skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Let's see how this essential complexity claim holds for a couple of things I did recently at work:"

"For some queries, it's arguably zero — my work was necessary only because of some arbitrary quirk and there would be no work to do without the quirk. But even in cases where some kind of query seems necessary, I think it's unbelievable that essential complexity could have been more than 1% of the complexity I had to deal with."

It's very clear that the author of the post understands "essential complexity" as related to thinking about the query they need to write (data structures).

The issue is that in today's computing environments application programming is only a fraction of solving the problem of delivering the application.

They too see the essential (or inherent) complexity as being a domain and requirements related thing, but they draw the conclusion that they are somehow not part of it.

It is possible the whole app and system would be unnecessary if the essential complexity was addressed differently.

And it is also possible that due to the current way of doing things, there are new sources of essential (inherent) complexity.

Brooks couldn't have foreseen productivity gains coming from the internet and collaboration. But if you factor all that in and create a new baseline, faster machines still don't tell you what is the best way to deal with changes in requirements or how to represent a postal address so that it works internationally.
Keep-It from Reinvented Software. I love it!
We had a 5% decline in suicide this year in Sydney. Although it wasn’t a very hard or long lockdown. The hypothesis is that increased welfare payments may be the reason but personally I believe the slow down/pause to what was a hectic pace of life, and being at home with family more contributed.
It seems like the poll was just a few thousand people [1]. If we look at some specific poll questions:

> Moreover, fewer than half (47%) are able to correctly

> identify that this statement is false: “A group of

> Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are

> trying to control our politics and media.” Thirty-seven

> percent are unsure whether this theory backed by QAnon is

> true or false, and 17% believe it to be true.

47% identify the statement as false, 17% identify it as true and I assume the rest are unsure. This sounds about right for most unproven things.

I would suggest that given the long list of powerful contacts Epstein is confirmed to have had, his seemingly random rise to wealth, the idea that he wasn't a lone wolf isn't insane.

Also you have to consider that something like "Satan-worshipping" is loaded, as to a religious person anybody conducting such acts could be said to be following the path of Satan. Given the large number of Christians in the US, it's not unreasonable to believe this could have been misinterpreted.

> Nearly half (47%) believe the majority of protests this

> summer were violent, while just 38% correctly indicated

> that this is a false statement.

I am open to be corrected, but by all accounts there was at least some form of arrests at most large protests and many of those were violence related. I personally watched about 20 random live streams on Twitch and each time there was somebody who got into a fight. I imagine they are conflating violent protests with riots (where you have a significant number of agitators)?

I remember watching some news reporter state that the protests had been largely peaceful as a building burned down behind him. I don't think it could be argued that most large news outlets have become political in nature - historically the press and politicians would work hand in hand.

> More than one in three Americans believe in the existence

> of a so-called “deep state;”

My understanding is that the "deep state" is essentially the permanent state - groups such as the CIA, FBI, NSA, etc, that hold enormous amounts of power and act on scales longer than most presidencies and without democratic oversight.

I think that some of what this poll considers to be "fact" is simply from one of these "fact checker" services, which are based on existing evidence and general consensus rather than any kind of real investigation past a Google search by one random person.

[1] https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/npr-misinformation-12...
Nat joked about this when it launched: "The battle for webgl globe supremacy will bring peace in our time" -- https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1336331076503916545

FWIW I'm currently running a Twitter poll to see whose globe people like better. 8 hours in the votes are running 60% Github, 40% Stripe:

https://twitter.com/calcsam/status/1344396912896712706
Release of Cyberpunk 2077 is not a problem of bad software engineering
It's usually dehumanized into something like "the market will adjust its behavior to reward manufacturers of higher quality products"
A very obvious example is the restaurant industry. 90% of managers started out in an entry level position. 80% of owners started out in an entry level position. Pricing people out of the labor market doesn't help them.

https://restaurant.org/research/restaurant-statistics/restau...
> Minimum wage by ruins a lot of poor young people ability to gain skills.

There are some jobs that don't get done because of minimum wage, but the claim you make is much stronger and really demands some evidence.

> And everytime its raise poor people especially poor young boys with no skills take the brunt of the pain.

So you are saying that the long stretches where real minimum wage erodes are good things for “poor young boys”? Because I don't think there are any measures of the welfare of that group that support either that necessary corollary or your specific claim.
> It will comeback to the society as taxes.

It should, but it doesn't.

Amazon is a classic example. Despite being the beneficiaries of many types of corporate welfare (including paying some full-time employees so poorly that they had to be on welfare), Amazon has paid $0 in tax a few times.

In fact, there is no meaningful relationship between Amazon's profits and taxes. Their profits go up, and sometimes their taxes actually go down[1].

