skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Should forced auto-upgrades be made illegal in a right to repair world?
* To be clear, I'm talking about forced auto-upgrades that give no option to downgrade.

The right to repair is mostly about hardware. But it's hard to ignore the software part of hardware. And that means having the right to keep and run old versions of software. Old software that work perfectly fine and do their job.

Forced auto-upgrades are fundamentally hostile to the user's freedoms. Ever since the browsers introduced forced auto-upgrades, we've been moving away from an open web to an internet of closed silos.

Forced auto-upgrades is often justified in the name of security. It's not worth it. The "good intention" of improving security through forced auto-upgrades is pushing us down the road to hell.

In a way, we developers are responsible for all of this. We all jumped on the Chrome bandwagon, we all told our friends & families to use Chrome, we all enjoyed the reduced browser market fragmentation after the forced auto-upgrades were introduced. We loved not having to support old browsers anymore. We loved being able to use the latest and greatest browser features. We get angry because Safari is "holding us back".

But at what cost?

Developing for work & for money might've become easier, but what about developing for yourself? As a power user, in control over your own computer? The internet has been getting more and more hostile to alternative ways of interaction, especially as browser market share turns into a monoculture.

We need to encourage more market fragmentation across software - including browser versions and OS versions. We also need to beware of the "winner take all" distribution. There's a strong tendency for everyone to pile onto the most popular programming languages, frameworks, tools. This has an extremely strong centralizing effect, it leads to a very thin long tail for alternative choices. And usually the alternate choices are very limited because there's not enough demand to improve those choices. Clustering around popular choices ironically hurts the market fragmentation collectively.

We need to make it easier to use old software. This pressure to constantly upgrade all software is also leaving many good software behind. Old software that worked great in their particular milieu.

One of the dreams of VMs was to be able run all sorts of old software any time, safely, securely, in their own perfect environment & dependencies. When is that going to become a common & easy thing to do?
You could implement it as a runtime check
As one of those customers back then: lots of QuarkXPress and Photoshop. Upgrading from a 7100 to a Sawtooth G4 was a dream come true. It was still running 9.2 when I left that office.
Weird take on a news site focused on tech. Posts about other industries are often met with 'why is this here?'

But anyway, is there a female-dominated industry that promises upward mobility that men are clamoring for acceptance in and failing to get it?

And, speak for yourself, I only did IT when I was in high school and now I work in cutting edge technolgy.
You're the author of Skaffold?
Damn that's impressive
Does live-reload that runs tests exist?
Women as a class are harassed and worse by men because men as a class allow it. They may not even be aware if it -- male privilege affords them that. Men have the moral obligation to get aware of it, and to take action to ensure that the male culture that allows it is ended. This requires cultivation of difficult skills such as shutting up, not mansplaining, and listening to women speaking their truth. And prioritizing the human rights of women over solidarity with their bros.
No one has mentioned git yet.

It depends on what you think of as great, but the man has developed two of the biggest software items in the world. One that runs the entire internet, and one that runs most software development.

Just about everything, ever, that any given person has done, would have been done by someone else. Sure we'd be on bsd. Or we'd be using subversion or mercurial. Without Einstein, the same truths about physics exist and would eventually be discovered.

I don't know how you define great, But in terms of good for society, and breadth of impact, I have trouble imagining anyone who's done more in recent times
That is on android too. So Google too
Snyk Open Source Advisor – Snyk
>working on the right side of history

I'm certain China thinks suppressing the Uyghurs is the right side of history too.

Your comment is literally the most dangerous thing you can ever say. Literally that someone else is a better arbiter of truth than yourself.
RFC 3339 vs. ISO 8601
Very useful for distinguishing between genuine node packages from imposters. eg. https://snyk.io/advisor/search?source=npm&q=nodemailer
> Appending a string to a null value..?

Appending a string to an undefined value, via array addition, which turns them into strings but doesn't turn null into 'null' or undefined into 'undefined'. It's a bit of a hack.

