skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My functional API's never return void because they're functions and immutability is the benefit there. Returning void means you're either mutating something or interacting with something thing that does. Also, chaining can be dangerous, as if it's not implemented correctly, can hide errors, or not have adequate failure tolerance, and cleanup can be a mess if a stream or connection disconnects in the middle of your chain.

But in an OO project, void is a really useful. If you're doing game programming, mutability is required for all but the most trivial games. And throwing in more functions and more variables on the stack isn't going to benefit anything. You click a button, the gun fires. I don't need to check the return, it add no value, adds complexity and isn't idiomatic to the language.

Use the right tool for the job.
No, this is a shrewd defense against a witness saying in court "but the opposing lawyer didn't let me speak and only told me to answer their questions, that's why it's not in the deposition".
Not only India. It’s even Western Europe - which is generally not a low cost area. US salaries for senior/principal levels are 3-5x of what the rate is there.
Maybe "can it make a business that works" is the only thing that matters to you, but it's not to me. If I have to spend my days dealing with developers who can't think outside of a tiny box, I will be miserable. I don't care how much money the business makes; that's not how I want to live my life.

And what happens after you get that business running and bringing in some revenue, but you need to start tackling harder problems in order to keep your current customers happy and attract new customers? You're stuck with a bunch of developers poorly suited to solving those problems, and a bunch of infrastructure that wasn't designed with this sort of feature expansion in mind.

So you hire some new people who have to rewrite a bunch of things, or who have to spend months or quarters untangling the mess. You could even miss your market opportunity. Even if you don't, you've still wasted a lot of time and money.
Are you sure it was actually using the index you expected? There are subtleties in index field order that can prevent the query optimizer from using an index that you might think it should be using.

One common misstep is having a table with columns like (id, user, date), with an index on (user, id) and on (date, id), then issuing a query like "... WHERE user = 1 and date > ...". There is no optimal index for that query, so the optimizer will have to guess which one is better, or try to intersect them. In this example, it might use only the (user, id) index, and scan the date for all records with that user. A better index for this query would be (user, date, id).
It’s the other way around for me. I use 27”+ monitors most of the time, which makes maximizing windows a waste of screen real estate in most circumstances, so I tend to have odd sized windows which means chasing menubars around the screen under Windows and Linux.

Also, increasingly Windows+Linux apps are eschewing menubars entirely in favor of hamburger menus or nothing at all (!!!) which is intensely frustrating. With a system-owned global menubar there’s no excuse for the developer to not have menus.

Unfortunately many of the same apps that are resorting to hamburger menus don’t expose their menus through dbus or something similar which breaks global menubars in KDE and those added to other DEs with extensions. I really really wish there were an XDG standard for Linux apps to programmatically expose menus with.
Why the Billionaires’ Tax Matters to You, Too
I'm not sure what to make of articles like this. To be clear, I agree with the claims it's made. Most people who oppose these claims will write them off as sexist, incorrect, bigoted, etc. And so I'm not sure an article such as this will convince anyone who isn't already predisposed to think this way. Further, I don't think anyone has any proposed solutions. We certainly don't want to return to a world a reduced female achievement, and of course it's not clear that there's any path there even if there were popular support for the idea. I also don't believe most women can look past their programming any more than I can be sexually aroused by unattractive women. So, I'm not sure the problem is solvable, and I don't think most people will agree that this problem exists. I suppose we're just in for another transformation of society.
I'm imagining everything was ASCII character art schematics, given the available toolset back then.
Panic isn't merely a facial expression. It is body language, actions and may be some other things.
I think you are leaping to conclusions here. It is possible that most people want to keep HN focused on technical conversations and use this as an opportunity to learn something (I certainly do), which is why you are seeing many more comments on the technical aspects.
Look into web3/blockchain/NFT technology, most of it has been around less than 2 years so experience is less of a hard requirement than in other fields of software engineering.
Related, in my opinion binary prefixes are better, e.g. MiB > MB (ha)
Many vitamins and minerals have lethargy as a symptom of deficiency.
Did you test it against extractive summarizers?
This is pretty inspiring to hear. I really do notice that my productivity is highest in the morning when I get time to have a shower, meditate, walk a short distance (10m) to the office, and have a cup of coffee-- I'm basically at peak performance until I get lunch "because it's lunch time" and then perf wanes from there as I get tired, sluggish, lose will power, etc. God forbid I lapse and have a sugary treat in the afternoon (even the little fun size baggie of M&Ms wrecks me for the rest of the day), eating sugar puts me on a sugar-dependent cycle where I need to re-up every hour or so after breaking the seal.

