skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After 15 years as an individual contributor and five as an engineering manager, I have to say, you are flat wrong. Doing the work of implementation is a dime a dozen. Getting quality RFCs and prior alignment on solution architectures is at least an order of magnitude more difficult, more valuable and more rare.

Cocksure senior engineers who think, “RFCs are easy, this’ll be quick” are the single biggest source of money-wasting errors that I have to navigate.

I’ve implemented huge distributed applications serving machine learning predictions in global scale ecommerce products, real-time image processing, eventually consistent and SOX compliant billing applications and dozens of other similar solutions in my time as an individual contributor.

Being a manager responsible for not wasting hundreds of person-years on the wrong architecture is way more challenging. It’s not even the same sport.
That's what I thought, but my effects were mild compared to what I've heard other people reporting. Either I got milder side-effects because I'm young, or I'm fooling myself.
People still do this even without flash. Lots of people post tiny online games that require dragging the mouse with the left mouse button pressed and it's clear they forgot/ignored that the majority of people are on laptops
It is software, of course you can (with access to source code and its tools). Car will record all of its sensor data, and we'll be able to analyze its decisions.
Sandboxing and security are only part of the reason Flash fell out of favor. It was also pretty terrible in terms of performance and battery life. While a Flash VM would address some of the security issues, it would not stop it from spinning up your CPU and burning batteries like blackened catfish.
10 hours a day is a personal nightmare. That's very much not what the best part of a 4 day week is about. Fuck this obsession with junk productivity as measured by hours - some weeks you can get more done in one day than five, but nobody would ever entertain granting such flexibility.
I had an idea once about something similar, I called it Design Picker, where you'd basically use some combination of crowdsourcing and "algo" to help you make design decisions. I had the domain for years, but I could never come up with a version of the concept I thought actual designers would actually use, so I never built it.
But when you share some HTML in practice, e.g. send a HTML game exported from Godot to a friend, they will need to unzip it and install a local web server to actually play it with appropriate permissions.

Whereas .swf files could be opened directly in the browser without any preparation steps.

It was also possible to read metadata from .swf files (background color, canvas size, etc), which made it very simple to automatically embed Flash games on web pages with the correct layout.

So there are a lot of small practical details that made .swf a very convenient format for sharing games and multimedia content.
As a Canadian who experienced urgent care in the US on a trip, no one with money would advocate for the Canadian system. The US system is mind blowingly good compared to the Canadian system. If the US could price in the externality of people who aren't covered by charging the wealthy even more, it would be way better than adopting the Canadian system.
http://bash.org/?13841
Anyone have a good explanation for why someone hasn’t built a true replacement? e.g. a good, widely used flash-like tool that compiled down to a HTML5 bundle of assets?
That code looks very familiar! I see what you mean now. I don't think I've ever seen this implemented recursively though - can certainly see how this would end up being problematic if you tried to do this in Python!

ps Thanks so much for taking the time to set this out.

pps I've been working on something that implements a highly optimised version of this style of calculation - with a DSL to describe the calcs - can do 30 year cashflow projection for 1m contracts in about 1 min on quad core laptop. UK focus initially but might have wider application?
Fair enough, but it had only been operational for a year at the time of the outbreak and is focused on veterinary science.
And you don't spend 100% of your days off not working.

The worker interviewed in the article said, "Also being on call can be a challenge, but it's nothing that's not fixable."

I understand that to mean that he's not truly working a 4-day week. He's working 4 days + on-call day(s) at times.
Act as if everyone you know has just tested positive
I agree with you on the cancer part. But speaking as somebody who has spent years as a contractor, I don't think Uber's drivers are "incredibly well-suited to being contractors".

For me, the essence of a good contractor relationship is a balance of power. It went best for me when I had multiple warm clients, giving me the ability to tell any one of them "no". This meant that they'd listen to me and bargain fairly. And if they didn't, well, I could walk and I'd be fine, especially since I was careful to keep a significant financial cushion.

