skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It happens all the time.

Some anecdata: When Garmin bought Navionics they cancelled everyone's paid lifetime licenses, pushed updates demanding logins (worse in this case than others because 99% of the places you'd use their software have shitty internet, so an intermittent login wall is a bit crippling even if it were free) and monthly subscriptions, and hounded every negative review saying that they were doing it for the users' own good. Could a person sue for $19.99 and not have corporate lawyers juggle you between headquarters in Kansas and Italy? Maybe, but it's a pain in the ass for minimal gains.
There is only one average HN user.

Half of all the rest are below average.
> PHP and JavaScript are not languages that help you become a better programmer.

One can do some really beautiful programming in both modern JavaScript and modern PHP. Both these languages can and have helped millions of programmers become better programmers. Today's JavaScript and PHP are no longer the hacked up languages they once were.
> Zoom everything

I think I've done this before by creating a zoomed in OBS scene, so as I see it, it's not zoomed but as they see it, it is!
I like the writing style and voice in this essay. I disagree with some of the assertions but I enjoyed my time reading, which doesn’t happen a lot with most tech-related essays.

I will say, however, that this paragraph felt like sour grapes:

> As examples, the scientific journal Guy Steele and I founded called Lisp and Symbolic Computation (LASC) had been renamed Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation (HOSC), and my primary scientific conference called Lisp and Functional Programming (L&FP) had been renamed the International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP). I was discouraged for two reasons. One was that during the 1980s when functional programming researchers had few outlets, many of us Lispers kept the lights on at L&FP for them, and later when Lisp was on the decline, they shut the door. And the other is that this seemed to signal that my field of inquiry had been deleted by the academy.

All that’s changed is that Lisp isn’t primary anymore; they are both titled to allow other languages and other media to contribute to their respective focuses. Common Lisp is a good language but it’s not the final language nor even the final “programming medium”, so acting like it is artificially limits both Common Lisp users and future language designers who could all benefit from that cross-pollination.

Now maybe the change of names is shorthand for lisp actually being excluded from the journal and conference, which nullifies the above, but without doing any research at all lol, I doubt it.
I started doing my first web development with PHP (4 & later 5) around the same time! Actually ended up learning a lot about how the entire LAMP stack worked + a lot of tricks and theory behind how to make things secure (PHP had very few safeguards back then). I'm still reaping the benefits of a lot of this knowledge to this day.

I have moved on to other languages like JS and Python since ~2012. Looking at the article, I feel like modern PHP is almost a completely different beast compared to when I used it back then >_<
Average HN user.. As I understand it after years here.

'Enjoys how the comments are only text.'
2 shots and done. Ya’ll are crazy to keep injecting yourself with an experiment for something that is clearly becoming more cold like and less dangerous. If this was Ebola, I would be at the front of the vaccine line. But this is far from Ebola at this point. If you are scared, get a booster. It’s time to move on, the damage we are doing to our children is unconscionable.
Python pip package matching current mood, relationship to Taylor Swift song
Which is perfect for a HTTP request.
So what are the similarities between Ruby and Smalltalk? I'm probably never gonna learn Smalltalk so it's hard to understand what Ruby borrowed.
> Facebooks blood money burning a hole in their conscience

Better late than never. Never seems more typical.
You mentioned that Cloud Run allowed you to reserve a number of always-running instances, but that feature is available for Cloud Functions as well [0].

[0] https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/configuring/min-inst...
Some people have adventures and others have “in-ventures”. You are ok with holing up in your abode for years of your life to avoid a mild risk (assuming you are under 70 years old and reasonably healthy). Others are not willing to live this way and would like the freedom to make that choice. Some people, by the way, have less choice, like the people that deliver your food and merchandise to the cave you call home or the people that treat your non-covid (of course) injuries and ailments.
Damn, that’s real cold canada.
I guess this is about the "average" paradox?
There is a presentation will probably appeal to the average hn user (hopefully).
Across one dimension, nobody would feel the need to question the utility of considering an average, e.g. the average salary of a user.
Of course the average may or may not be very informative, given the underlying distribution.
And everybody knows there are statistical tools specifically made to address these questions.

