skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Whether or not China will clone an app is immaterial to question of whether all companies will fold to Chinese government pressure.

It is very material though. If your business is not special/unique in some important way, then you don't have a lot of bargaining power when the CCP officials come to negotiate the terms. Then your choices boil down to -- accept whatever is offered or exit completely. While some exited completely, I very much doubt they did so on ethical grounds, as you seem to be implying. Rather, the terms were unsatisfiable.

Trying to get some sort of an acceptable to you deal is the only thing that makes sense from a business perspective. The alternative is losing access the world's biggest market and watching the state prop up a powerful new competitor that may well compete outside the borders of China too.

If you want American companies to be able to resist Chinese govt pressure, then you need to have significant intervention from the US government and hope that they will be able to broker some sort of a deal. Failing that, it's a joke to think that any company has any actual bargaining power in a negotiation with the Chinese govt.
Can i just take a second to mention that i honestly love everything that comes out of charm? Their dedication to the command line and the attention to detail and style are just a breath of fresh air when compared to bloated web and desktop interfaces. Thank you.
It still remains to be seen if these short- and medium-term gains for China's middle class will result in prosperity in the long term. "Selling" your social/political/religious freedom can often be a boon in the short term but come back to bite you later.
I built my own computer, from scratch
Yeah, but this was very much a just so story.
> But governments have improved, and improved radically over the years.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, there was a sizable research field devoted to trying to help make human organizations function better (it was most of what used to be called "operations research", but went far beyond the for-profit corporation version of this concept).

For reasons I don't understand, that project appeared to almost completely shutdown by the 1980s, and it's hard to find much evidence that it ever existed today.
Semi-related: in the nand2tetris course, they teach you enough so they can add a keyword in their (admittedly toy) system -- the course involves implementing the entire toolchain, including the high-level language[1] compiler, which emits VM code, and the VM code's translator into assembly.

By the time you've implemented a compiler that "just works" for the language, you notice that you have really inefficient code for those times when all you need to do is increment a variable by 1, given that the hardware has an opcode for that! In order to have nice, general compilation across all use cases, you've programmed the compiler to implement any case of "add X to variable" via the VM commands for "push X's value onto stack, push variable's value onto stack, call add, pop stack into X".

So, I figured I could add "inc" as a keyword. You have the compiler recognize that keyword and translate "inc <var>" into a VM instruction, and then tell the translator how to turn that VM instruction into something that makes use of the opcode.

(Alternatively, you can have it just recognize when it's doing something of the form "<variable> = <variable> + 1", but that's trickier once you've written the whole VM emission step as a single-pass operation.)

I know, pretty basic stuff from the standpoint of a professional compiler programmer, but pretty neat to be able to make an addition to the language like that!

[1] It uses "Jack", a syntactic-sugar-free Java-like language
I'm sure China knows that if they do ever actually invade Taiwan, then there will be hundreds of agents, if not outright military actions, to destroy or sabotage the critical parts of Taiwanese industry rather than let them fall into the hands of the CCP. (For instance, I can't imagine any of the key ASML machines would survive without being quite thoroughly destroyed by thermite to keep their secrets from falling into Chinese hands.)

This would nearly completely cripple the world's tech economy for a decade, but that is far better then becoming vassals to CCP tyranny.
I don't like the idea of having to hire staff to monitor someone 24x7 to ensure he stays on task and doesn't drive away coworkers and employees with harassment just because "he's good at" part of his job. That doesn't make any sense.
It's more of a "yes and..." problem. There's also a sanitation aspect to things.
SF Millennium Tower Tilts Quarter Inch in Four Days
> totally depending on other people's whims and fancies

And that they're not infected with some novel disease...

Public transit was pretty dangerous and way less useful during most of 2020.
Executive at Swiss tech company said to operate secret surveillance operation
not sure if it's still the case, but in a similar vein you used to be able to say "hey booboo" to google devices
No, this is wrong. Performance is everyone's responsibility, because compilers are fundamentally garbage-in-garbage-out. The people that work on them are incredibly smart and I don't want to discount that, but there is fundamentally nothing they can do if you write something nontrivial that's O(n^3): that's on you to fix. The fact is that a lot of websites leave timers running in the background or use really inefficient ways to manipulate the DOM, and despite the work of all major browser vendors there's not much that can be done here except asking the people that make those websites to not do this. If you're one of them, you should make it your responsibility to care about performance.
Monetization is the answer. Nobody is paying $50 for web games, there's no in-app purchase system, no web gift cards in stores, and the exploitative interstitial ad networks that enable free mobile games to make boatloads of money don't exist on the web.

