skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Cross-platform development is known to suck.

I'm getting tired of people saying this when it just isn't very true. There are multiple GUI toolkits that are cross platform, WYSIWYG cross-platform GUI designers like Lazarus, Java, and just plain old writing GUI code for multiple targets. Christ people, we used to ship computer games on 5+ different platforms with wildly different graphics and sound hardware and different instruction sets in an era where you often didn't get the luxury of writing things in a compiled language if you wanted them to perform!

Also, there's an argument to be made that most programs have no need to be cross platform in the first place.

I'm not saying cross-platform is trivial, but it isn't some impossibly herculean task either.
You can find answers to the first question here: https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective

And here: https://app.whaly.io/hacker-news/public/report/3596f39c-5a56...
> Users tolerating such bullshit is the reason why it exists and keeps on existing.

It's because it's the same kind of users that tolerated such bullshit on TV 20 years ago: 5 ads or more over a 30 minutes show.

The truth is: most people are brainlessly consuming any media (be it TV or the Internet or the latest crappy auto-tuned pop song) and are wandering hyperconsumerists souls.

20 years ago it was more complicated to go on the Internet, so your average "I'll sit in front of TV and tolerate 5 ads over my 30 minutes show" wasn't on the Internet. It's that simple.

It takes time and half a brain to not get abused by all these companies. People don't want to spend the time and certainly don't have half a brain.

The Internet adapted itself to the masses.

That'd be my rant.
I don't think anyone is directly blaming the users here.

It is just a fact of life that a sizeable portion of users "accept" dark patterns, and PMs consider that as a sign of success.

However I strongly doubt users are doing it by choice. IMO it's actually because of lack of choices, lack of knowledge or learned helplessness.

That might be controversial, but to me the point is that A/B tests and KPIs are the wrong incentives, not that users are stupid.
Fair enough. Its utility is mainly for serving as a virtual microscope for conservation purposes. For example, here [1] is a lead soap [2] particle up close, here [3] is a very detailed view of the dog showing exposed canvas, and here [4] is some retouching from a past conservation treatment in the face of the main figure. These kinds of things help us to make decisions about future conservation treatments, help to document the exact state of the painting for future comparison, and help us to appreciate Rembrandt's mastery with paint (e.g. the unintuitive way he depicts lace [5]). All in all, it should give the public a greater appreciation of how much effort we put into collection care at a museum.

[1] https://hyper-resolution.org/view.html?pointer=0.326,0.666&r...

[2] https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/conservation-and-sci...

[3] https://hyper-resolution.org/view.html?pointer=0.522,0.466&r...

[4] https://hyper-resolution.org/view.html?pointer=0.551,0.619&r...

[5] https://hyper-resolution.org/view.html?pointer=0.500,0.527&r...
You sidestepped the question about what rules of logic are intrinsic to the universe. There are different versions of logic. Is Law of the Excluded Middle intrinsic or not? A great many physicists, philosophers, and mathematicians don’t believe logic is intrinsic to the universe. Is ZFC intrinsic to the universe? Do large exist as a deduction from the math that is intrinsic to the universe?
I haven't really had any respect for SA since their terrible anti-Bjorn Lomborg. Goodness knows he was totally wrong about global warming but he was also totally right about the effectiveness of the EPA and Clean Air act in reducing pollution. That issue had the person criticizing the forward questioning how he could prove that the mainstream media was being too pessimistic and the person criticizing the bibliography complaining that there were a lot of mainstream media citations.
If your user base is large enough, some significant faction of your users are in fact “retarded un-learnable,” though I might have put it more delicately.

And when there’s money involved, there’s always incentive to cater to your lowest common denominator user.

I’ve watched many in-person and remote use testing sessions, some people just have no clue how to use technology, yet you still have to design apps and websites for them to use. These people aren’t necessarily dumb or anything like that, they just don’t understand technology.
BonsaiDb December Update: Finishing up alpha 1
2 cups coffe from early to around 0900
tea after that.

coffe bossts me a bit out of sleep and tea keep me concentrated and awake. I find coffe after 0900 a distraction enhancer ( my mind tend to get distracted)
Drip coffee with foamed milk using a cheap handheld milk frother.

I drink one in the morning and one after lunch and that's it.

I buy ground coffee (too much work to grind it myself) and not the most expensive ones. I tried almost 10 different very expensive coffee bought on boutique coffe shops and they all tasted horribly. One didn't even smell (or tasted) like coffee, but some fruity aroma. I learned that, for me, the sweet spot are the higher-end ones that are sold on regular supermarkets.