Uber drivers face a tremendous power imbalance, and that was always the goal. Kalanick was aiming for a monopoly. He didn't quite get there, but given that they have 70% of the rideshare market and Lyft has the other 30%, it's close enough. With that sort of market failure, and given the eagerness of VCs to buy future market failure, there's no way I'd want to be a contractor in that market.
The Open Source Design website lists paid and unpaid opportunities for designers to get involved in FLOSS projects:

https://opensourcedesign.net/
Amazon has recently launched a virtual experienced platform and it’s actually quite fun. (when not hamstrung by technical difficulties)

https://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=19419898011
Which proves once more that the governments do not really give a flying fuck about people and are willing to keep them in jail like conditions without those people committing any offence.
Too bad they didn't shut that racket down. The whole business model is a disgrace.
Scratch is still programming first, where Flash was animation first with the ability to add programming.

The Flash IDE was probably the best part of Flash.
If Biden stops this nonsense, then he might become a good president. But wouldn't put my money on it.
These stories put out by corporations - that consumers are victimized by %thing-disliked-by-company% because the companies are forced to raise prices - are absolute BS. It's anti-tax/regulation propaganda.

Put your business hats back on: Companies don't price based on some 'cost plus' formula (e.g., 'our cost is $100, a 20% markups is 'fair', therefore we'll charge $120!'). If they did, your soda would cost 10 cents (rough estimate). Don't ask what your software would cost.

Companies set prices to maximize their profits. When Uber's costs decrease, do they cut prices or take more profit? Do they tell this story when other expenses increase? This expense is no different than all their other ones in terms of its affect on pricing. When competitive SV salaries increase, does Uber whine and say they are forced to raise prices by the cruel demands of software developers? What about when the drivers' expenses increase, such as the cost of gasoline? On an economic level, pricing depends on supply and demand, and price changes depend on the elasticity of demand (among other things).

The new law merely causes Uber to share more of its profits with the drivers. If Uber wants to raise prices, that's their problem.
I haven't worked with Unity, but doesn't it compile to web?
First of all, let me say that I've tried it :)

Your recursion needs to "bottom-out" in order for that to work. If you don't get a stack overflow / out of memory error, you're good. But bear in mind that there will be thousands of stack frames. Before you get to time=0 (the recursive base case) in a long-term liability actuarial calc.

The recursion isn't simple like the Fibonacci sequence . It's more like:

f(t+1) = if t > 0 (f(t) + g(t)) * h(t) else initial_constant

g(t) = f(t) + q(t) - d(t)

q(t) = ....

d(t) = ....
Maybe "animal husbandry" is the term you're looking for?
That can be solved. Standardized "I see you and I am yielding" signal on front of all self-driving cars.
I don't really have any way to refute what you are saying, but I don't recall the difficulties you are describing. I supported Windows desktops for many years during the heyday of the Flash Player.
> The whole lab thing is people getting cause and effect mixed up, the lab is there because novel coronaviruses keep happening in that region...

That is not the case, the outbreak in Wuhan came as a surprise even to the virologists there.

The region where you would expect this to happen is Southern China, where there's bats living close to humans, not Wuhan, where there aren't any bats at all.

The virologists in Wuhan had to travel hundreds of miles to Southern China to collect samples from bats.
Those RFID tags are pretty minimal though. Basically just a thin trace antenna and silicon die directly molded into plastic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAm7qAKAXwI

I still agree that it's amazing that our society can make functional structures with feature sizes in the nm/µm ranges so cheaply that we can afford to throw them away.
Even if you did that it wouldn't repo flash. Flash streamed the file, executing it and making it interactive to the user long before the entire file was downloaded.
Uh, QALY is definitely used by governments to decide on health and economic policy, but not in the absurd utilitarian way you're imagining.

