skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Markdown in Web Browser
I've been researching for a few days now and in most web browsers[1] Markdown doesn't seem to be parsed. There are addons everywhere, but I don't want to install them. Since I am not a web developer, my question is if there is a specific reason for this. I actually only see advantages if websites could offer the well known .html but also .md files as format and that can be parsed right in the browser (with e.g. Github flavor). I am specifically concerned with how to save the step of parsing on my own system. For a small website this works quite well if I have e.g. only a hundred .md files, but for e.g. 5K it does get slower. Also I see the advantage as Markdown produces much smaller files. For a large project it doesn't matter, but if I have a small home server with solar power, I want to be more economical with my resources, right?

My question specifically is: is there a specific reason why current web browsers don't offer an in-house Markdown parser, and what are the specific advantages/disadvantages that I may have overlooked in my consideration.

[1] Tested on a Linux system. I did not test Google and Brave due to privacy concerns. Safari also falls out and so does Microsoft Edge.
Amazon allows people to use Slack internally. Chime is still at least the back end for all meetings. And in practice, because Chime chat is still supported, many managers tell their teams to always keep Chime open in case someone messages them there. There’s no way to tell who is on Slack vs on Chime.
"Semantically singular, grammatically plural" is already very common in English due to singular "you".
Capital gains tax is stupid. So is income tax. Why? They both tax changes to wealth. They are damping terms in the system. They actually slow down change. I thought Social Change is what you wanted?

Instead, there should be a WEALTH tax, with a rate slightly exceeding historical returns to capital (say 15%), and with a standard deduction of at least $5M. The purpose of income reporting would then be to influence the tax agency's estimate of your cumulative wealth.

Capital gains tax perverts incentives: It tells people to hold on to investments, even if they now think those investments are crap, even if they would rather now allocate their capital in some other way. This is one of the reasons why ETFs are a thing, and one reason why zombie companies continue to shamble on. Roths are the only accounts WITHOUT this feature.

And income tax hurts people who actually work for their money. Really rich people -- do people think some boss gives them a SALARY? That's not how it works: They live off investment income. Capital gains and dividends. Both of which are taxed less than regular income.

This wealth tax would directly stabilize the system towards a state in which everyone had $5M. There are other forces at play as well, so we wouldn't end up at that equilibrium, but we'd move closer to it.

Basically, if you want to change the rules of Monopoly so the game ends with EVERYONE owning some hotels, this is how you do it.

But you cannot, cannot set the deduction too low. People depend on investments for their retirement. You can't destroy that.

...

Now I back off from my confident-sounding rhetoric. Is this actually true? What effects would this have on investment and corporate governance? Would it create a giant market for cryptocurrency? For perk-based compensation? I'm curious what second-order effects I have overlooked.
This is just a rehash of https://future.a16z.com/instant-games/ which itself is a rehash of what the co-founder of Playco stated.
That's not a realistic interpretation of social dynamics.

On every issue, you'll find lots of people on both sides who have no idea why they take the position they take, they've just decided they're on the "cool" side, the other side are idiots and wanna wield that "I'm right and you're wrong" hammer for all its worth.

And sure I've seen this happen with vaccines. I've been attacked for discussing the side-effects of AstraZeneca for example. Not in context of "don't get vaccinated" mind you, but in context of "which vaccine each of us should choose".
from an Ironic core.

There were several months where I think we had contributors running a spell checker against patches as a review. They would miss obvious code syntax issues but would request lots of spelling changes (including British->American spelling).

You get what you measure. There's always going to be someone trying to do the absolute minimum to increment the number they get judged on.
10m people are legally living under poverty threshold in France. Migrants have it especially bad
Depends on the meters. My electric utility just replaced their old (circa 1999) smart meters which were one way broadcast with a new smart meter that's supposed to be two way capable. I didn't notice a lot of change at their data collection base station (which happens to be at the corner of my driveway), so I don't know if they already had a transmitter in addition to a receiver, or if it's small enough to fit in the existing equipment box or if they're using a different station.
But this is partially my point. We didn't nickel and dime all the crazy geniuses that put together the manhattan project in 200 different startups over 15 years. War AI isn't something you can bootstrap. You need serious resources and talent, and most of the people that are great are getting offered half a million a year unless they work for a startup with equity.

This is not enough money and this timeline is ridiculously long.
"Flip-flop" is a natural part of science - the adaptation to new knowledge being discovered.

Were the statements that masks didn't help against sars-cov-2 inaccurate in retrospect? Yes. Was the assumption back in the time that a) masks were a rare good, desperately needed in ERs and b) that it was possible that covid19 was transmitted by smear/touch valid? Also yes.