The fanciest that I go is using Hario filters, but mostly because I make coffee just for myself and they have those one cup filters.
Whoever it is, it irks me that they seem to remove the previous months scans
I'm building a new kind of search engine. Would love if some of you could provide me with some difficult search queries that target very specific content.
> Not a main factor but a factor is 'always the latest tech' issue. Most banks and airlines I use rewrote their perfectly fine and fast sites and apps to reactjs and now they seriously suck.

overusage of SPA of SPA framework (Next.js etc) has caused a lot of problem for users who are used using browser, which is most of web users. It breaks open the link in another tab, back/forward flow. It is not SPA is bad, however if you chose to go that route then design the app with screen size mind and you got think it as an Application instead of a web page.
>which is (maxWordlength*26) long. Each segment of 26 represents a

>^We're going to assume normalized words, which are all lower case and no punctuation, comprised of English letters from the 26 character alphabet. Getting the set of all of the possible words of any given length, is also quite an exercise.

I hate solutions like this because they'd never be even close to being viable in real world
4) is actually funny because that is what you would expect if their search wasn't based on race. ie: if they were correctly using risk factors when deciding whether to search or not then the chance of finding contraband conditional on being searched should be the same. it even says this in the study:

Though we found that African Americans were significantly more likely to be searched than Whites, this overall higher rate of searching did not result in a lower recovery rate as one would expect if officers were using lower standards to search African Americans, as other researchers have found in other cities
What is the security risk of moving from an API subdomain to a single host?
Employees Discover That Their Ex-Coworker Was a Genius
Yes, can confirm.
Something that's helped me in this situation is to explicitly tell people "I'm only looking for someone to listen please don't suggest anything to help". Otherwise as you said people want to help, and generally if someone is telling you an issue they are looking for a solution.

It can feel weird sometimes, but I think you get way better outcomes when the person knows how you want them to respond. Then you don't have to worry about not letting them fix things or absolving guilt if they can't. If you don't expect them to know then that's a perfect reason to tell them, and you can be super nice about it and say something like "Hey I really appreciate you trying to help but the thing that will help me most right now is just listening and not suggesting anything".

Edit: sorry in advance for the suggestion if it isn't what you're looking for haha, just sharing what's worked well for me
Would monetizing points here really be worth it? Even if you had a ton of points and made the front page with your new startup for a whole day. If it wasn't actually an amazing piece of code, or truly original, you would get endless amounts of blowback. Arguably this is the worst possible place to debut anything. You have to be some kind of masochist. And if you spent a dime on farming for it, God Help you. I mean, I love seeing MBA CEOs suddenly jump onto HN to try to do damage control after launching/promoting something here that they thought would get easy hits. That's like my favorite HN sub-genre... the wildly freaked out brand-new CEO. Someone should make a compilation of those.
This thread seems to be going down the path of rediscoving Maslows hierarchy of needs.
Why would you need affirmative action though since HR policies already dictate that there should be discrimination against genders and HR drones get bonus points for it? To counter bias?
Most of the dark patterns are not due to dumbing down UI. They're either because nothing better is available (security), income would be reduced (ads, cookie warnings, software is deliberately crippled for non-professional versions), development is done by lowest bidder.
Very concise; and that's pretty much the way I remember it too.

Maybe the most remarkable part of all, that had nothing to do with corporate behemoths (AFAIK), was the speed with which society pivoted to embrace the smart phone (specifically, the internet more generally).

We live in a completely different world than we did just one decade ago.

But I feel a bit like the OP. Soon I may just grab some hardtack, my muzzleloader and head out to the mountains and spend the next decade collecting beaver pelts. Cookie settings be damned.
Let's not forget the endless bloat. Multimegabyte sites, spinning loaders and that's before the 3rd party resources are loaded.
Is this going to be addressed?

Now people are more aware of it?
> The entire world owes the very vaccines we are using to save countless lives to the effort his administration organized

While I would never denigrate scientific fundting, there's stretching the truth and there's propaganda. We do not "owe" the development of vaccines from the US funding program.

And while the ModeRNA and AstraZeneca vaccine took US funding, BioNTech did not. As vaccines for "the world" goes, a lot of it was Sinovac and Sputnik.
I just watched your PyCon keynote and it's absolutely fascinating. Congratulations on the release of this amazing picture!
He doesn't address this, but some comments do: did he really get the pure molecule or was it some impure compound that made it less sensitive?
How is he wrong about global warming? As far as I know he doesn't say it doesn't exist, just that compared to other issues facing humanity, the data doesn't actually indicate global warming is the biggest threat to our future.

Other than going against the current unchallengeable orthodoxy, I think that is a valid hypothesis that is almost impossible to disprove, but is certainly worth debating.
My read of the SciAm article and of modern criticism of historical figures is this:

Without diminishing the accomplishments of historical figures, we can also choose not to lionize them.

All of them were mixtures of flaws and accomplishments. They are heroes to some people and villains to others. We can remember them that way, as a whole.

No one is saying we should forget Wilson's accomplishments. We should just remember the other things about him that weren't ahead of his time.
People only expect things to be free because they're not being told / educated on the actual cost of their "free" service.

