skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Extended pool of engineers, as the field has grown, has diluted the quality of software.

Post "Social Network" (the movie), and the economic downturn of 2008-2012 there is a new generation of engineers that started programming/entered the field because that's where the money is....

There is also proliferation of the code-academies, who often encourage trainees to create a 'github portfolio', often with low quality libraries.

2001 tech bust acted like a great filter. During the 2001-2012, a lot of people that remained in the field were there because general passion towards it, and had the skills to be employed after the bust.

People that couldn't cut it, did leave the field. Hence, the software was often more of a work of passion, or craft. A lot of the open source libraries that we use today, were created during this times (and the 90s, for the databases, and Linux), also a lot of the culture of startups (good and bad), was cemented during this time.

I think the field massively expanded after 2012, and people started doing engineering because that's where the money was/became trendy. Hence you will naturally have a dilution of overall quality.
The loading times were not initially that long and then the slow CPU makes a big difference.

This really only goes to show how much you can get away with if you have an outstandingly popular product that has no direct competition. Chances are that your product is not that compelling, if it performs poorly, that will hurt adoption. It will never become outstandingly popular in the first place.
> Touchpad and mouse scrolling direction is linked. So at least one of them will feel bad to use.

I get that this goes against your preference but to Apple it's either "your finger moves the content" or "your finger moves the viewport", and that translates to both your finger on the touchpad and on the mousewheel. Remember that Apple sells the Magic Mouse that doesn't even have a mousewheel -- the whole top of the mouse behaves like a touchpad. That's why the settings are linked.

> unnecessary Cmd button

On Apple computers the button has been used for keyboard shortcuts for the last 40 years.

> In VS code, to search : Cmd+F. To go to line : Ctrl+G. Drives me insane.

That's VS's problem, not ours and certainly not Apple's. Apple software and native macOS apps always use the Cmd key as the primary modifier, only adding others for more complicated shortcuts.

I agree that Windows is 10x better than macOS -- at being Windows. You WILL be dissapointed if you expect macOS to be like Windows with a different skin.
> they require that you show proof of previous failed attempts.

That's not exactly accurate with regards to the current options for voting to close a question. But the general reasoning here is that it's an anti-spam measure. It filters out low-effort questions (eg. homework questions) and forces you to be specific and concrete enough with your question for the question to be suitable for SO.

Simply describing the task and providing sample inputs and outputs tends to be too open-ended and often strays into the territory of asking for someone else to write all the code for you, rather than help you solve a specific problem with your code.
We laugh but iOS didn’t really support “files and directories” until quite recently.
If a customer owes money to an electricity company which goes bankrupt, that doesn’t cancel the customer debt. The insolvency firm will sell the debt on for what they can get in order to repay some of the company’s creditors.
Where going to see the end of civilization if we don't make a decision soon?
Maybe try using a 3rd party remote desktop system with focus on performance instead of the standard vnc server included in mac? Parsec might work for your use case. The disadvantage is these kind of remote desktop system achieve the performance by utilizing lossy codecs instead of lossless compression used by vnc, so you might notice some banding/artefacts depending on your network condition / compression level. The advantage is the hardware encoding/decoding is very fast, even fast enough for gaming.

https://parsec.app/
What I had to do 2 or 3 times total with my last dog when she was badly misbehaving in circumstances that simply aren't acceptable, where she wasn't wanting to listen/not calming down, was to take her, lay her on her side, put a lot of my body weight on her to gently pin her and grab her by the snout with both hands holding it down/together - while looking her in the eyes and in a slight low, slow, growly voice say "nooooo" - until she stopped resisting and became submissive again. It's over quickly and the behaviour stops from this "punishment"/control where she re-learns I am in control, and then regains confidence that I am an adequate pack leader.

This technique for barking is also very useful for quieting barking: some dogs will quiet very quickly and can be controlled just with the hand(s) over the snout with the low "nooooo" sound - others will fight to pull away and then you may need to add the gentle pinning action as well.

This technique comes from how that this is what mothers will do with their pups if they are barking and need them to be quiet - they will gently bite down on their snout from the top and growl quietly; maybe it's akin to a parent going "shhhhhhhhh" to a baby/child?

Also, my dog, Kylie, was 50 Lbs. The technique I described is harder to do on much larger dogs and much smaller dogs for various reasons, little dogs more often have alpha behaviours because the little buggers are hard to grab onto their snouts.
Did you get back to Megan?
Overflow trapping in practice – some strategies for low level languages
Given the asynchronicity of developer's life, I usually create a workspace for any microtask I have. And the workspace/microtask automatically dies whenever it no longer contains any window.
Even looking for information on stack overflow is now a workspace in my workflow.
(Because workspaces are so cheap).