That said, there is an ecosystem of web games and you might be surprised by the sophistication of some of them. https://venge.io/ is a good example, try https://poki.com/ for a sampling of more. https://playcanvas.com/ is the most advanced WebGL-specific engine.
Also I designed a Mac graphics accelerator gate array back in the late 80s, we were worried that the promised VRAM performance would not be fast enough so I designed in the ability to add extra clocks to RAS and CAS timings - it ran at full speed which was great, but marketing wanted a lower price-point version of the graphics card so we sold one with a ROM that turned on those extra RAS/CAS clocks
Yep. Being able to buy processors that don't trigger Oracle's core-count licensing (for example) but be able to vary cores on and repurpose them in the general VM farm is a thing that I have been very keen on in a past life.

It's a relatively niche interest, but it exists.
My Interview with Alex Berger
It seems the author is conflating a human social proclivity toward back-slapping/good-jobs with a reluctance to admit failure.

Medium and large groups admit failure all the time, but rarely dwell on it. Instead they adjust and evolve, which is the healthy response to failure.

Consider changes in management, business pivots, board changes, values evolutions, even cultural shifts and generational displacement. These are responses to failure after some form of prior admission to failure, even if slight.

The shiny thing that happens is declarations of victory and praise - so that’s where a lot of attention goes and where even the author has a bias. Admissions of failure are by their own mechanics brief and not very sparkly/shiny/attention-getting.
because we are animals stuck on a little dying planet and we believe money is what gonna save us

we'll transcend humankind the day we stop trying to profit from each other or worry about "how much it'll cost"

capitalism and its market don't want your street to look nice if it's not gonna make them generate profit, even if it makes you happy

the market doesn't want it!
From Wikipedia, on the Great Barrington Declaration:

The World Health Organization (WHO) and numerous academic and public-health bodies have stated that the proposed strategy is dangerous and lacks a sound scientific basis.[8][9] They say that it would be challenging to shield all those who are medically vulnerable, leading to a large number of avoidable deaths among both older people and younger people with pre-existing health conditions,[10][11] and they warn that the long-term effects of COVID-19 are still not fully understood.[9][12] Moreover, the WHO says that the herd immunity component of the proposed strategy is undermined by the limited duration of post-infection immunity.[9][12] They say the more likely outcome would be recurrent epidemics, as was the case with numerous infectious diseases before the advent of vaccination.[11] The American Public Health Association and 13 other public-health groups in the United States warned in a joint open letter that the Great Barrington Declaration "ignores sound public health expertise" despite public health experts agreeing "better balance must be found between protecting public health and helping the economy."[8]

The Great Barrington Declaration was sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian free market think tank associated with climate change denial.[13][14][15]

More on the AIER:

Prominent AIER fellows have run afoul of social media for opposing such measures. For example, Naomi Wolf, the AIER’s Senior Visiting Fellow, was recently suspended from Twitter (where she had over 140,000 followers) after using her platform to spread anti-vaccine misinformation. For example, she tweeted that vaccines were a “software platform that can receive uploads”; she wrote that vaccines “let you travel back in time”; she argued that the urine and feces of vaccinated people should be separated from society; and she compared Anthony Fauci to Satan.

AIER contributor Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist and President Trump’s former coronavirus czar, had also previously violated Twitter’s public safety rules, leading to the removal of one of his tweets for promoting misinformation about masks. His tweet stated “‘Masks work? NO!’”

https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2021/09/13/covid-19-and-the-new-me...
I think GP's parent is a fair argument against criticisms that start and end at "$11B is a lot of money!". It is valid to point out that $11B pales in comparison to the US's defense budget as a means of providing context for how big these really big numbers are.

If someone were to point to specific ways in which the project wasted money, that'd be different. But I haven't seen such detailed criticisms.

Nobody is arguing that wasting money is a good thing.
Why LGA airtrain would be a boondoggle? AFAIR, right now there's no way of getting to LGA without risking being stuck in the traffic for an hour.
There is nothing inherent in PS’s model to disallow some third-party app from working. Also, having to create per-usecase bug-prone parsing for everything is pretty terrible. It is okay for copying a file or whatnot, but it is definitely not okay for more complex tasks. And indeed, for those you would just use a single-purpose tool, like pandoc for my given example.
Exactly. The trick is to create an environment and context where it's possible for groups and individuals to brag about their failures (+/- mitigation strategies).
Even Amazon started without inventory. The website was the Ingram wholesaler catalogue, Amazon displayed 2-3 day shipping and would quickly order the book from the wholesaler within 24h. Only after a year of operation they started to directly pre-buy from publishers (top 100 books). I used to work at a similar company. As long as the sales margins are good and support burden manageable it's a decent business. These days dropshippers outsource shipping, returns.
Reminds me of the math [1] behind the Middle Out sequence (NSWF) in Silicon Valley.

