skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We mostly default to on but no one has an issue when people turn cameras off and they're pretty much off if there's a presentation anyway. Seems to work pretty well. Really, nothing pandemic related, we're spread across about a third of the world (or more, for some meetings) anyway.

A lot of people have fairly managed video setups at this point although not all do.
I can definitely see how it would be annoying in the moment, but if your company is in a fight for survival and a kid wasting 15 of your minutes is an actual risk to that fight, there are probably deeper viability questions.
Because we wait for quantum computers and true parallel programming languages. Until then that's what we do meanwhile "get rich and remix everything that is old on any new platform".
It seems pretty unfair to talk about early history of programming languages compared to last 25 years.

I mean, Lisp and Agol were some of the first programming languages ever. Of course there is going to be lots of experimentation in different directions. The ecosystem then matures around a smaller number of solutions, and tries to improve them in depth instead of breadth. That's just the natural product development cycle

Sure, we dont have a lot of new groundbreaking languages, but are you really going to tell me that haskell or javascript is the same now as it was in 1996. Would someone from 1996 even recognize it now? Their improvements are probably more unrecognizable to someone programming from 1996 in that language than go would be to a c programmer in 1996
>where you are degrading at other skills while doing so (making your future employability less certain).

I taught myself Python a few years back and greatly increased my income.

I don't expect any job to improve my skillset .
I use Craigslist for in-person transactions. Bonus is that they don't take a cut.
As a parent of a young child, this was my immediate thought. There is zero linkage between the ability to walk and the ability to relate socially. They are completely different skillets that develop along completely different timelines. This is the statement of someone who knows nothing of childhood development. But yes, people should endeavor to keep their kids off the zoom.
I wish I had been taught paperwork or actual practical life skills (filing taxes for example) as opposed to some complex mathematical operations that I don't even remember anymore.
According to wikipedia, diethyl ether inhibits processes such as oxidative metabolism of a range of compounds. The article doesn't go into specifics, much less the mechanism.
I've never read anything even half as terrible as this story on Yes At Google. I'm not saying shitty things don't happen, but I'd like to believe that such shittiness would not fly at the G.
Why are people so up their own ass about receiving advice and aide with their kids?

Do you get hostile and reject people helping you with flat tire, when you're lost, chasing down you escaped dog?

Do you jump to the conclusion that the offer is indictment of you're parenting?
Underrated comment! If eu has a viable alternative to tsmc, incentive to protect Taiwan diminishes greatly. Then again, Why would the eu care to fight China? EU does not seem interested in using its power to further democracy elsewhere (or even within Europe.... )
Seems like JVM developer who doesn't get out much. Two of the list are java editors. :D

How about the explosion of FLOSS?
Even as an American with no stake in the UK, this departure saddens me after how hard my family fought in Europe in defense of stability in that region.

The best thing that can come of this is that the UK promptly rejoins and everyone tries to put this indiscretion in the past. But even assuming they do rejoin, this tantrum has still significantly increased the risk of a massive conflict for probably a century or longer -- any hell-bent ideological maniac in any member state can now effectively use Brexit as a populist rallying cry that might actually work. (And most certainly, states with minority viewpoints will use it as leverage against the majority for an untold length of time.)
Bittrex to Delist ‘Privacy Coins’ Monero, Dash and Zcash
I agree with your conclusion, disagree with your argument. Especially the last one.

Cloud computiung was the first sort of computing available, widely, from the 1950s. Central systems which were accessed with terminals. A huge business up until the 1980s, at least.

Virtualisation dates from the 1980s, at the latest. I had a professor in the early 1990s who had worked on it for Amdahl
Commercial quantum computer and true parallel programming languages.
It’s very company-dependent, but most are not wanting a regurgitated answer. If you have a solid grasp on data structures and traversals, you can solve a lot of those puzzle problems. Sure some have tricks, but they’re not completely pointless and certainly don’t indicate anything about the person being willing to “spend hundreds of hours doing meaningless work” or are “good at following orders”.
30 on the dot, but my school was pretty liberal/progressive/what-have-you, so that may have helped. Hopefully considering those needs is more commonplace now, and folks won't have horror stories in the future.
No, what was it called?
I think Apple, like several other notable tech companies, has a ton of great developers and engineers, and a lot of really bad managers (and a few good ones.) As in most tech companies, employees have no power vs. management, and HR exists to protect the company from liability. (And good luck keeping your job if you try to, say, organize a union.)

A bummer about Apple as well is that because it is such a popular company, largely due to its well-regarded and often exciting and innovative products, there are always lots of people lined up ready to take your place. As a result, they can get away with paying in prestige (rather than a fair market wage) and demanding excessive (and anti-productive) time commitments.