`'a' + undefined === 'aundefined'`

`[ 'a' ] + [ undefined ] === 'a'`

Also the empty string '' evaluates to false.

`[ undefined ] + [ undefined ] == ''`

This is wat - https://archive.org/details/wat_destroyallsoftware
I sat down briefly with Jon 'Maddog' Hall[0] in Taipei in 2001, where Computex was about to happen. He had retired from his position as a career technical executive at Digital and was enjoying very much touring the world in shorts, beard and sandals promoting Linux and open source. I had interviewed him a year earlier in Sydney and we ran in to each each other by mistake. I was a young kid sourcing hardware for building embedded Linux PC104 systems. The key thing he said to me was that Linux was going to dominate embedded. How right he was.

2004: Ubuntu initial release.

2005: Maemo (Linux kernel) appeared in Nokia.

2007: iPhone (also unix kernel) appeared and Nokia (prior incumbent) peaked.

2008: Android (Linux kernel) appeared.

The rest, as they say, is history.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Hall_(programmer)
The article doesn't really show how this situation has evolved over time. Before cable didn't we essentially only have CBS, NBC, and ABC?

When I see other sources like OANN, or the disinformation being peddled from some corners, I am not sure what is a better alternative.

These media companies also employ a large number of people with diverse opinions. To suggest that a small group of elites are controlling the output of these companies is far fetched.

For some reason, a certain segment of Americans, have lost trust in these institutions that have been there all along. I fear the alternative.
I’d say with Linux and Git under his belt he’s undeniably on the level of Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Dave Cutler etc. Now the real question is do any of them qualify as “great men” since their accomplishments, while prolific, are kinda unknown to the general populace
In the early 1990s, when Linus Torvalds got started, BSD was tied up in a lawsuit, and Minix was under a restrictive license. Torvalds himself has said that if those legal issues around BSD and Minix didn't exist, he probably would have focused on improving one of them rather than starting his own system from scratch. And BSD's issues were legally resolved by a settlement in 1994, but by then Linux was already well underway. If the legal situation had been different, Linux probably would have never happened.
Lol hardly. The problem is no one controls the media so it can get very random. The crazy crap people believe isn’t coming from “corporate” media. You think they are writing about Qanon?
Kinda hard not to be Jewish during 1930s Germany when you're a Jew...
>You're raising a point that has no relevance to the conversation. Neither economists nor epidemiologists rely on self reporting.

Your links were to stuff from psychologists, not economists or epidemiologists.
> These media companies also employ a large number of people with diverse opinions.

Oh no they don't. If you work in media, you either bow to leftist orthodoxy, or you get fired. See Bari Weiss, etc.
> a Great Man of History

Really depends on how many of these awards you’re handing out. My guess is of all the people in the world who have been born in the past century, he’d be “ranked” somewhere in the ones-of-millions? Maybe if you’re being super generous you could make a case for him in the hundreds-of-thousands?
You may find this helpful: https://fromtoschool.com/why-most-programming-tutorials-are-....

A general framework that has helped me a lot in the past.
Specifically, this is an analysis of the strength of anchors built with cams. 'Anchor' in the title is relevant, but the title here leaves out critical information, because the overwhelming majority of anchors in rock climbs are bolted.

"An Elastic Model of the Holding Power of Gear Anchors in Rock Climbing" would be much more apt (though gear anchors can include several other types of protection, "Cam Anchors" is not something I've ever heard)

edit: upon further reading, you're right. There's no mention of anchors in the article, other than referring to a cam placement as 'a type of anchor'. It seems that the article was not written by climbers, which is surprising.
I think it’s fair to classify Luna 9’s landing as soft because at 14 mph it was survivable, though other landers where softer. LM was an achievement not just because humans, but also because it could take off again without maintenance.
Actually, shouting is usually frowned upon, and it's really disturbing in the salle.