Was it justified to stop issuing AstraZeneca vaccines after reports of blood clots? Yes. Was it justified to resume vaccinating using this vaccine after two weeks of investigations? Also yes.
China's ban forces some Bitcoin miners to flee overseas, others sell out
I haven't printed a document in 3 or 4 years. Don't think I'll ever own a printer
I think Fastmail is more honest - if you're using email and communicating with 90% of the rest of the world that uses gmail then the 'privacy' provided by proton mail is irrelevant.

They're also based in [edit: I thought Protonmail was Russian based, but they're not]. I think that's probably worse from a country level.

Encrypted email is a bad way to do private communication - services that pretend otherwise set off alarms for me.

The main advantage of Fastmail vs. Google is that it's a separate service focused on providing you a good experience with custom domain support. The business model is not ad driven so incentives are more aligned and it lets you leave Google services.

The privacy people's faith in proton is misplaced (imo).
This feels like mansplaining. I'm not sure what the correct term is, but watching a Brit tell an Israeli that they don't know their own country's history is surreal.
This is not civil, FYI:

> So in essence you don't know what will happen in the future. You have no clue yet you support it blindly, why?

>

> That is my point. You don't know and you don't give a shit. The long term effects are irrelevant to you.
I can't remember where I read it, but I read something along the lines of: "Technical debt is just code nobody can read anymore." A lot of us old timers have seen so many paradigm changes that we just don't care - we are focused on whether it solves the problem and whether it is maintainable.

Switching from the "hot" framework we started using last year to the "hot" framework that everybody loves this year is a step backwards from actually solving any problems. And two steps back from being able to maintain the resulting system. The world of startups is so very "now" focused that I think a lot of people (especially on Hacker News) forget that most programmers are still dealing with code written 20, 30, 40 and in extreme cases 50 years ago.

Better is great. Easier is great. But most old code can't be refactored, only replaced. Which means everything that interoperates with that old code has to either be replaced or it has to work exactly the same way. Sometimes that makes sense. Sometimes that's an absolute disaster.

Something that looks "simple" to you really can be too complex in a greater context. Rant all you want, this is just a fact of life. The software development profession has been so fascinated with shiny new toys for the past 25 years that we tend to forget that the hidden (and dangerous) part of the iceberg is not only in the past, but what we're creating now will just make it all that much bigger and more dangerous unless we're very careful.

But. I know places that are so stuck in the past that they are paralyzed and can't do anything at all. There certainly is plenty of "we've always done it this way" that needs to be thrown out the window. Introducing some new workflows or tools could really simplify things moving forward. The problem is knowing which is which. In order to know which is which you need someone who understands the system(s) at a "heroic" level.

I see us moving that way with things like "full stack" or "devops", but those are mostly only considering newer software. Making 30+ years of IT infrastructure work effectively and efficiently really is an epic task. And not one most CIOs I know of are at all capable of.

Sorry, I guess you triggered a flood of things I've been thinking about this past year. I guess I would sum it up by saying that your own rant is very personal and doesn't necessarily take the context that software is developed within into account.
What about my comment doesn’t add to the discussion?

I find it pretty thought provoking that mainstream news said the Wuhan Lab Theory was conclusively debunked as false, and now there has been a complete narrative shift.

Some, like the Washington Post, have actually gone back and retroactively edited their articles from that time period to hide this fact.

It’s very telling that my earlier comment was flagged.
No one is arguing for no change. The problems here are the new single corporation languages from this past decade that behave like 6 months is a long time. It isn't. Every ~4 years is more the cadence of everything before.
Not all smart meters work the same way.
Because that would be a huge time sink for the maintainers as well. They’re the only ones qualified to evaluate quality and they have better things to do with the time it would take. This problem is created by these companies and it’s their problem to solve.
I don't know if they have to switch engines in ten years. You could have made a game in 1997 with Unreal-- I can verify this because I was in a meeting with a demo at Activision where we considered this-- and Unreal is still a viable engine in 2021.

Game engines went through a period where they evolved very quickly, and they are still evolving. But the rate of change is slower, like word processors. It starts to make more sense to evolve them rather than replace them.
When I hear popular “thought leaders” like Naval Ravikant[1] hail the gig economy as the future we all want, I have to wonder whose side he’s really on.

The way gig workers get treated now isn’t some early implementation fluke, it is working as designed, saving corporations and the wealthy money and widening the social gap.

I think if you had safety nets like universal healthcare and a solid social security system, something like this might work. Maybe.

1. I love Naval, and listen to all of his talks and appearances, but some of the stuff he says (eg crypto, gig economy) with an air of expertise seems laughably misguided or uninformed. It makes me wonder about his words on topics I am not more informed about.
"just"?
Great question. This is pretty unfortunate, data mining secure communications removes much of the value. Signal sold out a long time ago, not sure of another 'verified secure' platform.
I agree price signals and local automation are the way to go.
I would love to have my HVAC run according to the true cost of electricity, also minimizing CO2 emissions.