Perhaps it's changed recently, but the myth of dual career ladders has been a major problem at many companies; basically to increase your salary it's almost mandatory to go into management, or to leave for another company. HR and management will point to highly paid individual contributors, but it's largely a pyramid with very few people at the upper ranks, and they do their best to hide and obfuscate the pay scale.

Many tech companies also love college hires because they usually lack the ability to negotiate pay, have few outside responsibilities such as children or a spouse, and often lack a concept of work-life balance. After they quit due to burnout they are easily replaced.

I still think it's nuts that Tim Cook wants his team to have calls on Sunday nights. There's really nothing that can't wait until Monday morning - it's just a stupid bit of the culture of anti-productive overwork and demands for proof of loyalty to a company that will never repay it.
A quick google shows it is starting to be studied now. We just don't know yet, and its not a sure thing. It may take a future generation of vaccine to be more effective at preventing transmission.

> The science behind this seeming contradiction is relatively straightforward. Vaccines like Pfizer’s and Moderna’s are injected into deep muscle and provide so-called systemic immunity. But they may still leave areas, particularly nasal mucous passages, where the virus is relatively free to multiply. Even without making the host sick, that virus can then potentially spread through coughing or sneezing, just as it is spread by a person with a full-blown coronavirus infection.
Reviews are especially bad. You can tell which people work at schools where citations count in their pay (and reviews are allowed in citation counts) by the ratio of reviews to original research papers they write. Some schools/govts really need to wise up.

I think of it as a kind of predatory or scavenger behavior. They basically steal the citations from the papers they are reviewing in return for a small effort in helping us with information retrieval. We might as well just cite google and elsevier. Ideally, citations should pass through them somehow and get applied to the original sources who did the hard work.
Would be nice for them to give examples of what they consider "real progress". Because the pre-1996 list:

> LISP, Algol, Basic, APL, Unix, C, Oracle, Smalltalk, Windows, C++, LabView, HyperCard, Mathematica, Haskell, WWW, Python, Mosaic, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Flash, Postgress

Seems just as "weak" as the list they give after 1966:

> IntelliJ, Eclipse, ASP, Spring, Rails, Scala, AWS, Clojure, Heroku, V8, Go, React, Docker, Kubernetes, Wasm

Basically, after LISP and Algol everything was just a small incremental change over them, some might even say a step back.

From the way they phrase "progress", it seems the lineage would look like:

Machine Code -> Assembly -> Fortran -> Lisp -> Algol

That takes us back to 1958 then, not 1996. I could agree more if that was the argument. That since Lisp and Algol, nothing new in programming language really came out. And if making that argument, the hypothesis around why would be very different. Like it seems it might be more because Software just quickly got bootstrapped and then we did reach a sort maximum with it.
I recently drove right around Africa - 54,000 miles through 35 countries, basically around the entire coastline. I have a bunch of videos from the trip [1] and I've just published a book about it too [2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waQGUz0Z97Y&list=PLNiCe5roBX...

[2] https://amzn.to/3pnVKu6
Oh, if it's not painful, you're not doing it right. Keep going :)
> Life-changing technology “discovered”: Air Fryer

They're just tiny convection ovens with a gimmicky name.
In general, it doesn't seem surprising that exposing carnivorous plants to large amounts of random chemicals causes them to stop moving, at least while the chemicals are present.

In addition to trying lots of similar substances that don't have anesthetic properties in animals, it would be interesting to try xenon, which is all but inert chemically but still works as an anesthetic.

Interesting (and more up to date) article here:
https://theconversation.com/science-lesson-how-anesthetics-w...
Boot Out Coding Bootcamps
There is no two ways about it. Coding is the way forward. The world NEEDS skilled coders and programmers to keep us moving, safe, efficient, connected, fed, entertained, and satisfied. Anyone who dares say that coding is an unnecessary profession has been living under a rock for the last seventy years.

Coders are no longer a bunch of nerds hitched up in Silicon Valley, they are highly skilled professionals who work for both themselves and some of the world’s biggest companies such as Google and Intel.

And when you see their sky-high salaries of $70k and upwards, you may think…

“Holy crap, I can earn that?”
I don't think so. Even if the main repository is organized in a linear style, it's very common for developers to make experimental branches on their own machines. This was inconvenient before DVCS, so you used to see things like conditional compilation or large blocks of commented-out code. People tend to work in the way best supported by their tools, and I'm convinced DVCS changed the way we work by making more things convenient. And that's not even counting large-scale truly distributed projects like Linux kernel development (the origin of git), which would be practically impossible without it.
Your analogy works if ASML makes the only printer that can print the letter 'S'. Without it, you can't print and sell the books, regardless of who the author is.
> If an engineer in 1996 fell into a coma and woke up today, they'd be greeted with an entirely different world. We're driving around in electric cars, carrying around cell phones that are orders of magnitude faster than desktop PCs from 1996, and communication technology has evolved to the point that many of us are seamlessly working from home.