Exercise, eating healthy, eating when you're hungry rather than when it's time to eat. Avoiding sugar, getting good sleep. Taking it easy on weekends and in evenings. All good stuff!
> WE VALUE MONEY AND POWER ABOVE ANYTHING ELSE

Isn't that what capitalism enables? With money, you get more money. With more money you get power. With power you get even more money.

I feel like you described current liberal capitalist world. The system is constructed in such a way that most people work towards creating wealth either for themselves or their boss. The way this wealth is later used is not as important, it can lead to overutilisation of resources, straining the ecosystem, creating pollution or just "having fun" while your neighbour has a hard time feeding his family.

I don't think that this is the "leaders'" fault, in my opinion the system is mostly to blame - it either rewards or forces behaviours that you listed.
Spiders are amazing. Of course you should stay away from some of them, like blackwidow, the brown recluse, or the brazilian wandering spider but for the most part, house spiders (unless you're in Australia), and jumping spiders are usually friendly.

David Attenborough covered Portias in one of the documentaries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDtlvZGmHYk -- It's fascinating that they can strategize their attack.
Maybe chinese tech companies are working to provide alternatives (even for freeish) to break the capital inflow of western rivals and hinder their ability to outspend them.
I did this early 40's

Don't focus to much on certifications or qualifications.
Do focus on a portfolio.
Find things that scratch your own itch to work on and learn
I can't wait for Google to open offices world wide.

Oh wait...
This sounds like inventing a problem for a solution you already have.

IPFS content addressing, .onion sites all work without any need for cryptocurrencies.
It works very well with VSCode. It has an integration. It shows differently than normal autocomplete, it shows just like gmail autocomplete (grayed out text sugggestion, and press tab to actually autocomplete). Sometimes the suggestion is just a couple tokens long, sometimes it’s an entire page of correct code.

Nice trick: write a comment describing quickly what your code will do (“// order an item on click”) and enjoy the complete suggested implementation !

Other nice trick: write the code yourself, and then just before your code, start a comment saying “// this code” and let copilot finishe the sentence with a judgement about your code like “// this code does not work in case x is negative”. Pretty fun !
I used BBSs from around age 13 to around age 18, and ran my own for about 4 years. It's hard to disentangle my feelings about those platforms from just the feeling of being that age: that's where I hung out with my friends, where I met my first girlfriend, and it was the context in which I learned both programming and design.

One thing I'll say is that talking about how slow the connections were, and how little disk space there was to work with, and how only one person could use the system at a time is missing the point: those things sound constraining now, but at the time they made complete sense. They were the state of the art. There were certainly times I wished my xmodem transfer would go faster, but I think the same thing today when I'm buffering a YouTube video. The state of the art always feels great at the time, and old-fashioned just a few years later.

Anyway, the experience of using BBS' at the time was a lot like checking Hackernews for new content. You'd log in, look at the forums, see if anyone had posted anything new, and then log off. You could play door games, but a lot of them could only be played once a day.

Another thing about the experience was that you were always aware that you were on the sysop's computer, and he may have been watching everything you did. They could be looking at your screen, watching you type a message in a forum. Sometimes, you'd try to log in late at night, or early in the morning, when you knew the guy was asleep. Nowadays, that sounds crazy to me: I'd never use a website where I knew someone was watching everything I did. Not tracking aggregate metrics, but literally watching every keystroke as it happened, and seeing everything I saw at the same time.

From my perspective, one of the biggest technological advances was ZModem, a transfer protocol that let you restart failed transfers. Prior to that, transferring something large (say, the game DOOM) took hours, and if anything happened that disrupted the transfer, you had to restart. That happened all the time: someone picked up the phone, or there was just a bad analog signal.

In the case of DOOM, I think it actually took me 2 weeks to successfully download the shareware version.

Another big one was FIDOnet, which was a gateway between BBS forums and Usenet: it let you read usenet forums, and post on them too. I distinctly remember one day there were a bunch of new message boards on a BBS I frequented, with a whole set of new members that all had @ symbols in their usernames. It was so weird. That was the first time I'd ever seen an email address. That morning sort of marked the beginning of when the BBS world switched over to the internet world, for me.
I have no idea how you came to this conclusion, but indices on datetime fields are completely required to bring down the seek time from O(n) to O(log(N)), plus the length of the range. Massive parts of the businesses I've worked at would be simply impossible without this.

The cardinality of the index has other ramifications that aren't generally important here.
> It seems a lot of folks are getting nerd-sniped

that is an excellent term.
Designated initializers is the most amazing feature of the C language. I don't understand why no other language ever copied it...
Italian coffee company using solar energy to roast beans
Which verticals are not saturated yet? Web dev is almost impossible to get in.
You first would buy a modem for maybe $100, which was a little box you plugged into the serial port of your computer on one end, and a phone jack on the other end. Then you'd plug the modem into your home telephone system. Home PCs didn't typically come with an Ethernet port in those days, and wi-fi wouldn't be a thing for another decade or so. The modem usually came with a floppy disk containing software to use it, which typically looked like a terminal window, sometimes with additional menus to simplify things like dialing and file transfers.