For example, it's used to prioritize people in transplant queues. The more "use" you can get out of a new organ, the more you'll be prioritized, but it's not the only decider.
USB-PD is almost always in place on top of normal USB 5V, 500mA current delivery as a fallback. Your hack would have worked if you had a type-C plug you could have hacked apart and soldered to, and charging would have been dreadfully slow.
I 100% agree, B&H is my goto for anything photo or tech related.
So, something like GeoGuessr?
> Regardless of whether you like Flash, this should be yet another ominous warning that you do not really own your computer anymore.

This is definitely true with regard to applications and services.

People give rms a hard time for going on about free software, but he saw this coming.

"One assumption is that software companies have an unquestionable natural right to own software and thus have power over all its users. (If this were a natural right, then no matter how much harm it does to the public, we could not object.) Interestingly, the U.S. Constitution and legal tradition reject this view; copyright is not a natural right, but an artificial government-imposed monopoly that limits the users’ natural right to copy." -rms[1]

I don't suggest jumping into the deep-end with free software mentality without full consideration.

However, Google Play Music went under recently[2] with all of the content that people bought becoming potentially unavailable, so it's worth thinking about how much we don't own.

[1]- https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/fsfs/rms-essays.pdf

[2]- https://9to5google.com/2020/12/03/google-play-music-dead/
hauxir, nice job!
how is P2P implemented? I see mediasoup-client SDK in use, but that does not support P2P.
How many participants are supported by the app? WebRTC requires to re-encode each video stream, so there is a CPU limit for how many peers one can talk to.
I noticed there is some kind of latency in ms next to each participant. How is that measured - time to the next peer or time to the presenter?
If lockdowns that aren't "real" (by the way, saying "real lockdowns" brings the no true Scotsman fallacy to mind) don't work to stop the virus, then why are >95% of the countries in the world doing them, since they still have all the negative side effects but without the benefit?
This is because it was reintroduced by returning Australians due to the rest of the worlds inability to contain it. Now we'll hopefully have some minor restrictions until we get on top of things again because you can effectively contact trace at these levels of transmission.

This doesn't prove that lockdowns don't work anymore than a car crash death proves that seat belts don't work.
That's just Thunderbolt 3 without the Intel trademark "Thunderbolt" name, isn't it?
There's been lots! I've funded and contributed to many of them!

The most famous is probably OpenFL, which uses the Haxe programming language. It does exactly that. You can even use Adobe Animate to author content for it.

The main missing pieces, however, are:

1) The abstraction inevitably leaks. HTML5 is just a fundamentally fiddly bundle of tech and there's always this or that little thing that can shake loose.

2) The tech burden is fundamentally higher with an open source project no matter how you try. With Flash you never needed to even touch a command line or download anything other than the Flash authoring tool.

3) The community is smaller. Fewer tutorials, fewer people able and willing to help you out. It's respectable, but back in the day Flash's community was MASSIVE. You'd post on the forum and get a detailed technical reply in MINUTES.

4) Resources are thinner. Without Macromedia or Adobe's pockets individual developers just have to bear the burden of dev/maintenance themselves.

5) Flash portals are dead. Now everything's about app stores for software and baked-out video for animation.

It's still a great project and I use it myself, but IMHO it's going to take someone to dump a bunch of money and time on top of these ongoing projects to recreate all the magic Flash had. There's only so much a small community of open source coders can be expected to pull off.
Openfl. All flash APIs are supported and it compiles to js
FWIW, this only works for me in Chrome, not Firefox.
It's non trivial. A lot of games require trusted clients because of client side latency compensation. Also any game that requires mechanical skill (e.g. aim in an fps or actions per minute in rts) is susceptible to cheating even if all logic is serverside.