I wonder how many people over the past 15 or so years have been denied a job because a tech-savvy HR person combed through social media / forum profiles and read things they didn't like? And if you think that wasn't happening then, you're out of your mind. This was happening in World of Warcraft guilds, for God's sakes... players with "wrong" opinions were kept out of certain guilds by """""""well-meaning""""""" officers of those guilds, so I assure you, it was happening in the real world.

But today, as then, you never knew about it, so you had no knowledge that your employment was denied because most American states are at-will and it's not like HR would have said you have a "problematic" stance regarding <insert issue X>.

This is but one small example of the "progress" we've seen on the "modern web".
Nice, but more renewables because of higher demand does exactly nothing. What we need is less fossil fuel burning, so less demand.
As worth studying as any language is. I think Tcl is really neat and would like to use it more at work, but most software comes with Python API's now, so there is an advantage to popularity. Also, Python has the scientific libraries I need without needing to drop down to C with Tcl. Your mileage may vary. I've used a bit of Tcl for some simple things, but Windows isn't exactly a first class citizen and I don't like how the various distributions of Tcl seem a bit less trustworthy than just downloading a Python distribution from the python or anaconda (scientific distribution) websites.

After reading Ashok Nadkarni's book though, I decided I felt the Tcl design was more coherent to me in a lot of ways. The way it sticks so heavily to commands is very consistent, but languages like Python (or something like APL that goes to the absolute extremes) use special syntax to make certain things easier to recall (think of how Tcl uses "lindex" for accessing arrays and Python has dedicated "array[4]" syntax. Neither is better than the other, just different.

Tcl to me is a lot like a Lisp built off of strings rather than lists. Many on HN will point to how this is inferior, but the overall language and ecosystem has been a lot easier for me to pickup.

Edit: I have nearly a decade of regular Python usage under my built for things like process automation and a little scientific computing, but have only read a book on Tcl, read blog posts, and coded a little bit every now and then.
> Capitalism killing innovation by making it another homogeneous device that doesn't respect you doesn't surprise me.

What is this weird fascination with capitalism on HN? If a socialist government thought collecting data was a good idea and directed its resources that way, would that okay?

My read is (rightly or wrongly) they want to have cloud services, and cloud services require identification.
Take a handful of decaffinated organic beans and hand-grind them twice, boil water and pour through a filter directly into mug. Add honey and coconut milk, drink while hot.

A kind of ritual. Living my life with time there's no need to save any with machines here. Doing it with care and by hand prepares me to handle my work much the same way.

At most once a day, on average once a week or so. Always a special occasion. Never make it a habit, never become dependent on it. Caffeine works too well for me; decaffinated coffee works about as strong for me as regular coffee works for everybody else, it seems. Prefer cream but lactose intolerant.
Yeah. It would actually be pretty cool if web sites and apps were dumbed down for a few things: denying cookies, deleting accounts, contacting support, unsubscribing from spam.

With dark patterns those things actually become more complicated.
I get the feeling that people here do know deep technically and code, but talk about things that don’t frequently use this knowledge.

I think this because every time there’s a coding topic, we’ll get really specific, targeted coding comments that are relevant and make sense.

I meet a lot of ex-programmers now in “higher” positions that don’t allow programming. And many times they’ve expressed that they wish they were programming and look for excuses to allow programming. It’s kind of unique in what’s been shared to me. But I wonder if it’s the same for ex-accountants and others who love a profession but grew out of it for the money.
Being able to implement a solution after having already been shown how to do it is sufficient for many roles. But not all. Some roles require that you are also able to figure out solutions to problems you have never seen before.

If your company requires only the former that's fine. But if you also require the latter, that's fine too and it's ok to test for it in your interviews.

If a company generally requires candidates to be overqualified for their intended role, that's a bit dumb. But I imagine that such a problem would eventually be fixed by the free market (supply of workers at various qualification levels vs. demand for said qualifications).
For a happier note, in this interview they tell how they managed to train non-lisp engineers on their internal browser-based Lisp system: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/lisp-interview-kina/
Long functions don't necessarily make for bad code. If there aren't long loops or long conditionals, long functions can reveal a lot of structure without the cognitive overhead of many single-use functions.

Good code uses abstraction judiciously. The same in prose leads to parentheticals and rabbit-holes. Good code is both easy to read and easy to modify, but making it easy to modify without losing much legibility is the hard bit. It requires a prediction of the future: what's likely to change and what isn't, and whether future change needs an indirection or if it should be integrated in place. There isn't a close analogue in writing, since writing is a linear tour of a whole, while code reading is usually a breadth-first directed search for the right place to either locate a bug or add a feature.

Great writing uses fresh, vivid and appropriate analogies. Making up new stuff in code is more often than not the wrong thing to do.

