lots of people in the business I plan to do it only in
“retirement,” by which I mean whenever I have enough money to live without the bar/café making any profit.

Because one of the key things I’ve learned from those I’ve known in the business is that it’s sometimes very, very stressful to make your living this way. And, as the pandemic has shown us, sometimes hard work isn’t enough.
Comprehensive Guide to Email Deliverability
I work in automotive, its the same here. There isn't a single person who you can find that has a big picture detailed understanding of the whole system.
This argument is patently ridiculous. New efficiencies in electrical devices has partly driven a huge decline in real emissions in both America and Europe.

Meanwhile, the real perpetrators of emissions get a pass. Again. Thanks BBC!
Midiblocks – Programming with Face Gestures
It doesn't shift blame onto individuals, because:

"Platforms and regulators should limit streaming resolution and default to SD, the authors urged."

While I agree it probably won't do much, you could argue that streaming high definition video just to listen to a song is a bit pointless (and with YouTube apparently being the world's largest music streaming service, this is pretty common)
Gromyko and Punk Rock? Sorry, that's impossible, for Gromyko "everything was going acording to the plan" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDCDsKHCE8s
In the UK, Octopus Energy[0] have a tariff like this. They have a 35p / kWh price cap to limit that risk. With the average price of electricity around 15p / kWh here, it means the risk isn't too great as long as the shortages don't go on too long.

[0] https://octopus.energy/agile/
Backpropagation through, well, anything (2018)
To borrow a reference from Alex Crompton, building software is both "Math hard" and "Bodybuilding" hard. Coding itself is then recursively "Math" hard and "Bodybuilding" hard.

Math hard is when to get something to work it's really hard "mentally" to achieve/produce/figure out, but when it works it's not a problem anymore and you can explain it to kids (like Pythagorean theorem). Bodybuilding hard is when there is clear and simple "process" to achieve a thing, but it's really hard to stick to it, because to not do so is way easier.

In coding e.g, it's boring to refactor and optimize code and not put all stuff in one place and write shitty functions.

In actual software development/management (one level "above") it seems it's really really hard for the team/company/PM/CEO to fight bloat. It's hard not to go for building new stuff and adding features. There is nothing to talk about and waste meetings on and add administrative and marketing staff early on if you're not working to "add new features". Mainly because there is no definable primary feature, no actual purpose for the software, no really good coders, and in 99% of cases no actual product and / or underlying business.
His son was a let down though.
AI is not a magic sauce
I know that people say this but I have questions:
1. Are there concrete examples where drugs have been discovered from protein folding structures? What are the biggest ones?
2. Is there machinery that already exists to take in 3D protein structures and create drugs? or is this yet another issue?
3. How does folding of a protein in the current state impacting the use of the protein when it is used? Presumably these proteins are similar to polymers where they are not super rigid in all environments, how does the environment effect the protein folding?
It's a joke, not about an actual tragedy.

A good reason to put a glass of water on bedside table is because you might be thirsty in the middle of the night. You might accidentally knock the glass over and cause a huge spill instead. So "in case he causes an accident" is silly.

If in real life someone knocked over a glass of water that they put on their bedside table, it's just like the joke, and "tragic". (And an example of life imitating art).
Absolutely! And I personally find it much more motivating than just chasing a business idea that I don't personally care about.

Does, I think, raise the chance of falling in love with your solution though, which is also dangerous.
Isn't that just the other side of the self deceit coin to have a peace of mind? If individual actions do not matter, climate change can not be our fault?

I am on team Blame Others and tend to somewhat agree though. Paraphrasing David Graeber, if a small percent of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, the state of the world reflects how they think things should be.
I’m with you. I’m all for progressive enhancement, but beyond simplistic examples (like HN voting or fancy inputs that can fall back to HTML builtins), it’s very hard—and sometimes impossible, depending on what you need to do.

I think really it comes down to where you draw the line between “document” and “application”. A document should probably work fine without needing to run any additional code. For an application, I don’t think that’s a reasonable request.
In other words, instead of doing it the standard, commonly-accepted way, the author did it his own way, and it ended up being worse.
Proof: https://www.kimnicholas.com/uploads/2/5/7/6/25766487/fig1ful...
Audit your apps User Experience with this helpful tool
> Notably one couldn’t do addition or subtraction with a slide rule; we used pencils for that.