Of course trusted clients are problematic, but there is no simple solution.
Unity WebGL export is a big rusty bucket. It works but it's a) incredibly heavy, and b) the abstraction leaks and is buggy.
I dont find that very plausible. There aren't really any places on earth with that many people AND that isolated from the rest of us. For it to be common among them for a long time without escape? I'm not buying it, at least at this level of discussion.
Show HN: HomeTryons-Home-based try-on service of shoes with no obligation to buy
Hey HN,

After multiple disappointments of receiving either unfitting or ugly(in reality) shoes I ordered online, I decided to take matters into my own hands and launch a service that takes the risk out of buying shoes online by allowing shoppers to test the shoes they like, but not sure they want to buy, all from their home in exchange for a fee(depending on the item's listed price) per tested item. I believe the ability to touch and feel clothes is an essential sales driver.

Any input/feedback is highly appreciated.
How original, smart and progressive!

It's a version of what some extreme Chinese commies advocated against Hong Kong last year (they suggested to cut off water supply). The EU commies are fast learners.

The fish stocks belonged to the UK before it joined the EU. What's unjust about that?
I think the bigger problem is moderation. If little Billy or Sally have a piece of candy or two at a holiday, or a slice of cake on their birthday... No big deal. But I've found a lot of every day foods, especially in the US are so insanely sugary that normal food (I.E. Juice) is worse than candy...
What you describe sounds exactly like how Cap'n Proto works. Obviously I like that design since I wrote it.

But it does have drawbacks. The encoded size is necessarily a bit larger to allow random access traversal of the raw bytes (though it compresses well). The API to manipulate structures in-place is a little awkward, particularly on the writing side. And, you can't really use the generated types as mutable in-memory state, as people commonly like to do with Protobuf types -- as a result, a common feature request for Cap'n Proto is to support generating "native" structs with the ability to convert between those and the zero-copy types as desired.

Everything is full of trade-offs. I don't disagree with your design preferences but I do object to the extreme line you are taking on them. You said: "Protobufs isn't useful for serious network applications." That is plainly contradicted by the existence of a trillion-dollar company built on said technology.
Don't worry, you're not alone in thinking this article was trash, I stopped reading after the first paragraph
This is where it gets weird. If an Uber driver's idle time between calls is built into their pay, then a driver could use that time to work a second job. Essentially double-dipping.

I'm not against this. It just makes for weird comparisons.
For the player, https://www.openfl.org/download/ is the best replacement
Cars, motorcycles, and airplanes existed before 1970.
Presidential orders are powerful but cannot override Congress. Not much Biden can do without Mitch's approval.
Zebra Clams are changing the Great Lakes. Pretty much changing the whole ecosystem.
> While suicide is a tragedy, and in the UK a worryingly high one, the effects of covid (which aren't all due to lockdowns) would likely have increased it (economic downturns cause suicide).

This is a good point that I think people miss. The equation isn't as simple as "less lockdowns == less suicides". If the pandemic rages even worse, there are a ton of second order effects that could also trigger increasing suicide rates. Family members or friends dying to COVID, getting long term COVID complications yourself, just the emotional stress of hearing about so many deaths, economic impact.

How do we know that there would have been less suicide if there had been no lockdowns? We don't, and expressing it just as a trolley problem is an oversimplification.
Releasing unverified AV code would breach most every 'duty of care' legislation in existence. Releasing it in a way that compromises thousands of systems at a time would be the same. These are devops issues not capability.

An AV system needs to pass the driving test your 16 year old sister passed, that's it.
Yes! I've found that I sometimes will keep a subscription, even if I'm not currently using it, because I've been locked in at the old price, and can feel really annoyed when they increase the price by a significant amount or percentage and force me to adopt it.

About rent control, yup, it may have the ups and downs of real estate rent control :-)

I'm also wondering, with physical real estate, there is a tangible limit to how many people can rent the space, whereas SaaS seems to make up arbitrary user limits. But maybe I'm wrong, and there is a limited number of users because each user has variable costs—in the housing analogy, utilities like water, space, wear & tear on the place, etc., and in the SaaS space, customer service, server space...I can't think of any more but maybe they're there...
Hey Mark!

