skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One instance where I've found writing lots and lots of comments helpful is for functions with code that I'm writing for the first time. It's like rubber-duck troubleshooting - making myself explain what I'm doing in plain language actually helps me reason about it. I tend to leave those comments in because then the next person who works on it understands why I did something in a particular way. This perhaps results in superfluous comments, but you're never going to get it exactly right, and I think erring on the side of too many comments is probably better than too few.
The title is a personal question. You could ask the same thing about collecting stamps, writing fanfiction, staying together with a so-so romantic partner, being an active member of a local church, etc. Maybe all those things felt great to do, back in the day. But now...

Most of the dark patterns he mentions are more (cough) features (cough) of monomania-type capitalism than of FOSS. Or just human nature. Sitting on your fat ass and blaming the poor guy who did all the work was really old before the pyramids were built. Same for the tragedy of the commons.
I have two periods in my life. Before password manager and after password manager.

After I made the password manager a part of my routine that I trust absolutely that I never skip, all of that anxiety went away. I still have logins from the before times that I wish I could round up, but for the last ten or so years I can guarantee I know every site that I’ve signed up for.
Using third party libraries in production libraries, regardless of its license, means you audit, vet, and test as much as possible the consequences of bringing in the library. And going through the same process every time you update the library. "Who does that?" Good software engineers do that.
> The best way to get paid for OSS

also "The best way to get paid" is to not make it OSS but to charge for it!

Because if the only reason some one would use the software is because it was free...
I reread the first one and was struck by how much smoking was included. (H. Beam Piper too) Between that and the nucleics, it really felt like 50's era SF, admittedly one that held up better than the bulk of them.
I believe random comments often become extra clutter and diversions from actual code. Code should have short, succinct names that explain in context.

What we should do is document the code, short and consise description of classes, methods and functions. This will then act as a reference, when names inevitably fall short.

From this discipline, comments above code-blocks should explain what's missing in code to a future reader - probably yourself even. But a basic explanation of "What the heck is this? What is it for?" might be in order, if not already given.

How to implement this depends on needs and tooling.

The bigger picture belong in design documents, with references to components.
Well, there is an audience which likes to avoid websites with JS. I think their biggest motivation is tracking and bloat. So having a technique for a user experience without load times (after the initial load) without JS is what makes this somewhat special.

On the other hand, there have been solutions for this case for ages (like using radio buttons), so using :target is just a somewhat cleaner approach from my point of view.
On the other hand, Apollo had no option than to abort to orbit. Just ditching somewhere and hoping for the best wouldn't have been an option on the Moon, but it's commonly done in aviation on Earth.
People who are bad with numbers often find it harder to make ends meet
> Auto experts today say that you should warm up the car no more than 30 seconds before you start driving in winter."[2]

These “experts” must never have actually been in a harsh winter. Apart from electric cars, modern cars are absolutely not pleasant when it’s 0F out after just 30 seconds of running.
Was it ever worth it? If somebody shares their work for free I would guess that making money out of it isn't their main motivation.

The main problem seems to be that other people using this work sometimes don't understand the license and expect the author to provide support.
Intermediate Representation.

Kind of high level Assembly like language used across compiler stages to make them more modular and easier to manipulate.

Some known examples are LLVM bitcode, GCC GIMPLE, Rust MIR, Swift SIR, Tensorflow MIR,....

Even bytecode formats like MSIL, JVM, WASM, P-Code,.... can be considered some form of IR.
"d" is also a frequently used suffix for daemon processes: inetd, pppd, httpd, etc(-d)
> in a way that makes fools of people who thought they understood the rules

Exactly this. A system that incentivizes bad behavior and fails to protect/reward moral people exerts pressure on those with good morals.

Morals may stop you from repeating such behavior at first, but if it becomes a key to getting ahead then you can bet those morals will be slowly chipped away.
I'm so glad I didn't read that book before being a pizza delivery driver.
Well, for public-traded companies, anyone in the C suite caught doing that would be fired, so it's not a mystery that they don't...
+1 for this. It also links to my #1 rule for comments: why not. It applies when:

1. There's a chunk of code that, on first reading, could be clearer/simpler/more idiomatic.

2. There's a good reason not to use the obvious approach, and do something else instead (maybe performance).

Then comment to explain why the obvious path wasn't taken. No matter how well written, code alone can never explain "why not". I've found this invaluable, even looking back at my own code.
Given the topic Uriel talks about here, this is awfully relatable.
Free No-Code Website Builder + Web Application Platform

- https://boomla.com/

- https://developer.boomla.com/

These are really 2 distinct products. I wanted to build a website builder that made sense, which I figured needed a new OS to avoid the nonsense complexity. (It's an overlay OS.) They go hand-in-hand, as every OS needs a killer app anyway, which is the website builder.