Most of us want to punch the yeller, but he's got a weapon. Oh wait, so do we!
"Asmongold on Blizzard Now Blaming Players for Being Too Toxic"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFqbfdcnNf8

i saw the tweet by Blizzard dev. He blamed the players for Blizzard internal problem. this whole mess is Blizzard's own problem and he is dragging the players into it.

he should just say due to internal problem. the patch for WOW 9.2 will be delay and leave it.

Blizzard have been going down hill for awhile. They treat their players like cash cow and try to milk them anyway that they can.

players = paying customers. if you can't cook the burger that a customer already pay for. your paying customer will leave. its simple as that.

bottom line: Blizzard treat their employees and customers like shit.
I think many people here are using duckduckgo and may have missed the decline.
The cutting edge technology you work in wouldn’t happen to be information related, would it?
Women discussing their personal experiences is "controversial"? And we "should expect" trolling and harassment and worse? That's exactly the problem. You think that that's normal and acceptable.
Agree, but it doesn't fit the narrative.
That is Reuters house style. Dry, dry news. It’s great!
As I understand it, there are countries where people may set some of their national currency aside to pay taxes, but make an effort (often illegal) to move their wealth into the currency of some other country such as the US or EU, either by holding cash, or securities denominated in those currencies.

In my view, money is a technology, and people will choose to use money that "works" if they can. A technology can be designed to suit particular purposes, and without claiming to be an economist, I think the major government money systems as US and EU are designed to provide a medium of exchange, temporary store of value, and tool of economic policy.

What I see as the main promise of US money is that it will be roughly the same tomorrow as today, to the point where thinking about the value of things in dollars is useful.
That's correct. There was A/UX which was a unix that ran the mac finder and MachTen which was a posix implementation for classic mac os you could launch like an app, but it wasn't until os x that it shipped with Terminal.app
Torvalds? No. Jon Von Neumann? Yes.
This is an issue for SheepShaver (limited to 9.0.4 because 9.1 and up require the MMU as you say), but not QEMU, which emulates the MMU and thus runs 9.2 just fine.
There's a Cranelift backend, which is apparently faster at creating debug builds than LLVM: https://github.com/bjorn3/rustc_codegen_cranelift
> But there aren’t too many people of that caliber. Most just go through the motions.

This is true of every field from doctors to lawyers to software developers. Most people are pretty average at their jobs.
In San Francisco, people aren’t surprised to have cars broken into multiple times a year at this point. The only change I’ve seen is more auto glass repair companies. Sometimes we are stuck with “perverse incentive”
Who socialises boys differently to girls?

“Boys will be boys”

“That is just his way of saying he likes you”

etc

It is a societal problem where the vast majority of people give boys a long leash for bad behaviour and then expect men to acquire good habits from somewhere on their own between childhood and adolescence.

It is not men’s fault that they were socialised and habituated by people who tolerated or even encouraged poor behaviour.
I wonder if it predated industrial-scale egg farming?
thanks, I had fun making it!

there's full design for a box and a floppy label that I've made for the upcoming 1.0 release
I suppose an argument could be made that google has undermined newspapers which has resulted in consolidation and “official” narratives that forces people to turn to social media for (mis)information.

But I think the problem is too much of media is written by journalists who by and large are really bad at math, logic, and science so all to often what they end up writing isn’t much better than the alternative.

Witness the random hysteria around covid and vaccines. It almost seems like every article is concluding something different and the only consistent theme is that they really have no clue.

When was the last time you read a well reasoned argument based on per capita hospitalizations ordered by state and vaccine rates? Never, and I’ve looked. Journalists are incapable of reasoning about these problems because they lack basic math skills.

All they can say is vaccine good and anti vaccine bad. Since they can’t coherently say why that is true, too many people just dismiss them.
I would love to read your writeup if you get around to it.
Maybe all the people on the internet who disagree with you don't secretly meet in the back room and coordinate their racism.
Find a good doc / book / whatever, and then read the TOC.

When there is no TOC, instead speed read the headings in a doc - hit page down (spacebar) a bunch of times as fast as you can to get the main keywords / concepts to stick.