Things get funky when we consider an average across multiple dimensions, and that is when people will question the use/benefit of these tools.
This is also a well-known paradox that there is no "average soldier" in the army.
Regarding hn, it is safe to say there are different cohorts frequenting the site, interacting mostly with threads that are relevant to them.
So averaging other these cohorts might not be very meaningful.
However, this is also a known problems for which solutions exist.
Just ask any marketing department...

So, isn't complaining about this very much about complaining about bad usage of a given tool?
If you use a hammer only to hit on your fingers, you might think hammers are useless and even dangerous.
That's not what he cited as the rationale though, is it? If he had we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

Why would he even bring up PPE shortages in response to a question about changing mask recommendations? You've invented a charitable narrative in an attempt to explain the changing recommendations, but this narrative doesn't actually explain the available evidence.

Like I've been saying all along, he either very clearly lied, or he's literally the worst science communicator I've ever seen.

Either way he should not be the face of public health.
Addressed by the author here:

> NOTE: This is not an argument about the benefits of vaccination for the individual— vaccines likely (and evidence shows they) still have great protection against severe disease; instead this is an argument about the effects of vaccination on symptomatic diseases, and (some good portion of) transmission.

In other words, vaccines avoid hospitalization but zero Covid is not a reality.
I thought this was a good reminder that we are a diverse group and it is easy to assume that the audience we talk to is one type of person.
> I am actually "self tought". Whatever that means.

What does that mean? I know what taught means, but tought? No idea.
https://the-big-bang-theory.com/quotes/quote/4391/

"That is my spot. In an ever-changing world, it is a single point of consistency. If my life were expressed as a function on a four-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system, that spot at the moment I first sat on it would be zero-zero-zero-zero."
I did a job interview with them 10 years ago for a software developer position. (I live in the Naples area). At the time, I just graduated from college. The test was about JAVA and it was really hard. They also had a piece of their infrastructure written in Scala, that was bleeding edge at the time for such a small company. In the end I failed the interview but, like all hard interviews, I felt somehow satisfied by finally knowing what i didn't know. Kudos to them
That's fine. Unions are democratically controlled organizations and they won't always align with your personal interests. "This specific union does not align with my priorities, so I'll avoid joining" is not something that will aggravate too many activists. "Unions suck and everybody should resist them in general" is what bothers people.
None of this is a problem in modern PHP. In production you flip a flag to turn on operation caching. You can also tell it to preload all of your code. You can then deploy the app and then clear the cache once all the files are there.
> find the optimal number of living beings to exterminate

you are conflating birth control with "exterminate", not the same thing. Birth control has its roles, does it not?

> in order to provide the maximal amount of pleasure for those remaining.

I never said that, pleasure is an example, society is optimized for way more variables that suffering and pleasure.

In the context of farm animals, it looks like the only purpose for the pigs to exist is to be food, then when the food is over-produced and wasted, then you have to question why have that many of them born into a miserable life then die pointlessly.

> Not any better

just say it like that, no explanation? What is not good? Optimization?
The world wide web is not the world. If it exists you can search it. Even if you need to open a client, run Discord search, and execute OCR to interpret the results.

In tech, it's never what's possible, it's just what costs area reasonable.
Why not just use firefox?
Depends on what you mean by 'short'. I think you're probably thinking of much further north in Norway. Summers in Oslo are usually from May or June to August. Sometimes there's 20+ C in March, sometimes it's 5 C in May. Night frost usually sets in around late October/early November, with snow usually arriving in November or December. Snow is usually gone by or during March.

Apparently the average temperature in 1890 was 1.3 C colder than it is now.

Source: Born and living in Oslo.
I mean to strain the analogy it's more like feeding someone a sandwich and then having the ability to transmute the sandwich into a knife once they've already eaten it.
(Warning: To anyone who might follow the hint, maybe heed my warning in another comment on this HN page.)