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/fWL3rv40cvsIPAqSvf1wz...
It's called dumping and depending on the specifics and jurisdiction, it can be illegal. It falls under the general umbrella of anti-competitive actions.
If your business cannot afford to pay a living wage, it does not have a viable business model. No amount of dressing it up or attempting to shift the blame will change that fact.

That the unions and local governments are attempting to ensure a business isn't extorting labor out of the population is a _good_ thing.

Yeah, it sucks that taxis aren't cheap and also pay drivers well. It also sucks that we don't have light rail going everywhere. In both cases the implementation is just not economical. Therefore we need a different solution that doesn't sacrifice people at the altar of convenience
I work in IT, write software, and have a significant number of hobbies centered around computing and I don't even think Linux is a viable choice for me [0]. But there's a lot of Linux evangelists out there who simply refuse to believe there is anything wrong with it for anybody.

[0] and belive me, I've tried [1][2].

[1] Some evangelist is typing a response right now about how I haven't really tried. They are part of the problem.

[2] I've put together my own distro, written and contributed to open source projects, until sometime earlier this year ran Linux on 4/5 computers I used regularly at home (now down to 1/5), and was even president of a LUG for a while. So shut up about how your grandma uses it as a web kiosk so it must be fine for everyone.
This is what I've been using to learn CL. It's a very small barrier to entry compared to when I've tried (and failed) in the past to approach Lisp from Emacs.
Indeed. Arguing that Linux makes a good web appliance does not endear it to anyone who needs more than a web appliance.
It's not a price control, it's a minimum wage. The developed world has decided that it's better for some jobs to not exist than to allow exploitative wages.
Have you got a source for that? It's the first time I've heard it and I'm interested to learn more, specifically about the kiss/pathogen response part.
Where are all the new games and animations, then? They used to be everywhere. People stopped making them because the tooling went away.
We have a good standard, SVG. It's just that the implementation has been slow and buggy, and the animation stuff may never be implemented.
Thanks for the correction, no blend mode ever it is
Anecdotally, i always thought i was a resilient person but unemployment is really getting to me. i finished my phd last December, have done excellent work published really good journals in my field (and publicly well known) but i couldn't stand the insane hours in academia. my advisor took out patents on my first author work but i did't argue for the sake of my degree. I have no network because i just sat in my office and worked daily...didn't make many friends in grad school...just worked. i'm never going back to academia; rent seeking vampires. the worst part is my advisor discouraged me from looking for internships over the summer. kicked me to the curb after all of that work.

now, I send out applications daily, work on 'projects', and grind leetcode. It's so hard to get an interview without any network. I'm a very disciplined person, gym in the morning, eat breakfast in the office and work until my goals for the day are met. moving back home, unemployment, and no gym removed those structures from my life. I run a lot now days but the gym was my social life. my phd involved a lot of coding, hpc work, and 'data science', i don't understand why i can't get past recruiters. it sucks being 30, doing a difficult thing, and now being broke and unemployable. my undergrad students i taught have found jobs...i don't understand.

in the interviews i've gotten, it seems like if i make one little mistake, i'm out or ghosted. i wrote and app for a well-known start-up in my area and then they ghosted me. i don't get this market.

i'm starting to get really scared; these past two weeks i've sat in my room silently screaming and crying...I've never done that in my life. i run by some cliffs on a hillside and have really started to wonder...because i'm not afraid. i just don't want my family to have to go through it....creeping thoughts of uselessness, wasted life, and being a burden.

sorry it's fragmented and don't worry i'm not going to do anything drastic...i still want to learn to paraglide and get to the top of denali...i can't go through life without doing those.

..i think my going to find some open source projects to contribute to...i think that might be a good way of doing things.

anyway a view from the other-side. sorry for the vent...i don't have anyone to talk to.
In a vacuum maybe, but one of the major challenges in any large technical organization is architectural alignment between different work streams. Meaning, that whatever you're doing for project A also has to be compatible for whatever is happening with completely different project B. Given how social cliques work, even if you are a senior engineer it's possible to find yourself going back to others over and over again just to make sure you're aligned with the major decision makers.
No animals found with the virus because its man made and escaped from the Wuhan lab.

China can never admit they are responsible for so many deaths.
Thanks for this. I didn't see your other comment about the guidelines. If you have a link to it, I'd be interested to read it.

I'm not asking you to "behave yourself". I don't look at your comments that way at all. I'm asking you to treat HN as a community that you're part of.