BUT giving the grid operators emergency control over demand is a useful tool when the grid is close to failure. Too many people will just hit override unless the price signals are very high. When grid operators know people will die if their system goes down and it’s on the brink, people choosing to be 4 degrees cooler is such an immoral choice I’m OK removing that choice from them.

Also very helpful to reduce shocks to the system after any outages by temporarily limiting HVAC restarts.
Do you think that technology doesn’t improve over time? You are suffering from a fixed mindset, where you think people or technology is as good as it gets now and never improve.

You should read up more on growth mindsets. People and technology aren’t fixed. They change and improve over time.

If people had your attitude about AIDS we would have let all AIDS patients die because “oh well nothing we can do.”

Luckily those with growth mindsets and optimism didn’t listen to people like you and now AIDS patients take a single pill a day.

The same could happen with cancer to, but not if people like you are in charge.
This is really cool, and I can really relate to being in a rut.
Thank you so much for sharing.
Lots of bigshots did shit they shouldn't have been doing on Epstein's yacht. Is there any credible report that any such figure did any such thing on McAfee's?

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the theory most likely to be true remains the null hypothesis: He didn't have diddly-squat on anybody.
It depends on your power company. My power company in Michigan uses cellular.
At the bottom of the article: the prescience of these important facilities decreased the probability of a shutdown from 0-6%. Probably look for a better hypothesis.

What was also interesting is that it correlated with altitude of the meter which indicates a preference for wealthier neighborhoods.

The problem is that the data Hash collected is incomplete and hard to draw conclusions from:

* It’s a war driving effort of a small strip of Dallas
* The data becomes impossible to capture as normal interruptions happen and reset the uptime counter.

It’s also unclear to me if these uptime counters are affected by having a generator or other backup power supply. One of the examples he noted was a Chase Bank that hadn’t experienced an interruption at all.
That depends on the power company. But it's quite trivial to compare your average consumption with similar users and find the outliers.

That's how people who steal power get caught for example and grow-houses :)

And it's also a useful tool for the consumers themselves to know if they are spending more/less/equal amounts of electricity as people with similar profiles.
> The issue is that creating objective measure of contribution value is just unfeasible if at all possible.

Could you give an example of a non trivial patch which value would be unfeasible to assess objectively? I am not familiar enough with the maintenance process to understand how hard it is to measure objectively the quality of a patch.
For chat yes, but not for video calls (and like others pointed out, some still avoid Slack depending on the user. Devs seem to universally use Slack thankfully)
If you remember what tool you used to generate or access the wallet, maybe that would help?

Maybe it's something related to Base58 format, which seems to be common for bitcoin keys? If it's Base58, then it should not contain the characters 0, O, 1, or I.
1. Most/all businesses above a certain size are state run or directed.

2. Sorry if it came off that way. It's just that in my personal experience, China is much more dependent on this kind of ingratiation compared to America. (e.g. I've never had to give the people who reviewed my college application gifts to increase my chance of admission or anything like that.)

From what I can see, the reason China is pulling out ahead is basically:

- they have a humongous population, with a fair portion in poverty, giving easy access to productivity gains by lifting them out of it

- they possess probably a majority of the industrial complex of the world

- they have a reasonably competent government

All of which breed technological development. You probably have different insights though.

(Also, things like patent and technology copying, etc. probably help.)
I agree with the author, that is a ridiculously short time for a breaking change in widely-used functionality.

Every "update that breaks things" is teaching your users to not update the software, ever. Frankly, it's hurtful to users.

By all means send the deprecation warning, but give a lot more time before removing the functionality. Tools require time to get widely distributed unless there's a huge emergency. In this case, there's no need for the hurry.
I'm a regular Elite VR player, and a more careful wording of the state of VR support would be that there is no VR support for the core feature added by the latest expansion: on-foot gameplay. The existing VR support (in the ship and in the SRV) remains and is currently one of the focus areas for fixes, but when you disembark your ship or SRV you're presented with a floating virtual screen.

There's a vocal minority of the Elite playerbase that want on-foot VR over pretty much every other feature request, but I think they're underestimating how much effort first class on-foot VR support would be to implement and how few of the already small VR playerbase would find fast-paced FPS combat comfortable to play in VR.
Sounds interesting! What resources are you using to learn?

In case you haven't seen it already, http://8bitworkshop.com/ provides an online IDE.
Amazon, Google Probed in U.K. Over Fake Reviews
Saving someone a click

> When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
Check out the speakers for Extract Summit 2021
https://archive.ph/Fi8RB
I think "classic" RTS is an interesting case that's not likely to return in anything like the form some of us used to like.