The website builder is taking off. I'm providing it for free, with the caveat that I'm going to start a domain registrar soon and I'll ask people to move their domains to this registrar, which will cost about the same as other registrars. So the revenue is not collected for now.

For me the long game is the application platform, which takes a unique, simpler approach. Lots of no-code users started hacking code on Boomla, I'm pretty excited about that. You just write the code and Boomla takes care of everything else.

I'm not sure it qualifies as a side-project, as it started out as such but now it takes all my time, even though it doesn't pay my living. Some border case I guess.
I'm a former IT consultant, and I'd like to run my home network to the same standards as at work. I looked into it and came to the conclusion that dealing with a few timers is much less hassle than trying to do it with computers.
That’s horrible because the git commit messages are easily lost, disconnected or hard to find in any reasonably active codebase. For example as soon as you do a change and move a file it almost always disconnects from the previous change history.

Whats even more difficult is searching through a code base when the documentation isn’t in or near the code. I don’t know any IDE or editor that makes it easy to search though git commit message and source code at the same time.

On top of that, do you review git commit message in code review? Do you aks people to improve descriptions, typos and language in commit messages?
Zodiac is really fun(?!) and quick.
I hope you won't be requiring logins in the future. Big deal breaker for me.
VCs offer bad advice, because most of them are successful not because of the ruthless elimination process that is a startup, but despite. Meaning that they have no idea why they are successful. Take this example: Let's take 10 identical startups with identical traits doing the same thing in 10 places of the US. Some die because they burn money quicker, b/c SF salary is expensive. Others die because they are in rural US and don't get exposure to the right people. Or they succeed because lower cost of income allows for longer runways so they are still alive at the right time, as opposed to the SF startup. Or they might have a neighbor who knows someone who knows someone.

All of those that make it in the end will think they made it because they were smart and hard working and what not. Truth is that hard work and smarts are the lower entry barrier of success, not what takes you all the way to the top.

But then again VCs are mostly self-congratulating morons who will attribute their success to anything but luck.

Case in point: Anything from Sam Altman or Paul Graham.
Interstellar Probe – Humanity’s Journey to Interstellar Space [pdf]
Agreed, most apps are useless to most people, just like most people don’t read most books. And I’m not recommending the comparison to a cup of coffee as marketing.

For me there is absolutely no difference in paying $1/month and $10/month for a daily driver search engine and I’m letting everyone know this to establish dominance over OP.
> Notifying vendors first about security flaws is a cybersecurity industry norm, but a new law encourages Chinese companies to first notify the government

There is nothing misleading or inflammatory
Are those directly comparable though? From what horrors I have heard of the US healthcare system, one can easily pay $5000 for a procedure that someone in my country can easily get just by walking into a private clinic and paying $50 out of pocket. So outstanding health expenditure per capita in the US can just be the symptom of how uniquely bloated their healthcare system is, and not the sign that US citizens use health services so much more.
My advice is for the OP to make his build system GPLv3 licensed and sue anyone who willfully violates that license.

Open source still has lots of life left in it, but copyleft licenses are now increasing in importance, and the days of letting it slide when a company violates your license are now gone.

To decide on what license you want, ask yourself, do you want this to improve software as a whole, or do you want this to improve FOSS? Does the image of proprietary software benefiting from your work soothe or anger you? Nowadays, it's becoming increasingly important to choose the latter. If you don't care what happens, you can license it as MIT or something. There are still valid cases for that.
I wonder what fraction of traffic these days is from nor search engines, neither social media ?
So? Keep it for yourself on an utilities package.

I said nothing of using one package per function.
He didn't take the worst from Biden's son either!
They are not always paid for developing math. Sometimes they are paid for teaching math, sometimes for applying math. And they are developing it on the side.
It’s undermined by comparing a laptop to a $50,000 workstation? In that it is unfair to the workstation?
I suspect every one of these cases the patients were customers of private health care clinics. The motive of the health care could completely change the outcome.

In Nordic countries you get the same or better healthcare with less exams and medicines than you get in the US because doctors prescribe treatments and medicine only when necessary.
I highly doubt that paid interviews pay $500/hr, let alone $1000/hr.
You should consider jumping on the NFT bandwagon while the hype is there.
Park Geun-hye: South Korea's ex-president granted government pardon
Are you familiar with Literate Programming? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming
> I write my comments in commit messages because those are valid forever.

Only until someone moves a file to a new directory. Now this file shows up as a new file with no history.

Also, you hope to never change your version control system because that change will erase the history.