[1] https://www.cantorsparadise.com/the-math-behind-that-dick-jo...
And did they prosper? There's a cosmic sized gap from a billion dollar idea and actually obtaining a billion dollars.
This would mean either that we would have a lot less food, or we would have to divert a lot of effort from other productive activities to make it up. Maybe that's okay, but still this idea is not free, and not low-hanging fruit.
Ironically, all the gold and silver the Spanish extracted and transferred to Spain did the Spanish little good, as it simply resulted in inflation.

Like what we do today with fiat money.
>It randomly crashes and corrupts your data

My PC doesn't have ECC memory and it isn't crashing and corrupting my data. I think you are vastly over exaggerating.
I agree, although I would swap out React for Vue.js V3.

Also, from experience RabbitMQ (with I assume Celery) is probably overkill for most projects and introduces more moving parts especially if you already have Redis. So I would go for Python RQ with Redis as the broker. (You can use Celery with a Redis broker but it has strange bugs and again probably overkill)

Finally, Ionic framework and Capacitor for mobile apps.

Oh, and increasing falling for TypeScript.

Supper quick stack to build anything.
>Even researching what soldering wire to use is a pain because apparently leaded solder is just so much "better" when it comes to flowing than non-leaded.

This used to be true (I remember having to grind through many different solders on different boards for work and they sucked compared to the Multicore 60/40 5 core rosin fluxed solder), but modern alloys are pretty good. Whatever you're using you must use ventilation too, so the comments about flux are already answered.

I feel that there's a much wider range of soldering tasks that solder has to cope with now. In the past hobbyists had single or dual layer PCBs with big pads and through hole components, or stranded wire and big connector buckets. But now we have tiny surface mount components on tiny pads, or a big FET on a 12 layer board with a big ground plane. If it's something you're doing at work you get used to the feel of it and can set your iron station up accordingly, but if you're a hobbyist you don't get that practice and set up time.
I had some friends who worked at Alexa. I recall they had these bare metal servers down in the basement in these old barracks buildings in the Presidio. I recall being impressed that the whole thing ran on a 1GbE connection. Also was my first introduction to companies that had lots of perks like free food, sitting on Yoga Balls, etc…. I remember they had this raging argument about milk as a condiment versus milk as a beverage. Seemed like a dream to me at the time.
Yes, here in my city, construction is a racket. they get unfair contracts, make them shitty, then when they break they get another one.
Pandoc's Document Model in Python
How even smart people have started to buy this 'Modern Monetary Theory' nonsense wholesale. The same old terrible idea resold in a new package for 1000s of years. Everytime a government runs out of money the charlatans come out and start claiming you can just magically print money without any issue.
Excellent point, and will still work on recent MacOS versions with zsh/gitbash.exe too.
I think what separates the two camps is a positive incentive to admit failure, which is where the rarity comes in, as highlighted by other posters. If the group's incentive is integrity and trust, or loyalty and retention, it makes sense as there's a capital (political, monetary, etc.) incentive in doing so.

That's where I think the insight cleanly falls apart and yet holds up pretty well for the vast majority of situations. Rarely are groups actually positively incentivized to admit failure, and therefore they do not, as a cohesive unit, actually admit failure as there's a greater incentive not to, barring force.
They usually take longer than 2-4 years
Tell HN: I've rejected $1.4M offer to work on open-source instead
I've been offered $1.4M (over 4-years) for a senior technical role in a Series-B funded startup

F*ck them!

I'm not slaving away A SECOND of my time to build next capitalist ponzi-bubble

I won't let these bastards become billionaires off my back

What, you're a billion dollar company already? With only 10 clients?

You need growth? What for? To lure in more investors and ride up/justify your crazy valuation?

I'd like to my spend next year contributing to open-source
Quote:

Pipeline exports of natural gas from Russia’s state-backed monopoly Gazprom to continental Europe have dropped roughly one-fifth in 2021 on pre-pandemic levels despite a sharp rebound in demand and low stockpiles of the important fuel. The imbalance has helped send prices in Europe to the highest levels since 2008, increasing energy costs for homes and businesses.

https://www.ft.com/content/c023ba5f-4d78-4749-8485-4851baf9e...
Yeah my first reaction to this was "Oh it's going to be the public". Because the US has strong rights and legal system basically anyone can come along and considerably screw up a project just by claiming some endangered bat is living in the path of it, or some economic harm will be done, or some community will be damaged, it's far easier to just to just stick planning notice on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'

A great example of this is in the UK where the main road going east to west from london to cornwall is a single carriage way with 2 lanes going past one of the country's most historic sites (stone henge). It's a fucking disaster. So the plan is to build a massive tunnel under stone henge to help traffic and remove the blotch on this area of historic importance. It's expected to cost £1.7Bn but it's already been completely tied up in legal fights, it was proposed over 25 years ago (when it was already desparately needed). Essentially plenty of people either don't want it built at all (presumably just accepting that we'll never ever be able to have economic in england west of stonehenge) or they want a tunnel that is several times longer than the proposal sending costs and construction time soaring.