But these things were not driven by software innovations.
Indeed. In my hometown - Gyula, Hungary - there was a precision mechanics factory, for phones, faxes, communication relays called Integra. It wasn't huge, employed a couple of hundreds people. In '89, Olivetti bought it for peanuts to close it down.

This was quite a classic move during the "privatisation" in '89-90.
I'm not here to help you determine whether you should care or not. That's entirely up to you. For some unknown reason you seem to care, and I certainly can't figure out why from the replies so far.

As best as I can guess from the evidence available, you're looking for some vector to "No, you're wrong!" disprove some aspect of my personal view of this. This will, of course, go nowhere. I didn't submit my personal view as some sort of entry in a debate, and I'm making no effort to persuade anyone to my view.

If you can't find a way to derive value or relevance from my viewpoint, other than trying to disprove it or debate it, then you'll just have to move on. I'm not going to try to pressure you, persuade you, influence you, argue with you, or otherwise make any effort to interfere with your freedoms of thought and choice. That would be inappropriate for an unsubstantiated personal view such as the one I have provided.
You generally have to reverse engineer the website, which could be easy or hard depending on a lot of factors
"Cambrian explosion" any better? :-)
If you think there have not been significant achievements since 1996 then you are not looking in the right places.

Then why just look at 1996? The Mother of All Demos by Douglas Engelbart (1968) probably had all the cool stuff anyways: graphical interfaces, videoconferences, collaborative editing, word processing, hypertext...

A lot has been done since 1996. Could we have done more? sure. Computers have way more potential than what we use them for.
I think this is just a sign that the field is mature. You could take someone from the 1800s and show them today's machine shop, and they would basically know what the tools do -- lathes, mills, micrometers -- but we're making pretty complicated things with them today. It's just that "the past" came up with pretty good tools and we're still using them.

In 1996, I'm not sure everyone was carrying around a super computer with a multi-day battery life that could shoot slow-motion 4k video and understand your speech. And yet, today we don't even think twice about that. Clearly something has happened in the past 25 years.
How long will it be until there are thousands of these streaming through a city with machine guns mounted?
Maybe not: If he considered those sorts of structures (absent the forced labor) to be inherently bad in some way then I do not understand that point of view.
Since I started coding professionally in 1987, I've had to re-tool myself four times:

* In 1989, to learn to write GUI apps on Windows.

* In 1998, to learn to write web applications.

* In 2008, to learn to write mobile applications.

* In 2014, to learn to write cloud applications.

In the next year, I'll start retooling to write AI applications. I think there's a remarkable rhythm to innovation, and it seems to be getting faster, not slower.
"One day I went to use the woman restroom my “iBuddy” was there. She told me “die!” and slammed the door in my face."

This bit made me suspicious of the whole thing.
Thanks for posting this, a lot of people forget this perspective that sometimes the heavier users are view dropping money into their hobby as just that.

A way of supporting their hobby, especially when their dollar/hour of entertainment is so high.

There's so much discussion from people who do NOT spend a dollar in any game, and how those that do need to be protected from themselves
If Apple doesn't remedy this situation, I will no longer purchase their products.
Lockdowns drastically increase the amount of domestic violence.

Also deferred medical care because the health care system is overloaded.

Finally, people are not getting the best health care money can buy. In most countries if you are very old or have underlying conditions making your survival chance very low, they don't offer to try everything.

Excess death is a useful metric for the true total body count of Corona, including all cultural, economic and policy changes it entails. However it's really hard to accurately provide any number for the mortality of the disease itself.
It's pretty outdated. In research schools you need to win funding or die nowadays.

And while publications do help you, say in getting hired and promotions, your publications are dug into pretty deeply. They don't want to be tricked into hiring someone useless who can crank out fluff but can't win a grant.
It is not all about the capacity of the software. If software has been around for a long time, people can gather experience about how to use it. Longstanding software in the hands of someone very familiar with it, will use it like a simple, comfortable, reliable tool. That has huge value to the individuals who use it.

They know they are blind to potentially better products, but they no longer have the time to gather the experience and confidence in the new products.
I thought there wasn't, so on a recommendation from wirecutter, we bought that cuisinart toaster oven that is also convection. It toasts up our tater tots nicely, faster than the instructions on the tater tot bag. But if air fryers are actually different I'd like to know.
What company? I want to apply there!
Unix with lipstick?
This metric for judging if software is trusted or not seems backwards. Solarwinds was (probably still is) quite popular for instance.
> Our principal refused to let students leave campus, as a student had gotten in a car wreck over lunch and died at a previous school. So, there's some logic there

By that logic, we should never let students leave at all, because certainly some have been killed in car wrecks on the way home.