Huh? It's trivial to make a slide rule that you can add and subtract on, you just rule linear scales on it.
GP mentioned cable insulation. Between that and food containers and gaskets, I can easily imagine that if a biological agent that could decompose petroleum-based materials were to spread, it could topple our civilization. Like, I don't care about my nylon t-shirt, but I care about the gasket in the LPG bottle underneath my sink, or about the PVC pipes that carry water into my apartment, and waste out of it.
So I've done this a few times and constantly play with the idea of offering it as a consultancy service.

Two things put me off, I do wonder if anyone else here has attempted to do it as a consultant?

Firstly, while I could quickly identify the cause of the slowdowns, the previous times I've done this I already had an intimate knowledge of the codebase so could confidently fix the problem. Without an intimate knowledge of the codebase, I fear I'd either muck up the fix, or that I'd have to rely on internal developers who, as you say, would deprioritize it or feel resentful at an outsider coming in and from their perspective effectively telling them their code is "bad" (even though I understand how these speed issues develop organically). Or would it be enough to just offer the diagnosis, but not the fix, and thus give ammo to the PMs/senior management to take the problem to their own developers and say "look, we've been told there's a problem and it's fixable, go fix it".

Secondly, how to handle getting access to their codebase/a proper debug environment that reflects production for such a short time. Again I fear it would turn into a "not my problem" scenario of trying to get a live environment setup from people who don't want to give it to you. Fixing these problems usually turns out to be fairly quick once you've identified the real cause. I can do a quick analysis just with access to a website (i.e. is it a back-end or front-end problem), but until you can run diagnostics you can't say exactly which loop/sql statement/js compilation issue/etc. is causing the problem.
AI Santa
I wonder if anybody answered "Why do you use Common Lisp?" to because I read pg's "Beating the Averages" essay. Because I am.
Multicore OCaml: November 2020 update
Some comments on yesterday's submission:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25274856
Someone who creates and relishes drama.
I’m a little stunned the reference is not obvious to a reasonably well educated person over the age of 20.

I was a baby when this album came out and knew who they were by the time I was probably 10 or so, despite the fact they had been long broken up. This is one of the most influential bands in rock music history... for an adult to be unaware, would almost be like a younger version of myself to be clueless about who Buddy Holly was.
Among developed economies, Canada is similar to Europe, and Japan is the worst for software engineers.

The Balkans pay programmers like US 7-11 cashiers. :)
From the photos it doesn't look like the chain is abrading the steel of the ship, more tearing it in the way you can tear aluminium foil with your hands.
I read the EEtimes article[1] and find it surprising that they claim to beat the Apple M1. They don't say how, though...

[1] https://www.eetimes.com/micro-magic-risc-v-core-claims-to-be...
I love how elephant means 'resemble'
uses symbol for 'family' （家）
upper radical 'knife' (刀)

Elephant in the (里的大象)

亻人 (r)en

氵水 shui

手扌 shou (of hands)

忄心 xin

犭犬 quan
豬 zhu

刀刂 dao

到 until
象 elephant

不客气
bu ke qi
[you are] welcome。
It's very interesting watching the HN response to this. So far, it largely consists of:

1. It's not the responsibility of consumers to adjust their habits, it's up to governments to mandate behavioural change

2. Tech will fix this

In response, I would say individual behavoural change could result in some of the biggest gains. My personal purchasing habits, which consist of buying almost everything second hand (and most specifically for this discussion, electronic items), minimising the number of electronic gadgets I own, wearing an extra layer before turning up my home heating, and minimising fossil-fuel based travel, have an enormous impact on my total emissions and pollutants produced. This is without me needing to outwardly display much sign of my choices, nor abidcate responsibility to some central power.

As for the second point - tech largely got us into this mess. Semiconductor manufacturing is incredibly energy-intensive, and electronics in general consume an huge amount of non-renewable minerals without much hope of recovering them. The mess generated by e-waste recycling has created some of the most persistently polluted places on the planet (take a look at Agbogbloshie, in Ghana). I don't see how increasing dependence on tech will reverse this.
I think many people read the title as “How to befriend people to influence them.”
A union is often how these sorts of things get passed into law.
It is inevitable to compare to the State of Clojure survey:
https://clojure.org/news/2020/02/20/state-of-clojure-2020

I think surveys like this are representative of dark matter programmers - Clojure over time changed from a hobby to work language.
It indeed is - it's rusted.
“For a typical 5W device, we can implement 25 cores. Who can do 25 cores in the mobile phone industry?”
I think he forgot to ask himself the really important question : who want 25 cores in a smartphone!
Francisco Franco left Spain a monarchy with minimal unemployment, the 8th highest GDP, and the 2nd highest world development rate.