There are at least two audiences for traditional RTS: the ones who want an experience resembling speed chess and are focused on multiplayer, and the ones who don't care about anything more than maybe a little casual multiplayer, and mostly want the campaign.

Looking back, all the RTS games I played growing up, as the latter kind of gamer, were sort of bad at delivering what I wanted, even the greats. Teasing out the elements into their own things makes them so much better. Base-building is a better single-player experience when it's more like city-builders with objectives. Moving your little dudes around a map in service of a story is better when there's minimal or no base-building, and certainly when most maps don't revolve around both sides building bases while trying to destroy the other's. Grand strategy scratches another part of the RTS itch. Certain RPGs, another. They all shine better, doing what they do, than RTS did, however nostalgic I am for the abstract ideal of it, which, in hindsight, was never even really approached by the actual games.

Meanwhile, the RTS genre seems to have refined more and more into the multiplayer speed-chess-alike space, sometimes dropping some traditional elements of the genre in order to hyper-focus on delivering that experience, all of which makes it even less interesting to me (but I gather has made it much better for people who want that). It's not the 90s now, so you can ship a game that's almost entirely focused on online multiplayer, with little or nothing to offer for single-player, and it can still sell, so there's no need to try to tack a satisfying single-player campaign on to these.
Cellular being backdoored by design might have something to do with it too. Although I think it really is just a $$$ question; cellular providers didn't want utilities competing with handsets for service, so utilities built their own.
Where did my 256 GB go? Mobile storage Analysis [pdf]
Paradise https://youtu.be/VKHFZBUTA4k
Looks great so far. I feel like I've tried almost every text-based diagramming tool ever made.

The lang reminds me a little of graphviz/dot but hopefully with better layout options.

Are there docs available? Do you have icons/objects for other clouds (GCP) ?
this needn't be attributed to racism.

I'd clarify this as "needed be attributed to intentional, malicious racism."

A system can be racist in terms of outcome without having been intentionally designed to be racist. That still might be a problem. A sibling comment posited low-income areas are both more likely to have monitory residents and older infrastructure. That seems possible. But doesn't make it a non-issue.
I live in a city with 95% adult vaccination (at least one dose) and the government has just announced that they are exploring how to open schools at an indeterminate date in the future.

If we can’t just go back to normal now, then why don’t we just give up?
Brain Computations, What and How, by Edmund T. Rolls https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Computations-Edmund-T-Rolls/dp/...
In my opinion it's quite simple.

Upgrade cycle should be one major version per year (may be less, but not more).

N+1 version does not break compatibility with N version, but introduces warnings for things that's going to be removed. Every warning must have very easy and clear way to resolve it, ideally automatic way, if language and tools support it. Developer must not redesign his application to get rid of warning, but rather just make few obvious mechanical moves.

N+2 version removes previously deprecated things and breaks compatibility with N version.

So you're going to spend few hours once a year to migrate to newer dependency and resolve their warnings. If your software was rotting for 10 years, you're going to spend a week to gradually upgrade, resolve warnings, etc. That should be acceptable to everyone. And those who prefer to live in rot, should pay someone to maintain those outdated libraries (or just live with bugs and vulnerabilities, that's their choice).

With programming languages and foundational frameworks it might be worth to be a little bit more conservative and extend that deprecation period to a few years. Just don't keep deprecated things infinitely.
Especially when tax season rolls around and those 1099s start looking a lot smaller than they did on payday.
React-three-fiber is a renderer for Threejs but does not introduce overhead. Games and webgl is loop driven, so React solves that with a hook, useFrame, which binds components to the render-loop in a managed way. It could in theory outperform Threejs because it can schedule: https://twitter.com/0xca0a/status/1383165072554532865 or scale quality: https://twitter.com/0xca0a/status/1407371461447368705 These things would require a framework around Threejs.
Damn this makes me feel old. I'm not that old!

I remember when downloading 50KB was a serious commitment, over a phone line, of course. It took long enough that inevitably someone else in the house would try to use the phone and your download would get disconnected.

buries head in sand
You're talking Snowden, right?

I think the GP you replied to meant McAfee. (Snowden was never supposed to have killed anyone, was he?)
Slamming political rivals may be the most effective way to go viral
My wife and I have tried this, but it causes each of us to snore intermittently. Did you contend with snoring as you learned to sleep on your back?
This exaggeration of Python3 migration is ridiculous and frankly has become boring. Yes, Python 3 broke compatibility. But we had more than a decade to migrate. It definitely does not deserve to be the poster child for migrations gone wrong.
I also implemented a vaguely Hey-inspired system in Fastmail a year ago and it's been good.

One tweak that's really helped me: when I filter things to "The Feed", I also use the filter to snooze them until 6pm, so I only get mailing list emails once at a day.