I think you're underestimating the good faith in readers here. It is an unfortunate consequence of HN's non-siloed structure (i.e. there's no filtering or selection of who one's subscribed to—just one big room) that bad actors, even when they are a small minority, create an overwhelming and shocking experience of the community being that way. It is not objectively true. Actually the opposite is true: this community is, for a place that includes millions of people, actually relatively functional. (Note that word 'relatively'. Obviously it's still dysfunctional. The question is how do we nudge it into less dysfunction.) I've written about this here if anyone cares: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098.

Re making things worse: there are, unfortunately, many ways to make HN worse. I'm not saying you're doing all of them, just one of them. You posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25565642 5 times—that's obviously not cool, regardless of how badly you were provoked. When I say that, it is in no way a defense of bad actors. I'm just trying to prevent this place from degenerating deeper into hell, or at least to slow hell down a bit.
I don't know what GP is trying to say, but the problem was that they never provided any actual evidence. Everything was presented on social media was made of videos that might have looked suspicious to someone not familiar with the process, but easily were debunked. For similar reason no viable evidence was provided to courts.

Frankly, I would be glad if we would actually ban electronic voting machines, and use paper ballots. There were some fishy things happening in states[1] that didn't get as much attention. It's much harder to commit fraud on larger scale with paper ballots, since everyone knows how they work and it is much harder to hide things.

[1] https://www.dcreport.org/2020/12/19/mitch-mcconnells-re-elec...
> Cross platform my butt, Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows, and occasionally on Mac. Everybody else on mobile and Linux got ignored

This is my view as well. Windows on x86 was the golden child. Linux was the hated bastard at best (anyone remember switching between OSS, ALSA and PulseAudio to eke any sound out of the plugin?).

And even that only on x86. ARM? What, you mean that's a processor architecture? That's not even going into the utter dead silence when it came to supporting other Adobe plugins outside of Windows. Adobe Air? Shockwave? I can still easily feel my blood boiling at the absence of these plugins, after so so many years.
I think there's two reasons.

First is that the costs are hidden and complicated. We need a decent understanding of economics combined with an honest and deep analysis of the consequences of the specific policy to conceptualize why it's deleterious. Very few people will tick both boxes.

Second is that politicians want to be seen to be doing something. Even if leaving the market alone is the best of all options.
I know this is in jest, but this will never work in practice if you did actually try it.

Over-engineering is never done by accident; there's a reason for it. The reason is that someone's personal goals took priority over the actual business problem that the software should resolve. Someone wants to be a CTO or head of engineering and speak at AWS conferences about very complex (but self-inflicted) problems, someone wants to manage multiple people under them (even though the combined business value delivered is often below what a single employee on a non-crazy stack can deliver) or play with latest Terraform, serverless, JS framework of the day, etc.
To be pedantic, you can't actually prove anything, positive or negative, outside of the realm of logic and mathematics.
The problem is companies/teams only want to hire 22 year old "experts". Try interviewing as a 22 year old and admitting you aren't one; your interviewers will think you're a dumbass.
I did just that, emailed SWFs mostly to myself, and a couple of times to my more savvy classmates who knew how to use them.

I also recall having a stash of standalone SWF gamęs on my shared network drive at school, because all EXEs were restricted and SWF files could be opened by drag-and-drop on the Internet Explorer window.
How many people have the current SOTA systems killed?
I purchased a book this year which included encoding errors. Original greek text which amounted to a couple of quotes was replaced with garbage output. Tables were printed but unformatted. Furthermore, it only included the first 1/2 of the text. The entire second half of the book was missing. I could look past many of these except for the last. Selling half a book is fraud.
Uber drivers are adults who are not being exploited by any one. They are free to choose any manner of employment available to them. That is the beauty of the free market.

Taxis are absolutely terrible monopolistic businesses with absolutely no regard for proper service. Uber and Lyft thrived because taxis are so disastrous.
Where do you live that that is a viable option?

Outside of super-dense urban centers, there is almost no public transit, and taxi/Uber rides are prohibitively expensive because of the distances involved. Outside of cities, it's not unusual to drive >100 miles on an average day.

And that's on easy mode, when you don't have kids to ferry around.
So this article only seems to discuss historical inflation over decades and generations and then points out that because technology and the standard of living have improved so much more inflation isn't relevant.

However iflation is an epstimplgocial fact that does need to be considered. There is X amount of good and services currently available or able to be produced. There are Y amount of dollars to do that with. If I increase Y that doesn't change the actual amount of stuff available that just means each X now costs more.

The classic example of this is college prices. The government dumped a ton of money into the higher education sector via grants and subsidized loans now the quality of education hasn't changed drastically but the cost has risen astronomically because just making it easier for people to get money for something doesn't change the underlying problem that a thing is limited.