After some weeks living like this, i see that some microtask survive for a surpisingly long time, and my workspace management has evolved into a kind of poor's man task manager.

The fantastic side-effect of a workspace tied to a task is that the windows, history, URLs are ready to use instantly. Which makes cognitive load when task switching a breeze.
I can't seem to find a single paper on this vaccine, and this news article sure doesn't help. Does anyone have a link to at least a preprint? It could be hot air for all we know.
Interesting that you should mention device support as a cause of more complex code, as the best way to support the devices you list is generally to use LESS code.

Bare HTML is supported by pretty much everything...
> Pocket is on the death bed.

What makes you think that? Happy Pocket premium user here. The product staled a bit for quite some time, but it received a large-ish update in January and they've posted this at the bottom of the changelog:

> We’ve also made significant changes to our underlying codebase so we can make more rapid improvements in the future.

That definitely doesn't sound to me like it's anywhere close to being killed.
Glenn Greenwald – the interview that breaks the internet
Not Safe For Work = NSFW
Arguably what works really depends on your relationship, the trust you have or don't have yet with the dog. And we're all mostly speaking without referencing what exactly the positive or negative reenforcement methods we're even talking about, so it's a fairly shallow level of discussion missing the nuances.
The Perseverance rover runs on processors used in iMacs in the 1990s
But for the ones that don't, it equals a virtual commute, so it might be a good filter and the audience beyond that watershed is more serious about spending money there. ;)
Have You Heard the Good News About Elixir? - X-Plane Developer Blog
Interesting post. This reminded me of what it was like to be a true beginner a very long time ago.

I’d forgotten just how confusing those initial concepts like arrays could be.
> Pocket is on the death bed. Instapaper is good

Instapaper is more dead than pocket is. Their android app hasn't been updated since June 2019 [0].

[0] - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.instapaper...

Pocket works great, even on the free plan. The apps have a beautiful UI and it is fast.
Maybe you're just getting better at coding so you make less mistakes so the mistakes you find are more often somebody else's? Kind of a regression to mean.
Meh. I think it sound cool to say "We (or our youth) are not suffering enough!", but, I think it is just because society is changing so fast (too fast for our monkey brain), more and more we can choose for fun instead of happiness and it's to easy. So we need to educate ourselves. How not to over-indulge and self-regulate when the whole world is at your feet. We also regulated the gambling industry, we can do it with other industries (ads, social media). I feel that our emotional spectrum stretches from about the worst we have been through to the best and adapts slowly over time (continuously recurring suffering is needed? I think we can do better). It's true that in current, nice, times the spectrum may be narrow, but we need to identify where the lows come from and combat them by educating ourselves as a species.

Many of our habits (social networks) make us feel that some things are important to be happy (likes, looking like a Kardashian). But they rarely are. Some people are too young to understand this (and parents to old, with exponential change over generations the gap will only grow) so perhaps we should regulate. At the very least we should study the s* out of the phenomenon.
Accept cryptocurrency payments with Coinqvest for Node.js
Right now, the southern half of Germany has clear skies and thus a bright, sunny day approaching noon. These are optimal conditions for solar energy. This is why renewables get to approx. 40% of the energy mix right now. Let's have another look at those numbers around sunset (approx. 6 hours from now) and see where that goes.
> getting offended only when seeing it was from Quillette or simply by reading the title.

I tried reading Quilette when it started coming out a few years ago. At first it sounded interesting but draping itself in intellectual-sounding rhetoric didn't make it any less misogynistic/racist. I gave it a try with a dozen articles over the months, but they were all so disconnected from reality (written by scholars from their ivory towers) and so reactionary (really opposed to any form of social equality) that i don't even bother anymore. Quilette is mental masturbation for neo-nazis. Nothing more to see there.

> If you don't fit a box, you clearly fit the other and need to be attacked by it.

You're assuming there's only two boxes "left" and "right". This axis is valid for economic concerns (collectivism vs property) though really misrepresented by the media: the democrats are really right-wing, except for the DSA or Bernie Sanders who are center-left (for a modest redistribution of wealth) but there is no mainstream left ideas/parties in the media in the USA. Left meaning strongly opposed to private property (as opposed to property of usage).

But then there's more axis to consider. Are you for social control and State surveillance/repression (authoritarianism, whether justified for "social progress" as in USSR or for "social peace" as in the west doesn't matter) or for freedom and autonomy of individuals and communities? etc...

In the end the whole concepts of political parties and parliaments ("representative democracy") were invented by the bourgeoisie and enlightened intellectuals of the 18th century to prevent any form of social progress and oppose democracy they saw as a threat to their privilege. Democracy is when people are divided by ideas, not by party. Democracy is when people decide, not when others decide for them.

« Anarchism is democracy taken seriously » as the quote goes.
>Also: Nvidia couldn't increase production quantity if they wanted, this isn't a money problem.