There is NO logic in preventing people doing that which they will do later anyway.
Seperate route for A transaction, not THE transaction.

The difference is setting expectations and how they are managed.

The restaurant is able to set and manage expectations when people deal with them. They are not able to do that with other agents, unless that relationship has been established and mutually agreed to.

If doing that came along with the outside service, such as what one might experience with a general courier or agent, it is not cheap.

And people get what they pay for and associate it with the restuarant, who did not set and manage expectations appropriately.

Total mess.
Would you like it if I saw some code you were writing over your shoulder and I started correcting you and giving you advice on how you should be coding it differently? Maybe, but more likely you would feel defensive depending on my tone and/or how you interpreted my tone.
I think the author has a point, perhaps poorly articulated. There is obviously a large universe of software out there so broadly speaking a lot of innovation has happened since and continues.

However, there is a general crappiness around software innovation (or the lack thereof) these days that hides behind "sexy" CLI tools with a few "sexy" options. Some of these tools are very popular and can be difficult to assail but the smell of mediocrity (or lack of ambition) around them is hard to shake off.

A comment left on the post does in fact hit on one of the reasons: the lack of interest in creating user empowerment technology. The obsession with CLI tools for instance is framed as simply facilitating better integration, while this is true, it is also a convenient excuse to avoid the difficult task of building user interfacing software.
Quite. Funnily enough, in older history, I find Venice at the center of similar intriques. Also interesting to me is some of the references to the 18th century England political class as the "Venetian party" (such as in Benjamin Disraeli's Sybil).

Dutch and British East India company history is something I really need to find a good book on.
No, because that ignores the savings the employer receives for not having to hotel the employee. But employees stioo have to ensure their working space. So remote==cheaper is not guaranteed.
Does sorting by upvotes solve it without needing downvotes?

Sorting would be at sibling level.
I hope they make the penalties prohibitively high.
School Is to Submit (2016)
Thanks for the security reminder, I have blocked IMDS access, need to learn more about security. I'll also set up email so that I can put in the about page.
Decentralization / smaller government. Left often has an inexplicable urge to assume that Government Knows Best. Imagine the Fed government gets somebody like Trump at the top again, but smarter, with more effective political tactics and stays in power for a longer time.

Limiting what government can do puts the brakes on what such a person can accomplish. Leave things up to the states, of course you can still occasionally get problems at the state level, but that's only 1/50 as much of a problem.

Assuming anti-vax is a single movement. I have a normally reasonable friend who refused an STD vaccine for his newborn. Having a <1 year old baby vaccinated against STD's simply doesn't make sense. His experience opened my eyes: Some vaccines undoubtedly are genuine medical miracles that save lots of lives, but the necessity of others can be rather questionable. (The number of recommended vaccines for children has also exploded since my friend and I ourselves were kids, unless you have children yourself you might assume your childhood experience is still the norm, which it isn't.)

When you say "Why should I vaccinate my 0-year-old against an STD?" and the doctor can't give answer beyond "You won't be able to send them to school if you don't," it really does seem rather reasonable to conclude that it's medically unnecessary but Big Pharma's successfully lobbied the government to require this particular shot.

To be fair, my friend may be wrong. There may be sound medical reasons their doctor didn't know or didn't feel like explaining for the 1000th time.

My point is, there are shades and shades of anti-vax. We use the same term to describe (a) the irrational nutjob who rejects all vaccines and denies all historical reports of how bad things like smallpox were as some kind of elaborate hoax, and (b) reasonable people who are trying to reasonably evaluate whether a given medical product is a reasonable step for their health situation, and sometimes reasonably comes to the conclusion that it's not (as in the case of a parent who decides it doesn't make sense to vaccinate a newborn against STD's.)
It is, it was likely some big thing, like strut support, not small hobby things like jewelry.
This thinking is how you end an empire
The government probably doesn't care enough to bother setting up some sort of repository of papers.

Also, there are some pretty prestigious journals out there. I'm sure there are academics who'd want a whole lot more money if the government asked them to stop publishing in the journals that their peers read.
The problem with them all being similar is that would mean they don't reflect their inhabitants. The same as no two rivers flow the same, no two schools work the same. They nominally accomplish the same task in similar ways but will have a fingerprint in how its done. There's a degree of practicality that comes with a school that can be met with common resources, but it's still apparent communities don't want modular schools (regardless of individual opinions).

There's a long list of reasons schools aren't just a cleared field with a bunch of mobile-unit classrooms thrown out there despite that being the most cost-effective way to house classes.
25! Happy new year!
As a grown man (with grown children!) I find it incredibly humbling to learn to read all over again. I am learning Hiragana as a necessary step to learning Japanese.
"I didn't get into college because I had to use the bathroom during class a lot" - no one, ever

Just turn on your voice recorder and go.
Just start shipping floppy disks again.