Then you needed to find the phone number of a local BBS. There was no Internet at the time, so typically you'd get this through going to computer trade shows, or asking around, or occasionally computer books & magazines had local directories. You'd dial up this number and connect to the BBS. This tied up your phone line and their phone line, so people who were seriously involved in the BBS scene usually bought another phone line (about $30/month). Modems had a distinctive screech that you'd learn to love, which is apparently now on YouTube.

The actual interface was almost pure text, and had features like forums, file transfer, and occasionally chat. Basically you'd leave messages for people who'd dial in after you, and exchange files. In general, there was no real-time communication, and the scale was much smaller than today's worldwide social networks (typically each BBS might have a few dozen to a few thousand users, so like HN for the first month or two of its existence). Everything was slower-paced than today's Internet; you had to actually delay gratification and check back tomorrow rather than seeing if you got a response in 5 minutes.

The hardware also was slower. On a 2400 baud modem, if you were a fast reader you could read the text as it came over the phone line (2400 baud is only 300 characters/sec, which is like 50 words/sec, and much of that was formatting boilerplate you could skim over). None of this graphics or video stuff. I remember downloading my first MP3; it took 2 hours to download, and every time the connection dropped (like, for example, if a family member picked up the phone) I'd have to start over again. I think it actually took like a week of wall time, and then I found my computer wasn't fast enough to play it back in real time, so I needed to decompress it, which required buying a new hard drive so I could fit the 40MB decompressed that a 4-minute MP3 expands to.

The industry was tiny by today's social networking standards. It was a hobby for most of the players involved, not something you could really make money off of. Really it's the telecoms that made the money, off all the people buying second lines.

The biggest lasting breakthrough was that it showed communications and networking could be a major use-case for PCs, which paved the way for the Internet and WWW a few years later.
Yup! I have at least two eSIMs myself that have SIM applications running in them that wouldn't be able to function otherwise. (The operators do IMSI switching based on SAT event triggers, from the looks of it.)

The Oracle JVM installer wizard isn't lying when it's saying that there is billions of devices running Java in the world :)
Yeah, I'm not clear on how multiple tables fixed it other than allowing you to scan through the main table faster.

Multiple tables could be a big win if long email addresses are causing you a data size problem, but for this use case, I think a hash of the email would suffice.
I don't really get why you seem to believe there are just two extremes and that's it. I don't think "do it right from day one" means that you never accumulate technical debt or that you write the perfect architecture that anticipates every possible future need.

Doing it right, to me, means hiring people who can adapt to changing conditions and needs, and who can make (or help you make) the right trade offs when you have to balance faster time-to-market (which can involve cutting corners) against avoiding technical debt.

The team that lives inside IntelliJ and can't do anything outside it is not going to do that for you.
Another challenge was have enough time to download. Most BBSes had a limit on the number of minutes you could use per day, which could severely limit how much you were able to download.

For example, on a 14.4k modem, it takes about 15 minutes to download a single 1.44mb floppy disk image. A typical game could be anywhere from 1 to 10 disks, so if your daily quota is 30 minutes, it would take multiple days to download a complete game.

On very popular systems, you might not even have enough time to download a single disk. Keep in mind that many early modem transfer protocols didn't support resuming downloads, so if you ran out of minutes before finishing your file, you just had to start over again. So what to do?

The solution was to use the "time bank". If you were done using the system for the day, you could "deposit" your unused minutes and store them in your account, up to some max limit. Then once you had enough time saved up, you could withdraw them and finally download that big file you've had your eye on. At least, as long your parents don't pick up the phone...
This is not even close to the reality.

Zestimate is not the tail that wags the dog. It’s wild how much people get wrong in their assumptions here.
Perhaps it's a bit flippant to make this not-obviously-true assertion without attaching any reasoning.
Do the descendants of these slaves get reparations?
> What's wrong with the formatting?

It messes up Firefox reader mode.

I myself have gotten complaints from other people when using linebreaks in Github comments because their device renders them.
A master's degree in one year? Did I misunderstand something?
US terminated Taiwan's nuclear program in 1988. They confiscated fuel rod, data, research paper, poured cement into the labs and dismantled the heavy water reactor that was worth around 2 billion USD.
That’s like if an alien took Mozart as a specimen and then disregarded the human race because this human, while making interesting sounds, does nothing of value. You have to look at the bigger picture.
Which ironically, RISC-V was funded initially purely by the US government.
> A lot of the search & compression technology we created during the BBS days is still in use, though in different ways now. Compression being pretty critical since for most long distance sites you paid per minute and downloading a 1Mb file over 9600baud was slow. Man I remember going from 1200-2400-9600-19200 then 38400 and 115200. You felt like a damn rock star when your file downloads didn't take 6-8 hours and could be done in like an hour or so.