For me knowing that a particular concept / tool / technique / thing exists and where it's documented if I need to know more is the primary technique. Go deep on a few fundamental things next, then work out what you want to do with the tool and work on that and the surrounding necessary topics to achieve that task.

Often ramping up fast is akin to finding ways to traverse the knowledge graph of prerequisite knowledge. Knowing how to speed up that is the best meta skill you can develop.

In my 20 odd years as a software developer, I've found it very rare that I'm working on a task where I start with the knowledge to complete it.

That approach works for me - it might for you too?
To expand on the article’s initial argument, it seems like to understand what Bitcoin really is, you need to understand the Bitcoin financial system - that is, what spending Bitcoin gives you access to. Understanding the cryptography, the code, or how mining works is not enough, because that doesn’t tell you what you can do with Bitcoin.

I’m hardly an expert but it seems fair to say that Bitcoin’s financial system is considerably smaller and probably more fragile than, say, the US dollar’s financial system, though there’s still some activity.
Perfectionism is the worst enemy. You pretend to be an ally but then treat any failure as a total disaster.
draw.io?
This seems prescient. There were cutting-edge products being delivered on non-commercial BSDs well through the 90s - Hotmail, for instance. But most of those solutions were being delivered on commodity off-the-shelf hardware.

Linux's "killer feature" for adoption may just have been the copyleft license. If device manufacturers had delivered today's generations of single-board computers, networked cameras, Android phones, and who-knows-what else on a permissively-licensed OS like BSD, each of these device trees would have had no mandate to make source available - and as such, I'd bet that any one entity (Samsung, LG, HTC, etc.) maintaining a device tree wouldn't have seen fit to open-source their "trade secrets" in the ARM ecosystem. Which, I'd also bet, would have led to fewer manufacturers adopting noncommercial BSD to begin with, as the "core" distribution would have been less ready to take on new platforms.
New evidence: Gus Grissom didn't accidentally sink his own spacecraft in 1961
It's the encryption. For Crypto Ancienne, it may take 20 or more seconds for a cacheless 25MHz '030 to do a local TLS 1.2 transaction, and that's with skipping a whole bunch of steps. Pretty much anything under 40MHz will have timeouts because most servers won't wait.

https://github.com/classilla/cryanc
Currently the US has spurred the development of military technology by fighting a 20 year war. It's just that the destruction has happened on a non-electorate population. LA and NYC vote.

Planned obsolescence is also a form of this. Why build a phone that lasts 10 years when you build one that lasts 4, convince people to throw away perfectly working phones, and funnel the additional annual sales volume into technological research?
It's a nice sounding etiology. I can only speak for myself, but I've not been afraid of covid since day. This non-fear did not magically arise seven months ago because I don't want the vaccine.
Made me wonder what dining out would cost if the labour were free, and/or if the building (rent, mortgage, etc) were free. I assume those are the two significant costs of any restaurant.
That'll really teach Blizzard. Lower their server costs for one day. Ha!
Not being anti-semitic.

But is the article false?
If it weren't for linux I don't think git would have gotten much traction. Much of the inertia git overcame was because it was pulled alongside linux.
Ask HN: Ryzen 5 Gaming laptop for development
I was looking for a multi-purpose laptop for some light gaming and also Android and Web development. I have been searching for a while, but with a tight budget, I finally found a gaming laptop with specs:
- Ryzen 5 4600H
- 16GB RAM
- 512 GB SSD
- NVIDIA GTX 1650 (4GB)
- 120Hz Display
- Windows 10

Now two things I didn't like was the weight at 2.2kg and screen size 15".
I'd have like to have a 14" screen and weight around 1.5kg. There's a kind of business variant of this laptop which has an Intel i5 11th gen chip without the NVIDIA graphics and costs around the same. The advantage is that is it is 1.7kg.

I have been primarily using Linux for around 2 years now, so I do plan to dual boot Linux at the minimum. So I am worried about Ryzen compatibility. Can the HN crowd please give your opinion on whether the specs is ok for my use or I should look at something else?