I'll also say that the other argument I've seen used against inflation is that people have been wanrning about it for years and nothing bad has happened yet. Countries and national economies operate on a timescale of years and decades not weeks and months. Saying inflation doesn't matter because nothing bad has happened yet is similar to manager deciding developers are wasting too much time in meetings and discussion and they need to get coding then pointing out the burn down chart a week later as proof of his reasoning, completely ignorant of the fact that he's added crippling technical debt to the process.
I said much the same in another comment -- my kids (5 & 8) play a bunch of browser games, but eventually they'll have their own phones and steam accounts (and credit cards) and stop playing free stuff in the browser.
> that is extremely wrong by my moral standards

Selling people what they want for cheap prices is extremely wrong?
> Legacy media institutions have destroyed their credibility because of this race to the bottom

Sure, but the new crop of media that we've seen arise in the past couple of years isn't objectively better - it's just wretched in different ways.
Minimum wage and rent control are both examples of price controls. This is Econ 101 terminology.
No one has tried it because it's a silly and naive idea. The rest of the economy would correct for the adjustment, leaving us in the same situation and causing a lot of pain for workers and businesses in the process.
Does it? Genuinely asking. I would expect the precision involved to do this to be a lot higher than when you have actual landing legs, which would provide some bit of “buffer” for hitting the target landing point. A RUD that takes out the first stage is one thing, but a RUD that takes out the first stage and the tower?
It’s true it’s been an experiment since the St. Lawrence Seaway was opened, but there are plenty of native species left in the Great Lakes.

This includes everything from walleye, lake trout, and perch all the way down to daphnia and diatoms.

The problems for native species in the Great Lakes has been driven by the introduction of zebra mussels, quagga mussels, the round goby, and spiny water flea (bythotrephes) for native food sources.

These new species have interrupted the food chain and therefore the reproductive fitness for many native species which further decimates the natural Great Lakes ecosystem.
Copper (Cu)
> It would be more enjoyable to develop

In my experience, cross-platform is less enjoyable to develop. Yes, it might be more valuable to users for a program to be cross-platform, but it is definitely more enjoyable to develop something that just has to run on a single platform.

For cross-platform work, you have to use languages, runtimes, and libraries that are supported across multiple platforms.

When you are doing single platform work, you can use all the cross-platform languages and libraries and tools, plus all the other languages, libraries and tools that are on the single platform.

I suspect the difference was even more stark in 1999 because Windows was even more dominant than it is now.
But at least the gate would automatically close once they went through.
I think that stuff was on its way out before Flash's general demise. I think people (let's be honest, mostly kids) seeking that sort of content now will download games on their phone and watch YouTube/TikTok. They're probably on a phone/tablet instead of sitting at a desktop anyways.

It could be a combination of both - the tooling for creating that stuff with just JS/HTML is not as good and the diminished demand prevents the creation of such a product.
There are plenty of terrorist attacks in the US too, from the wiki below China does have a few years with big numbers but the US page doesn't include a bunch of mass shootings by far right white MAGA and single white men wackos.

And despite those numbers the US isn't rounding up millions of our own citizens into 're-education camps.' I'm sure the 'whatabout' is the stupid wars in the middle east which are undoubtedly horrible and should fairly be condemned (and definitely are). But the US is not waging an ethnic genocide on our own citizens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_China#Terrorist_i...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States...
Copper – The Metal
Non-autonomous trucks probably do some of the time. I'm from a snowy place and actual big snow storms with significantly reduced visibility are infrequent, probably on the order of one day out of 100. It might be OK to compromise and say that the autonomous part of the fleet doesn't go out when that happens.
Silicon level Amazon Echo Flex teardown
This is what happens when the state acts like your nanny. Overzealous local restrictions on businesses is what led to this. The market would have dealt with the threat of infection perfectly. But it wasn't allowed to. And it shows that any sort of government regulation, regardless of intent, will always hurt the small guy, while the Bezos' of the world will find a way to profit from it.
You should check out https://www.ceros.com/

That's actually exactly what we do.
One of the most important lessons that I think it's difficult to really internalise, is that your job is far more about managing imperfections than it is about achieving perfection.

It's very hard to kill your darlings as a developer, you have the whole edifice of software engineering best practice right there on people's blogs, there are infinite frameworks, libraries and languages at your fingertips. An appreciation for what's theoretically possible is always useful, but I will hire, promote, and throw money at people who can deliver a 75% solution to a problem with 90% confidence. I will struggle with people who aim for 100% solutions that never materialise.

I don't think that I (as a younger programmer or if I'm honest even quite recently) would want to hear this, from my future self or anyone else, but I would have been happier accepting it early in my career.