There is a problem with this logic. If there is no money problem why haven't they expanded production ahead of time? Well, probably because there is no money in expanding production, so yes it's a money problem.

If it takes 5 years to build a fab and there is no reason to build a fab since there is no money to be made then why would you build a fab in any situation, even if you are willing to wait 5 years? The answer is you don't build the fab and accept that there will be a shortage in the future. Since there are not enough GPUs that's what you will have to live with instead of complaining that there aren't enough GPUs.
Another point of surprise is that these things grew somehow organically. Nobody went onto AIM or MSN because it's gonna revolutionize anything, it was just a simple need, simple programs.. no biggie. They're gone and now it's replaced by things that try to be grandiose and keep changing every year (or die ala Google) because the big new model is not right and they have a new big idea to chase.
> more time spent looking at loading screens than actually playing anything.

This could easily compete for the most expensive bug in history, up there with the Pentium Bug. It might have halved the revenue potential of a billion dollar franchise.
It does not seem to matter. Paid things, if anything, seem to be more likely to be trash than the free ones, but the free things are certainly not blameless.
> But SBCL requires an existing Common Lisp installation for bootstrapping, whereas CLISP bootstraps itself just from C thanks to its interpreter.

The SBCL people claim you can bootstrap SBCL with CLISP.

http://www.sbcl.org/getting.html#compile
Yeah, let's compare the market cap of nuclear companies and the market cap of Total and other "renewable + gaz!!!!11".

> Facts and an interest in truly bringing your country forward don't matter. Money and lobbyism is what rules the discussions.

Well said! But i'm pretty sure not all greenpeace workers are shills for Total, some are genuine, accusing them of being shills is uncalled for and wrong.

Some questions though: electricity is 25% of our energy usage right now, we need to elimitate 80% carbon emission before 2050, so we need to use Co2-free electricity for 80% of our usages, right?

here is the cost to replace only our current electricity generation by only renewable: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191...
The price does not account for land destruction and material rarefication btw, but let's consider those negligeable, and do some order of magnitude calculations. energy generationcapacity: 1.9TW needed, * 3.5 let's say 6TW. 200 GW of power transmission: 700 GW of power transmission. Biomass 8.5 EJ => ???? well, this is harder since biomass in those scenarii would be used as heating mostly, so not really helping a 80% electricity energy mix. Let's say 28 EJ but with the energy loss in carnot machines, i think it would rather be close to 40 EJ. Do we even have enough land to get to 16 EJ every year? I'm not sure, especially if we have to clear the land with electric tools.

It seems reasonable to say that this won't happen. Ever.
This is a very important point. With load-following natural gas (and some coal) plants available, the returns on renewable energy are excellent, and the cost per kW "average" output is quite low. These values cannot be linearly extrapolated out to 100% capacity without energy storage which, even if a viable solution is invented, will not be free.

Bear in mind also that current wind and solar installs are being built in the most economical locations to build wind and solar: places that get good amounts of average wind and average light, and which are close enough to populated areas to avoid lots of transmission loss.

Future wind and solar installations (albeit with some benefit from hypothetical improvements in PV efficiency) will not be as efficient on a per-unit basis, and utilities will increasingly have to build not to the average power output (made possible only because of load-following natural gas, as well as coal) but rather to some low percentile.

An example: if a 100% renewable grid must service an area with a flat average demand of 500 GW, then if renewable output is greater than 500 GW 95% of the time, the other 5% of the time will require firing up a fossil source or turning off customers' power. And this assumes demand is constant, which it isn't-- demand peaking is just as much of a problem as supply dipping.
>Yet even in the current low-wind, low-sun scenario, 37% of German electricity is from renewable sources according to your link. Your conclusions don't match your own data.

France, which doesn't really invest heavily in renewables is at 30% right now. Spain is at 60%, and most of Europe is around 40%. It's not exactly hard. Sure, Germany doesn't have some sources (hydro is an amazing source of power), but let's not pretend that Germany is doing something amazing here. Additionally, looking only at renewable does not tell the whole story. Would you like to have 100% renewable through solar panels ? The rare earths required to build them, and the mining methods are absolutely horrendous for the environment. Not to mention changing them regularly, the sheer amount of space required for them, and potentially the batteries :since Germany doesn't exactly have lakes it can pump full of water to store energy, its options are good old chemical batteries, or Power to gas to power with its absolutely HORRENDOUS 15% efficiency.

Our primary focus should not be renewable. We legitimately have enough resources to burn uranium for thousands of years. The sun will not stop shining on us, nor will the wind stop blowing, nor the water stop moving. We have time to develop these technologies further and make them truly a solution. As it stands, they are not. The current priority should be low carbon.