Relying on commit messages is sometimes just not good enough.
KNX already does this without internet. The downside is that it's expensive and just as proprietary as the internet-connected smart gadgets.
Yes, TiddlyWiki is great, but isn't it full of JS? I mean, the somewhat special thing here, is that the page is built without JS.
To you as the author it might be crystal clear, but the next person who has to modify might not have the full context. A lot of good comments in this thread mention that you should write comment about intention (“why”), not implementation details (“how”), although also the latter might make a significant difference to the next person.
And even if your original code might have been clear to another person, it might have been modified in the meantime.
No it doesn’t, it’s open source, not an obligation.
Also, lots of open source software only achieves widespread use because they are open source. If e.g. Daniel Stenberg had decided to charge for curl instead of releasing it under a FOSS license, very few would have bothered to use it, and in all probability, some other person would have written a FOSS replacement for it.
YouTube can shadowban your comments just because you used (more than one ?) timestamp "links" for the same video !
It's hard to make responsive table with <table> tag though (except if you only want horizontal scrolling)
They are probably people who tried it once and still can’t exit.
Does that mean if you have acid rain, it reduces back to iron?
You are not "dinosaur". People like me are. I don't live in the city. I love driving, it is a form of active therapy. One day I realized that the UX of my M3 is making me crazy. I crafted a UX customer journey for myself and removed all the "marketing crap".

Turns out all I need is basic functionality, no infotainment and focus on driving experience and reliability.
Sold my BMW, bought 2001 Mercedes-Benz Compressor, restored the hell out of it. After a year, repeated this with X308 Jag and Honda Civic R 2005.
Now I have a fleet of cars with no problems and versatility for my use-case.

I will wait patiently for the option to electrify all of them.
New cars are not exciting for me, to much "tech" for my taste.
May be this is professional deformation, but I need a place in which I am in control all the time, with no distraction from the road and no "notifications", except the valuable ones related to the driving.
I use a Garmin navigation and old iPod touch for infotainment needs.
The Mars Volta could have gotten some good lines from this.
Lebanon faces ‘depressing’ Christmas as internet crisis stops festive calls
Webb is scheduled for liftoff at 7:20 am EST Saturday, Dec. 25
Ah the cleaning culture censorship that is such in vogue nowadays.
very cool! how much bandwidth do you need to supply a 100 "gigabit" businesses? and how do you get it?
git log --follow -p file

edit: here's another

git log -p -L:show_commit:builtin/rev-list.c
Looks like it got the HN hug of death, getting 502 error.
I see, thanks for clarifying.

In the US market[1], it appears to be a discontinued model.

[1] https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/accessories-and-software/moni...
John Ousterhout spent a (short) chapter on writing comments in “a philosophy of software design”. The whole book is in my opinion a must read and gives advice rather than claiming it has all the answers. Back to original topic: including how and when to write comments
Same thing here. At work I can see the history going back to 1995. And that's after migrating from something to Mercurial, and from Mercurial to git. Maybe that's not the case in all companies, but in the one I work at, the commit history is the longest-lasting information trail.
The way is solve this is that I release everything under GPL. Companies usually won't touch that, but everybody else might.
The value isn’t “consumed”. I get as much value out of my open source projects regardless of who is using them.

The fact that you consider users to be “leeches” means you’re missing the point of open source.
Be advised that you increase the risk of driving off accidentally at start by just being in neutral. The clutch is a good double safe that you feel the whole time whkle starting where as the gear is just a check in advance that you can mess up.
> Everything is buggy the newer it is, your point being?

There's a distinction between labeling it as a hobby project and something ready for production.

Linux started as a hobby OS, and being buggy is OK in that regard.

systemd is way more buggy than it should when it's deemed production ready. This is my point.

I'm using Linux for a long time, and I know the meanings of unstable, buggy and experimental; as well as production ready.

I don't hate or I'm not against systemd, I'm against the attitude behind it.
Why does "justice" as a concept exist? How did it evolve? Where is the advantage in it? After all, in non-human species, the runt of the litter tends to die.

I have ample evidence that all humans are deeply concerned with this concept, however different their conceptions may be; yet I have seen or heard no evidence that could plausibly explain why it helped sustain us as a species.
Thanks for the pointer - I had read about it, but hadn't put two and two together. The kinds of things I work on (cacheable wesbites) don't need to be highly tuned for back-end performance, so I guess it's easier for me to do that.
Is moderation and abuse of free hosting for malicious purposes an issue for you?
My latest side project is a link management system. It gives you one place for all your links, you can use it in social media as a bio link, instead of posting non usable links each time you want to direct your audience to a specific content. I sell it via agencies for now and I make a little less than $300/month.

https://krok.link/
Yes! The comment may not even have been necessary, if you extract into a function calculateBT601Luminance(red, blue, green).

Then you can link the standard, or at least the Wikipedia page, and I would lean towards this if I don't expect readers to know a bit about the domain. But if you don't, someone can still find an authoritative source with a single search.
If all you offer is the idea, it would be hard to find a good partner.