The writing which is closest to code is newspaper reporting: starting out with a summary, and iteratively delving deeper into details. This is writing designed to be skimmed by the reader and aborted when the desired information is acquired. The other prose which comes close is documentation. Neither make for great writing.
A lot of this is also caused by following the leader. And the leaders are fueled by adtech or spyware...
The business model is data/network lock-in. Everything is optimized to prevent users from switching, not solving users' problems.

I think it's because users don't pay for anything; it's valuations based on ad exposure, or expectations based on size of user base.
Interesting. I'm surprised to hear that you've been so successful with that technique. My statement was slightly inaccurate. I have no idea how difficult it is to extract the content from the page once you're able to get it. What is more immediately challenging was to get FB to serve you the page at all. See https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/issues/2047

There were a handful of pages on Facebook that I used to keep tabs on that would have had to have been public as I do not have an account, but now I can't get FB to let me see some of them without a login (for example https://www.facebook.com/MadisonAudubon). I have no idea if my IP as been flagged, which they appear to do aggressively, or the pages were made private or FB introduced some addition settings and the pages are now configured or what.
I'll add a fast guess from some earlier, solid experiences: Let R be the set of real numbers and n a positive integer. Consider R^n, the common n-dimensional space. Assume this Rn is Euclidean, that is, has the usual inner product, norm, metric, topology, and measure (area, volume, e.g., in the sense of classic Lebesgue measure* theory). With this overly detailed description of context (WHEW!), we move on to the main point:

In the R^n, consider a sphere. To be more clear, for some positive real number r, consider the set of all points in R^n with distance <= r from the the origin, that is, the point in R^n with zeros in all its coordinates.

Now for the big point: Consider the volume of that sphere and let n grow. Will discover that very soon nearly all the volume of the sphere is in a thin shell just inside the surface of the sphere. Or to be more explicit, for positive real number s a little less than r, nearly all the volume is in the set of points x where the distance from the origin d(x) is

s <= d(x) <= r

I encountered this in some analysis, I have forgotten, maybe generation of random points in the sphere independent and uniformly distributed in the sphere.

So, for the 10 or so body measurements of the pilots and the women, it's going to be tough (small probability for nearly any reasonable, non-pathological probability distribution on the sphere) to expect all 10 measurements to be close to the expectations, i.e., the center of the sphere (for people, the center will not be at the origin, that is, all n coordinates zero).

There is a counterexample: The girl I dated in high school, the most beautiful female I ever saw, in person or otherwise, was essentially perfect on all dimensions!
There are a few I'm in that really moderate. One is for owners of old Datsuns. One is for pedal steel guitar players ($5 per year, just to keep out the junk). That's okay if you're running a PHP forum with a couple thousand users, a few dozen concurrents at most. Modding this thing as one or a few people? That's a whole 'nother animal.
Javascript is experiencing the same problem as C++ and (albeit to a lesser degree) Python.

Instead of locking down the language and saying "this is it", we just pile on new features, because "what? language Y has x, and ours doesn't?! Outrageous! We need to implement x right away". Bonus points if the only reason for the "feature" is to support some paradigm-du-jour or to make up for a fundamental flaw in the language itself. async is the perfect example: The only reason this rehash of cooperative multitasking ressurected from the 90s was ever taken seriously, is because JS-on-backend was suddenly a thing and the language is single-threaded only.

Put enough languages into this mix of mutually-reinforcing feature creep, and it becomes clear where this is going: A language that devs have to re-learn every 2 years.
> ...else the richer will become unstoppable kings with control that cannot be deflated.

The runners-up can just launch their own $hitcoins and be kings in their own domains.
> Yes, as mike_d explained, those specific bat coronaviruses occur in Wuhan

Source? AFAIK those bats coronaviruses were only found in caves in Yunnan, which is ~1300 km from Wuhan.
Reading byte-by-byte using `getchar()` is probably quite slow.
HN has adopted a suicidal mindmeld on this issue. Can't be helped. The discussion will turn around when the first big platforms show up, but by then it'll be too late. HN is FUDing people out of the investment and retooling opportunity of their lifetime.

The criticisms of blockchain now will age just as well as criticism of the web. "Why do I need Amazon if I can just use the neighborhood bookstore?" sums up most criticisms here.
> Ironically the "my mom" and "but my grandparents" angle is what has always been used to dumb down and introduce user-hostile patterns.

Dumbed down and user-hostile are independent things. Dark patterns are being introduced for nefarious purposes. No one is explaining away things like "click to subscribe, wait 3 hours in a phone queue to unsubscribe" as required for "grandmothers"

The software isn't stupid, it's intentionally and cleverly manipulative and user hostile.
Oh boy, tell me how you do tax reports with the amazing experience of pen, paper and standing in a window. I bet you're outsourcing misery rather than avoiding it.