Your attack, pretending I'm just looking for a rant is unjustified, but once again, I'm not surprised. Ideology does this. I'm looking for a better planet, for us to be able to electrify as much as possible so that we can be rid of fossil fuels. Germany isn't exactly helping with this.
Bank-switching like the KimKlone does would be possible to support via a cartridge on the C64. Alternatively - though I don't think any of them have been pushed to that size, the CBM REU's did memory transfers fast enough that they actually were faster than using the CPU (because they could use every available bus-cycle for the actual data transfer).

So you would likely need custom/new hardware, but in terms of how, it's a solved problem.
Yes, but many investors will have bought their share in the company, and that is worthless.

Whether they had enough money paid out through dividends in the run-up to that point or not is situation dependent - the company could not pay dividends at all.
Many people would say "more accountability" but I've seen that used successfully to deflect lightning strikes to innocent people who were then fired so... I'd like to know as well.
It's not illegal to photograph or film in public. You don't need permission to use an image taken of someone in public unless you're using it for something like an ad. You'll often see police try to tell you you can't film in public (usually them) but this is complete crap. Likewise if a business owner tells you that you can't film their business from the street, it is complete crap. Shaming culture is a problem but making public photography illegal is not the solution.
Average lifetime of those batteries are about 7 years before a full replacement.

Everyone also seems to clearly ignore how detrimental they are to the environment. There's huge swathes of toxic wastelands created from mining the materials needed.

So cost, lifecycle and externalised environmental damage is what I would say is missing here.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/07/27/141282/the-25-tr...

Late edit: Batteries certainly have their place in smoothing out the grid inputs, I don't want to come across as saying they are not useful when they certainly are. In South Australia the newly installed grid scale batteries have paid themselves off within a few years.

The article linked makes clear the engineering tradeoffs involved, and as a society we should always base these decisions on the numbers over emotion. Think there is a bright future for small modular reactors in remote and rural areas if communities are willing to accept them.
OpenGL is like learning to ride a bike. Vulkan is like flying a fighter jet. Lots more work and not much benefit if you're just trying to go a mile or two.
Even if you take engineering you see that adding more links on a chain increases latency and demands more auxiliary circuitry. But at least in engineering you can design each part to do what you want it to do close to perfection. And it will scale better because you can build everything to spec and bin, which is why we automate a lot of tasks. With humans that can't happen. Human "binning" is a constantly moving target.

After tangentially working on this for a long time I'd say that the core issue is so deeply ingrained in human psyche that it may not even be a matter of education (starts early), let alone organization (starts happening when everything else is "set in stone"). There's no organizational structure that fits the types of activities we humans tend to do these days and that can deliver low latency, consistent results at scale. We mitigate issues in one area by accentuating them in others.

You can have one large flat structure but the load on the single coordinating circuit (the manager) will compromise quality. You can split the thing in multiple, individually coordinated units but the added layer of coordination and latency will compromise performance.

Maybe some form of general purpose but not quite full AI, something that combines human like intelligence and engineering like consistency, might be able to do what humans are supposed to but without the variability of humans (which is both good and bad).
"Base load" doesn't really exist any more. Yes, there's a minimum below which demand almost never dips, but the implication of base load is that this should be produced by the type of power plants that provide a continuous supply, like nuclear or coal. But these are extremely inflexible and can't react quickly to changes in demand or supply by other means. As the share of renewables grows, the position nuclear is in becomes worse, not better. More flexible solutions are needed that don't need demand scheduling days or weeks ahead.
> Once intermittent renewables (solar, wind) reach their saturation point, nuclear revenue changes.

Yes, once that happens, nuclear revenue gets worse, while flexible power sources (natural gas) get the lion share of the profits.
The Hijacking of Perl.com
> Solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro are more than enough to power the world

Cool story. My city of 7M people has ~50 days of sunny days per yer, is located on a plane (as the most part of large cities), doesn't have active underground volcano nearby (as 99% of Earth's cities) and requires indoor heating at least 7 months/year. The city consumes an equivalent of two nuclear power plants output in electricity alone (half of that is from an actual nuclear plant). Heating probably consumes even more energy, but it's direct heat from CHPs so I can't google direct MW numbers straight away. I'd like to see calculations on powering that from solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro.
> Am I making a mountain out of a molehill or should I stand my ground?

If you can afford it, boycott this unethical job offer and move on with your life. Of course if you're anxious about paying bills in the upcoming months, that is less of an option.

Sharing information/knowledge and helping one another is the foundation of any healthy society. Someone or some corporation trying to prevent you from helping someone (whether for money or not) is definitely a sociopath and is a danger to society as a whole. They will make your life miserable and will use you to make other people's lives miserable.
- What is my purpose?

- You bootstrap SBCL

https://www.reddit.com/r/LispMemes/comments/bduwrl/you_boots...