Juan Carlos unraveled the monarchy. Liberal democracy has turned Spain into an economically stagnant and culturally neutered joke that is somehow less powerful and influential than Greece.

Letting your kingdom unravel for the platitudes of foreigners is sick. Franco should have put a Carlist on the throne.
How about we tax environmental damage to manufacturers and suppliers, so everything auto balances itself?

I see this and similar conversations just as distractions to keep few clinical psychopaths profiting few more decades on a non renewable business model.

Tax the pollution fist, then we can discuss these things.
This gives a good impression how much that reduces the footprint compared to the commonly blamed activities:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-...
The annoying thing is that YouTube’s audio quality is linked to the selected video quality, so watching a music video in SD will often also result in inferior audio.
Both breaking ships though.
*Mendeleev
Some arguments below blaming software bloat on nefarious action by big tech and platform owners. Maybe, but there's a simpler explanation: your computer's speed is a public good, shared by the hosted applications.

When you run multiple applications, if one of them is bloated and slow, it takes up processor time and memory. This is then not available to the other applications. So your whole phone/laptop slows down. You don't blame the app. You blame the phone/laptop, and think about buying a new one. As a result, there is little incentive for app developers to create lean, speedy applications. This is a standard public goods problem.

Apple may perhaps be deliberately slowing their computers down with software upgrades, but they probably don't need to. They can just wait for app developers to do it for them.

This argument also challenges the article's optimism that slow apps create a market opening for faster apps. In particular, while faster startup is something users notice (and blame on the app), memory bloat is not. So developers are likely to (over-)optimise for startup speed, at the cost of being memory-hungry, which in time slows the whole computer down.
Nature shows us nothing. Nature is an abstraction for a collection of different systems in a state of dynamic equilibrium. What is unsustainable disappears and the rest remains as long as it can until it is replaced.

Wood used to not rot for millions of years. That's where lignite comes from.
Yeah the first half seems questionable, but the second one is great.

Use your phones, and everything else, for longer. Fix stuff if it breaks. It's not rocket science.
Simple Advent of Code Discord Leaderboard Bot Written in TypeScript
This is simple a discord bot written in TypeScript for Node.js that posts to a discord channel when the stars or the score on a private leaderboard have changed.

No fancy integrations, just using Discord client for posting the messages.
How many airline pilots are in a position to publically say that and still keep their jobs?
You can make systemic changes to reduce the amount of animal products that people consume.

For a start, you could stop subsidizing them. For the long term you could fund a massive meat replacement research project.

(Though I disagree with the OP that this is the biggest issue, it is a large enough issue that it's worth tackling it, and certainly larger than streaming video.)
Germany spent a lot of money on renewables and they still ended up as one of the countries with the highest levels of CO2 in Europe. That said, it's not for nothing because while this is was a combination of a lot of mistakes, everyone else gets to learn from these mistakes. Other countries could simply cut emissions by replacing coal with gas, cheaply. Now they can switch to renewables at a much better price too since they've waited while Germany did a lot of the learning the hard way.
Safari may be fast, especially on mobile, but it sure is holding back everyone on features. The irony is that with WebGL2 and WASM, near-native-speed applications would be possible.

Also, if there were Safari APIs for all their fancy chip features, developers might actually use them widely.

The problem is that if this happened, Apple would lose its monopoly on a good app experience. They need web technology to be crappy, and poor performance is part of that picture.
One thing I found interesting about the novel was that the depicted Martian utopia is just as growth hungry as contemporary capitalism.

[spoiler warning] The premise, in fact, is that Mars has consumed its major resources, and now needs to colonise either Venus or Earth in order to survive. The latter option possibly involves exterminating all Earthlings.

I've come across claims that communism is a solution to capitalism's unsustainable growth demands, and it was fun reading a major Russian revolutionary imagining his communist utopia with the very same demands.
Well thank YOU, but not everyone is YOU. This is like saying: "I've been a huge strong male for 35 years and I haven't killed anyone so far. I think murder should not be a crime, we can regulate ourselves. Take me for example."

No, you are not the example, you are the exception.
You're discounting a key variable in the equation: You can't teach people who are not motivated to learn; who don't have enough desire to learn; who literally can't afford a "life changing" transition.

Given the pay rate of oil workers, few are going to plan ahead and switch careers to something paying less. Keep in mind, that new pay drops further as the supply (of devs) increases.