If you pay money for experts, sign contracts and non-disclosure agreements.

Find an expert with a good reputation. If they breach those contracts you can sue, and that can also harm their reputation.
I’m surprised Python is so high and ahead of everything else.

The problems in AoC are quite easy, broadly speaking. So to me the appeal is to use a novel toolset. New language, new platform, etc. Someone on HN mentioned org-mode+CL.

Python is great, but not very novel. Are there that many people learning it on AoC? Or am I missing the point?
It's simply better suited for some types of images than others (e.g. the resulting size is sometimes bigger than expected). The main advantage is the very simple encoder and decoder with a specification that fits on a single page (and which still yields surprisingly good results for many image types):

https://qoiformat.org/qoi-specification.pdf
Yeah I didn't know that until I had my own app in the Play store. It is quite surprising even though it says Downloads.
Is this sarcastic? Sanitizing individualism in the Christmas Eve is not for the
faint of heart. Retirement by 35 means others must retire later than they should, unless you pretend to be self-sufficient.
looks like a typical SEO spam website that I would avoid
Yes, there are lots of factors like this when comparing any two countries. USA does have uniquely high expenditure supporting your bloat claim.

The point is other countries e.g. France, Switzerland, Canada, UK, there are also not significant differences vs. countries with lower GDP per capita.

I'm not saying this proves a relationship but it's a useful indicative signal, and the randomised studies cited by Hanson, combined with the health outcomes of American Amish all together make more more sceptical of the benefits of health expenditure.

I'm not certain though and would love more info. If anyone has any evidence pointing in the opposite direction then would be really interested to see it.
Sounds like a plain-language version of "git blame"!
i think for many, they are not easy
It was not an issue this far, but if it gets more popular, it may become an issue. I am not actively promoting it though.
That’s not what “appropriated” means.
How China's high-speed rail network got built so fast
The acronym was like 2nd or 3rd result on ddg after the radio station.
Open source is great for marketing. You can market yourself as a developer to your peers. You can market your proprietary software by open sourcing a small but useful part of it. You can market your business/service/protocol/whatever else by open sourcing the software to best use it.
There are two parts to this.

The first part is, if something is wrong at your employer, should you try to negotiate, or leave? The thing to realise is that conditions at an employer are already the result of negotiation, even if it isn't overt, and even if it happened before you joined. Leaving is an inefficient way of communicating your preferences, and many things are too minor to bother, or too minor at the margin to bother leaving, but you would be lobster-boiled if you let them slide.
Also, to be brutal about it, top managers and CEOS are there because they are good at taking advantage. If they see an opportunity to take advantage of their employees, they do. So you are in a negotiation with them, like it or not.

The second part is, should you declare yourself an activist? I think this is more questionable. It is not necessary to follow the patterns of activism to push back against problematic decisions. You may well be better off making it clear that you consider a particular issue unacceptable, and making the employer aware that the consensus among employees is that it is unacceptable, while making it clear that apart from that, you are a loyal and trustworthy employee. Activism sets up a narrative in which you are their adversary.
"Everything" means two 32-bit integer values (width and height) in the header, that's hardly much of a downside ;)

Usually it's a good idea anyway to read file headers byte by byte instead of mapping a struct over it to avoid alignment, padding and endianness issues.
There is another way. Where we can have:

* modifiable and fork-able code

* free for non-commercial use

* and payment plans defined in code for commercial use.

I'm working on it at github.com/openfare
> The problem lies in how value is measured and this is imo the root of nowadays turmoil.

People have always had differing values, this is nothing new.
When people believe that only x is ultimately valuable, and y is not, It allows for people who understand that people have always valued things differently to exploit that for their own gain.

The people who understand that not all food, all shelter, all clothing, all meds, all land, all x is valued by everyone the same will forever have the upper hand against those who are ultimately convinced of the absoluteness of their values.
Thanks. The idea came up thanks to the pandemic. I wanted to make it super simple to make any pdf file reachable via qr code. I’m sure the market is a lot bigger, but I never really spent any significant effort on marketing.
And it's 100% true. The job is to get it out to production not to write essays in comments. Always be deploying.
Published in 2021 -- 'Perhaps the Stars' The last installment of the Terra Ignota series by Ada Palmer.

It's SF. But written in a conversation with Enlightenment era philosophy and plenty of bits of mythology. Lots of exploration of what could be and what should be, and the interplay of politics and war and ambition and murder.

(A note though, if the style and language of the first chapter put you off, then ... You're not going to like the rest of it)

I went into the last book with two questions:

* Who is on Who's side?
* Who _is_ Mycroft Canner?

There were definitely some answers there. Perhaps more answers than there were questions.