I've posted about buying a laptop before but my budget didn't let me purchase it before.

The laptop I was looking at: https://www.amazon.in/dp/B096SKGTCG/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_fabc_55E34DY0PP1WZ0NFG277
You can get lucky on this scale once, but to do it twice is truly something special that leans very far away from luck and towards genius.

From what I’ve read from his own writings he has faults, but he certainly moved the world forwards more than most people that have existed.

Just think - every software engineer’s resume worth anything mentions Linux and Git. Pretty incredible.
Well you've got Henry Ford and then there's Ludwig Boltzman.
Under climate emission targets & global equity assumptions, western (#) lifestyle must end. In political terms, the western middle class lifestyle must end, the global elites will still ride their jets 'for the common good'.

According to WRI calculator, in 2018 world GHC emissions totaled 47.6 Gt. Paris accord 1.5C target is 25 Gt. Population in 2050 projected at 10 billion people. Back of the envelope calculation gives per capita target of 2.5 CO2e t. As of 2020, even countries with green electrical energy production (nuclear & renewables) like Sweden, Switzerland or France are still at 4.5, 4.7 and respectively 6.3 CO2e t/capita emissions.

As of 2021, there is no country with a western lifestyle and 2.5 CO2e t/capita emissions, closest being Sweden with 4.5 and Switzerland with 4.7. Perhaps a ray of hope, both these countries started at 8 CO2e t/capita 30 years ago in 1990.

(#) 'western' roughly includes Western Europe, North America, East Asia, Australia and Arabian Peninsula.

https://www.wri.org/insights/4-charts-explain-greenhouse-gas...

https://unepdtu.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/un-egr19-es-4...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-electricity-fo...

https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...
If you have code like:

let x = 0;

doSomethingAsync(); // does not touch x

console.log(x);

There's no guarantee that x will have the value 0 by the time you get to console.log(x). The value of x might have been changed by an outside function that just happened to run between your statements. In synchronous JS this would never happen as callbacks are scheduled to run only at the end of a function, and if they change x the change will only be applied after x is printed.

The change in behavior will break a lot of existing code, since the synchronous behavior of a function is a core feature and assumption of the language.
Sure. I'll give you that it seems a bit cherry-picked. In fact, "Angry all the time" is the last phrase that comes to mind for most of my female colleagues. That said, when I look at the list of asks, they are actually quite tame, they mostly go without saying in my opinion (e.g. "report bad behavior").

But when I read all the comments on this thread I think "Wow. If this set of innocuous requests is generating this response, then that speaks volumes. Who am I to say this type of pent-up bitterness doesn't affect her career?"
They sorely need oversight (with teeth). Grooming, instigating and then entrapping impressionable people, illegal seizures, ability to lie but then imprison people for "lying" to a federal agent... the list goes on. Sure, we need a national investigation unit, but it also needs oversight to prevent glaring abuses.
> The way a plane flies is quite different than the way a bird flies in complexity

And a plane is a vastly simpler machine than a bird!
A huge part of modern litter isn't people throwing out, like it was in the 70s and 80s, but it blowing out of the back of vehicles, even trash trucks.

Another big issue I see around where I live is when storms hit on trash night. They'll pick it up around 6AM so people bring it out the night before, but on a regular basis we'll get a strong thunderstorm that blows trash everywhere.
Start that argument once we can model insect brains. Mouse brains aren't even on the horizon of what we can do.
He wasn't "found", but sold by the Pakistani intelligence that was protecting him at the time: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n10/seymour-m.-hersh/the...

Not before the CIA faked a vaccination campaign to get some blood samples for confirmation, thus compromising the concept of vaccinations in the region, of course.
Definitely "How To Get Out Of Deserted Island ASAP for Dummies".
Pretty much, yes. I’d say most wow fans say Burning Crusade was the high point and that was released in January 2007.
There's a global debate happening today about whether complete free market allocation of investment is best, or whether East Asian state-lead investments into technological advancements is. If the free market was all we need, then why should the government invest into scientific research?