In theory, I agree with you. However, the reality is inertia is a key force in life. My life. Your life. All our lives. And a magic wand - Poof! You're a software developer - has little proof of effectiveness to date under such circumstances. Yes, some success stories, but none the less limited. More software bootcamps are the answer? I'd like to see evidence of that.

We're not going to solve real problems with fantasy based on disconnected from reality. If we could this conversation would not be necessary.
The Icelandic parliament would be up there at around 1100 years old.
> So does this count as a form of intelligent design

No, because the resulting organisms are still very much evolved rather than designed. They still have masses of junk DNA and stupid path-dependencies like the appendix and the recurrent laryngeal nerve.

> would a hypothetical alien race be able to detect this kind of intervention by examining future species?

Yes; we've been able to tell from its genome that brewers' yeast is an ancient deliberate hybridisation of two wild yeast strains, so future aliens could presumably do the same.
This can be viewed as a battery defect, especially if it's not user replaceable. Battery usable capacity vs longevity is a tradeoff in how the BMS in configured.
This is just a further misunderstanding of the market. People optimize for who their customers are. Knowing what devices your code runs on is trivially easy, and so is measuring its performance against them. People aren’t going to instantaneously make their code 20x slower just because the new Apple chip is so good. But they’re also not going to optimize for that old Samsung phone that represent 0.0003% of their user base.
You hit a vein of truth here, I don't recall any of that being covered in a university course or in any of the companies I've worked with. My knowledge too comes from dabbling with gamedev, programming/hacking underpowered hardware (90's consoles), and spending (too much) time on open-source projects where performance optimization mattered.

I don't expect my colleagues to have the same kind of experience, but I would expect someone presenting as a "senior frontend engineer" to understand the GC impact of allocating thousands of objects in a tight computation loop; or of doing heavy computations / updating the DOM inside a mouse move event handler.

On the other hand, Slack is worth $27.7B and is still selling a product that has frustrating multi-second delays on standard keyboard interactions, so I don't know. Maybe I am really just expecting too much.
People who started with CL but switched to Clojure may also be a contributing factor.
Nice. It's good that research like this is carried out. However, it's totally an 80-20 kind of a game. If we have any chance of stabilizing the climate, its only through focusing aggressively on the 80% part of the above.

For example, reading 'ditch new tech to fight climate change', I was hoping to get an article on massive reforestation schemes, agroforestry, or something old-new along those lines. Sure, it would be a massive effort, but that's low cost highly available and accessible carbon sequestration tech right there. You just need to incentivize people and organizations appropriately.

Actually, we could just start by doing something about the aggressive deforestation going on in Brazil right now.
Point taken, you're right re nginx
I only had deeper interactions / usage with two Lisps so far: Racket and Clojure.

CL must have some unique appeal that I'm missing. It's community seems to praise it's properties, but is rather quiet otherwise: Interesting talks, projects and companies are be eluding me, especially when compared to the above two Lisps.
Making this interactive, Bret Victor style, with a slider for theta and show the actual numbers somewhere - might help?
It does look almost like magic, and it is an amazing achievement, but mostly it's down to dedication and hard work, not talent. Talking about "talent" in this context is almost always down-playing the work that's gone into it.

The number of people who genuinely have talent in this sort of thing is very, very small. For the vast majority it's a willingness to work on it, and a good teacher. You can be an auto-didact, but that's then an additional skill.

Almost anyone can learn 3, can learn Mills Mess, can learn the basics of 4, and get learn a few dozen 3 ball tricks and patterns.

Getting to 5 requires significant dedication, but the reason most people don't do it is because they don't invest the time required.

Talent isn't a myth, but it's seriously over-rated, and usually just an excuse for not putting in the work. It doesn't need an excuse -- if you don't want to put in the work then don't.

But it's almost invariably not a lack of talent.
I was just going to post the same link here ;)

Great game highly recommended
If any were to, I'd hope it'd be YouTube. For better or worse, it's an amazing repository of what it is to be human in the early 21st century in terms of the billions of hours of evidence that people record and upload. Imagine being an archaeologist in 1000 years having access to this.
The quality of social services and healthcare in EU countries is grossly overestimated. One can easily be left behind with no support American-style in countries like Spain, Italy, Poland, Czechia, not even mentioning Bulgaria or Romania. In countries with developed services and healthcare like Germany of Finland, the language barrier will heavily handicap one's ability to even benefit from them.

One simply sees their paycheck cut by ~40% monthly and in case of crisis situation is always put at the end of the queue as a low priority applicant. That's ranging from irritating to infurating depending on the urgency of one's problems.