I started BBSing in the late 80s, so saw the very tail end of 2400, but the first modem I bought was 9600, so I missed the big 2400-9600 change mostly. Road the wave all the way up to 56K. I had planned to finally start my own BBS when I moved off to University in 1994, since my parents wouldn't let me buy dedicated phone lines. Saved all my cash from working McDonalds and was all ready to pull the trigger on multiple V.34 56K USRobotics Courier modems and had the BBS (based on WWIV) all ready to turn on. Confirmed that the University would allow multiple phone lines per dorm. Got to University, and lo and behold! The summer before, they outfitted all dormitories with two 10-base-T ethernet connections to the Internet backbone. Mind blown. Ditched the BBS idea instantly and that was it, I never dialed into another BBS or ran my own.

A lot of my BBS friends also instantly lost interest the moment they entered University and had a proper high-speed Internet connection.
This could be useful for that [1]. It has a thing to catch the creature and a built-in magnifier. The video showing how to use it is amusing--those two kids have great expressions.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Carson-Quick-Release-Catching-Magnifi...
Newspaper is cutting back on print, training readers to use iPads instead
Ask HN: Why don’t startups share their cap table and/or shares outstanding?
Start-ups expect you to join as the 4th employee, work incredibly hard for years and not have a clear picture of your compensation? Am I meant to take a 409a valuation at face value?

Is there a legal reason? If not, founders who are hiring, please know that withholding information like this is the easiest way to lose a potential hire.
I kept reading but I did have a "hey, that's kind of unfair" reaction at that line. It's not their fault that the speed of light is a hard limit, eh?

There's a chicken and egg problem with compilers and languages on the one side and machines architectures and instruction sets on the other, it's not easy breaking the mold. (GPUs are a counter-example perhaps?)

CPU designers can't all be Ivan Godard ( https://hackaday.com/2013/08/02/the-mill-cpu-architecture/ https://millcomputing.com/ ) or Chuck Moore ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Moore#Hardware_desi... http://www.greenarraychips.com/ ) eh?
It wasn’t a free put, the problem here is that it was a put but it was not priced correctly.
Are you employed as an SWE? Web dev?
One thing I thought about is alternative scenarios. If the house market had rocketed up for whatever reason, Zillow could have made a pile of cash without having a sensible strategy.

Then the articles would be talking about what geniuses they were and ML trampling traditional real estate.

They would double down and when the market calmed, all the same issues would reappear. Perhaps that's actually what happened, because the house market has been buoyant recently, and they seem to have had the iBuyer business for a few years?
You pointed the obvious without maybe realizing it.

I find most people lose energy by eating lunch. So skip lunch or make it super small and light.
No, it's normal in the UK. She already did one last year, so this is verified. UK unis are also pretty desperate for students lately. Go check it out.
One of the big things about being an experienced developer is knowing when things are important. If someone asks me to write a function that returns strings over X characters what counts as a char is going to be whatever the language counts as a char for the length function. Asking about emojis will just lead to a time-wasting discussion about something that doesn't matter.
You need to separate technical progression of VR headsets from the whole meta-verse idea.

It's out of question that Facebook (and other companies) did a good job in progressing VR headsets technology (through I wouldn't call it a miracle).

But the meta-verse idea as presented by Facebook doesn't look too promising IMHO. It looks out of touch with reality and it's from Facebook. A company well known to try to force their world view onto all other people around the world, ignoring any ethical questions arising. Sure by renaming themself they will manage to somewhat run away from their responsibilities, but as they don't really change their ways it's just a mater of time until we will have the next batch of scandals, now attached to the "meta"-name instead of Facebook.
I'm quite certain that E.B. White's wonderful Charlotte's Web is based on the author's similar observations.
Origin: https://xkcd.com/356/
Pusher to Get Real Time Updates for Your WebApp
Funny, I heard the same thing from someone trying to sell me shares of WebVan.
Could I get more clues? How might someoone hire a 40 year old for NFT/blockchain?
A surgeon still spent many years studying medicine at a broad level before moving into training for that specialty, though.

And many developers I know do end up specializing in particular sub-fields (ML, databases, whatever), but they already have a wide breadth of knowledge and experience to serve as a foundation underneath that. In contrast, I also know some developers who didn't take that route, and jumped into specialization early, and who are completely useless at productionizing their work.
If you have a need for lightweight cryptography today, why wait for the NIST competition? Ascon is already the primary recommendation in the lightweight category from the CAESAR competition, and now also a finalist in the NIST competition.