What you could do, if you were Turkey, you could just built a 12 lane motorway and shove stonehenge a few miles north. It'd be cheaper.
Many computer designs can be made by untrusted assemblers as long as the silicon fab, fusing, and packaging are trusted.

Most Intel machines are not designed for it.
Apparently you don't see (don't want to see) the point of the discussion. The context here is not about their ideology or superficial talking points. It's about the mechanism of the power structure. No matter which party gets in control, it will always want to increase national debt, always go for more money and more concentration of power. This is the same mechanism applies to everybody, anybody who doesn't want to play the game would have been excluded from the game long time ago. Anybody who doesn't want to play with the established power structure will be easily destroyed.
Was he the one with all the beef?
FYI in Safari desktop, which supports web push, you can turn deny all requests. The same thing works for the other permission types as well.
You should install the license the same way you install other software.
And then write another program for ppt-to-txt and every conceivable format? You might then say, okay, then first create an intermediary format but depending on program domain that may be more hassle than its worth it.

Powerpoint is made for correctly understanding .ppt(x) files. This complicated functionality should probably not be replicated at other programs as well.
BallisticNG has tried really hard to get the look and feel of the PSX Wiepout games, including an optional PSX shader that adds vertex wobble.

https://neognosis.games/ballisticng/
A lot of platforms unfortunately have these blanket disclaimers. Fortunately Substack hasn't gone down that road yet, while Twitter, Facebook and Google are already over the horizon.
> That I am aware of, "protection money" clearly implies that the payments are to a criminal organization - which is separate from, and unauthorized by, the established state.

The phrase is also very commonly used to refer to money paid to government officials who are corrupt. One could still quibble over whether this is technically “corruption” since it might very well be totally legal and encouraged under Chinese law, but I think the usage of the phrase here is quite suitable.
You need both, and you need a lot more "techies" than visionaries. Otherwise those visionaries just sit around at home with no one competent enough to execute on their vision.
It didn't work :/ There's always next time. Until then, my friend!
> But a gravitational wave has a longer reach than the force of gravity.

That can't be right - surely the gravitational field permeates the whole of space; and surely the wave and the force are the same thing?
> https://source.chromium.org

Wow, it is pretty cool! Is there an open source software that is similar to this? It reminds me of https://elixir.bootlin.com/. I really want something like these two. A cross-referencer, but seems like the Chromium one does more (editing, for one). The Chromium one seems to do more git-related stuff as well.

Currently checking out https://github.com/bootlin/elixir.

Edit: Oh Wow, GitHub just improved their code search. Pretty cool. Seems like it can do cross-referencing (even between different repositories!).
Thanks for the clarification!

I might not agree with your conclusion but I appreciate the effort to explain the point your making.
Effort to Save Local Journalism in US
It’s only hypocritical if you find the American and Chinese governments morally equivalent.
> Google Search for example was heavily modified for the Chinese market.

Do you mean something other than Project Dragonfly, which was terminated?
Same old both sides argument. It’s getting old when the republicans are authoritarian snakes and are efficiently gutting this country and filling their pockets. The modern democrats are ineffectual and that’s their only crime.
I don't understand why people wouldn't bother testing for radon - the mitigation systems tend to be cheap when compared to getting rid of lead, which might involve tearing out all your drywall.
No, that's the exact equivalent to what I said above "if the page says "Latest NBA game - pay $1 to find out who won", that's fine, but then that's what you should provide to my search engine." - that's delivering searches based on the publicly available data, that page is about "30 Rock" and that's what I'm searching for.

This dissonance is not really applicable to video or audio, it's a problem specific to text content, because for video we don't have widespread search for actual content like we do for text, we're searching just on the metadata so the availability of the actual content does not affect searches.

For text content, if I search for a keyword and a phrase, it gets (or should get) searched on the actual content that's available. My beef is if the site wants google to index the actually unavailable content - for example, if you're selling a book and you're making just the title and abstract available to the public without buying that book, then searches should be based on this metadata. But if you tell google "here's also the content of page 313 with an interesting factoid about 30 Rock (which is the only place in our book which mentions 30 Rock), please index that so that searchers find our book not only when searching for its title but also when searching for 30 Rock" then I would consider it acceptable if and only if that page 313 with that 30 Rock related content is actually available to public; and if you want to keep that text hidden, then that's your prerogative but in that case you don't get to use that text as "advertising" to draw in searchers.