Just saw this. You indeed have the right person. Here's an archived version of the MVP site (ugh that design was terrible, even for the early 2000s) that tried to deflect some of the angry phone calls:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060325184439/http://www.mvpsof...
> If Biden stops this nonsense

Can he do it on his own? It's it Mcconnell who is rushing these bills through to avoid close scrutiny?
I'm a little confused. That feature has been built into Photoshop since at least CS1 (2003), maybe earlier.

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/slicing-web-pages.ht...
Old skin for the new ceremony
SARS was a thing in China, so that's not surprising. The discussion is about SARS-CoV2. Now they are a few small mutations away that would be significant.
I'm not sure what you're suggesting (often the case with analogies). I'm not going to even guess where you think liability in that analogy interfaces with someone, who doesn't even know what Flash is, using Windows on their home computer that gets pwned by a Flash exploit.

But you need to temper your argument across your posts here with the various benefits of the appliancification of computing for most people.

Since you don't, it becomes impossible to parcel whatever argument you're making from the arguments of "people should care more about <arbitrary thing that I happen to care about>" and "anything that addresses the needs of others over me is bad" and "there is literally nothing good about an automatic Windows update removing Flash."
And what particularly horrible things they were contemplating to do may I ask?

I would rather imagine and prefer the world where those who deprive people of their freedom without said people committing some crimes should be fucking jailed themselves.
Why is it always about running to the sidewalk or the other lane? There's also the option to reduce speed as much as possible, aka break hard, that a computer can do a) earlier than a human would b) much harder than a human would. Yes, the people in the car might take a lot of negative Gs. But that's also an option. The car might still hit the kid, but the difference could be some broken bones, or with chance, bruises, vs. death.
Yeah but aren't these contradictory goals for the "influencer?" At least for the ones who start to catch on?

Canon says "make us look better than Sony" and Sony says "make us look better than Canon" but at least in the stuff I watched, for photography, the really successful people were quite obviously prickly opinionated photo nerds who were not likely to risk their ever-increasing reputation and influence for a bit of payola.

I guess it probably varies a lot based on subject. Travel vloggers are pretty openly corrupt in that sense. And I have long dreamed of being a corrupt restaurant critic...
I do all of my automobile maintenance (except for replacing tires) and I do a fair amount of the routine, preventative maintenance on my airplane (which is permitted for part 91 operated aircraft).

I doubt that lack of roadworthiness on DIY-maintained automobiles is a significant contributor to fatal and serious collisions. I also think most DIY-maintained cars are just as well-maintained as their same-year counterparts that only see dealerships (sometimes more as the DIY is likely to be an enthusiast and unlikely to be deterred by cost pressures relating to the $130/hr service rate).
Every single SD card or MicroSD card has an ARM CPU onboard to track flash wear and to handle physical to logical block mapping. Everything has a CPU anymore.
>I have to ask. How long do you stay in China when you visit?

I've stayed usually for two to three months per year. I've been in Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Guangzhou mostly around tech folks. It's getting better but I'm not fluent, I can get around. So sure obviously I follow the politics it's of interest to me but mostly I've gotten my impression from work, talking to people and just living there.

And while the atmosphere is tenser maybe, there's more nationalistic tones in particular from very young people and it didn't feel as geopolitical say 8 years ago as it did 2 years ago, it doesn't seem like a fundamentally different place. I can't speak to every machination of the party but I don't think China is going to withdraw from the world, or not let foreigners in or anything like that. People from the very bottom to the top seem to know there's no way back to Mao's days, I don't think more political centralization is going to change that.

There's so much bad press these days you think China is the next Soviet Union, but it's hard to square with lived reality for me which is why responded quite strongly to the original post, there's just so many of them, I don't think it does the diversity in the country justice.
Or just didn’t go out of your way to do things in a way that’s both more difficult and slower.