Yeah, it might be bit cheeky to have a bot that guesses one word, and then gives you the correct answer and the date on which Wordle used or will use it.

Is the tree size still too big if you're only using Wordle's word list? (I'm almost interested enough to code something up, but asking you might mean I don't get fully nerd-sniped.)
I dont think it was a spoof.

People just preferred the silly name
Thats what Trademark, Copyright, DRM, WhatsApp ToS and all claim. “We want to protect creators/snail businesses ”, but they end up as tools to go after little guys.
How to log out of Twitter for Android
Have you heard the term “xenophilic restrictionist?”
> Do you really dig through the internet history of every maintainer of every package you ever used?

No, because that would be impossible but I do try to check the libraries I use to the best of my ability, the same with browser extensions I install. I even read the ingredients on things I buy. Sometimes I read the instructions on drugs I'm prescribed.

The perfect is the enemy of the good, after all.
For someone who has never used PHP: what is so good about it?
Came here to say the same thing. I'm the last fan of Google but "the ability to connect speakers in groups and control their volume" is obvious to conceive of and implement to any engineer with sufficient expertise in the field.
Rocket engines are to jet engines basically what paper utensils are to porcelain. But with transition to reusable rocket stages, chances are that the "disposable" designs will get more complex if that extra complexity gets justified by not throwing away the whole unit after several minutes of operation.

> Developing jet engine is not an easy game unlike rocket engines as it's comparatively very compact in size & it requires advance engineering to develop it's crystal blades technology & maintain it's thrust to weight ratio & that's what make jet engine technology one of the most complicated technology.

That's a terribly worded and nonsensical claim (and almost reads like it was written by a ten year old). How could someone claim that rocket engines are "not very compact in size"? The RD-180 turbopump for example generates 170 MW of mechanical power, much more than any jet engine in operation, and in a smaller package to boot. Likewise, the HPFTP on the RS-25 generates around 50 MW of mechanical power, and does so in a package sized 0.55m by 1.1m or something like that.
Definitely not that :)

But I guess one could say that the average HN user knows what Docker is and has at least some affinity with computers and technology in general. I guess "we" care less about the Kardashians etc. (I have to ddg if I wrote that correctly, a very average-HN-user thing to say, I always write it wrong and picture Gul Dukat as many average HN users probably do.)

Perhaps I'm projecting, but that too is a typical average HN user thing to do. What HN users never do, is generalize.
Their post missed the fact that evolution is about selection, not just single mutations.
> Signal has no idea who sent messages with Sealed Sender.

Sorry to deceive you, but "Sealed Sender" is just an empty promise.

Even if you could assess that this is indeed what is being done server-side (and you won't, because Moxie will neither let you, nor will ever federate his server with yours in case you wanted to run your own Signal instance), this does nothing against the fact that every message still enters and exits Signal's walled garden. No amount of indirection in the middle will change that. You are back to trusting all intermediaries' good faith (which extend beyond Signal, btw, Amazon also controlling every packet that enters/exits its cloud on which Signal runs).
Building process of the SQLite library and the SQLiteODBC driver on Windows
Other way around... "It's human nature to exploit". Be it the nature or other species or other humans.
Of course not everyone is exploiting at the same level... Corporates and Governments are the apex predators in this exploitation chain.
> I know a lot of venture capitalists who hate California NIMBYism, care about climate change

lol citation please!
I'm so sorry to hear that. I hear that quite often from friends and family members. I did not get vaccinated/boosted around this timeframe if you were curious if that was the cause. I even had covid earlier in january 2021. I did a few COVID tests(both ER & at home) and came back negative each time. Inflammation markers in blood work also looked normal according to doctors/cardiologist.

For my situation, I think it was a combination of many things. Stress, anxiety, caffeine, intense workouts, allergy season, diet, hydration, long COVID, seasonal flu, genetics, etc. Nothing really changed for me personally either, but the world around me did. Maybe it's my body & mind's way of saying "dude slow down". So I listened.
We're running Gunicorn behind Nginx for an internal Django web application. I thought the rule of thumb was to scale workers = (Cores * 2) + 1?
> Why would I choose PHP when starting a greenfield project?

LAMP stacks are super ubiquitous, open source, cross-platform, and in many cases to deploy your app you don't need to configure anything, add any modules or dependencies... just copy your files in place. A small project (e.g. contact form with a CAPTCHA) could be just a small file named whatever you want, which you can place anywhere in the public directory, and it'll work.

If you don't want to maintain the server you can get a managed VPS and things will probably run and continue to run for years without any intervention on your part, even through software updates.

... The exception is that PHP breaks backwards compatibility often, but even then most hosting services let you choose between different PHP versions which they'll maintain for a while. Installing older versions from package managers is very easy as well.

That said, I don't think this is a strong reason to use PHP in most projects. I do think it could be one of the strongest ones to justify its use in some specific projects.
"Germany's CO2 emissions from electricity estimated to rise by 13% in 2021"

* https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/germ...

"German energy demand, carbon dioxide emissions seen rising in 2021 -industry group"

* https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/german-energy-d...

"Germany’s energy consumption rising, renewables share falling in 2021"

* https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germanys-energy-consump...

I live 50km from a nuclear power plant. I don't worry about it at all.
Yeah it started out as the Italian Buzzfeed, but now they’re getting serious
Asking a libertarian to understand coercion is like asking a fish what it means to be wet.
> had to be deleted

I think you mean "was censored."
Unless you're doing matrix multiplications, PHP will work reasonably well. It's probably not the right tool for the job (because python's data ecosystem is too deeply entrenched in the ecosystem), but if your codebase is already in PHP, you can easily do long running processes in PHP (similar to how you'd write Rails jobs with ActiveRecord queries in Ruby).
NFTs and metaverse! So excited I can hardly breathe ;)
I live in the heart of south Minneapolis. I really doubt the claim that this is for organized crime for some kind of financial gain. There was an organized ring last year targeting high value cars, but it got busted pretty easily. From the news I’ve seen, it’s almost always joyriding teenagers and stolen vehicles used to commit some other crime.

Uber/Lyft drivers are specifically targeted because they can be easily lured to a semi-remote location by the apps. But multiple criminals using that tactic doesn’t make it “organized crime.” It would make sense that an app driver knows other drivers who have been carjacked, but this M.O. isn’t exclusive to Minneapolis.

Crime is still really low here. I live at a dodgy intersection with major bus lines that brings a lot of characters—good and ‘bad’—around. I don’t worry about walking around even at night. I don’t worry about driving anywhere in this city, even in the areas where carjackings have been “up” (which I travel through frequently in order to reach the now infamous Lake Street Target).

Anyway, fear-mongering comments or anecdotes from people who visit here don’t really express the lived experience of people living in Minneapolis. :)
I mean, “fascist” is either a political slur or literally just 2 governments.
I wonder if this also has to do with things like maintaining pilot certifications.

IIRC (and correct me if I'm wrong) if a commercial pilot goes a long time without flying they'd need to spend some time to retrain or something?
I agree with the resolution and texture smoothing, but I really like the mouselook, though. On the higher difficulty levels, with autoaim disabled, the experience is really intense. Of course I like the Brutal Doom mod as well.

However, the software rendering in GZDoom does that 256-color-only fade out thing which really contributed to the scary, gritty look of the original. Game looks "better" with that enabled even if it's not truly 3-d rendered.

That's the awesome thing about GZDoom though. Everyone can make it their own game and customize it how they want. It's fascinating people are still making new levels for it.
Since there are many dimensions and units involved in characterizing HN users (we hate just using 4 colors I learned recently), I guess we should say that there is only a "most average HN user", pretty small chance she lies on the exact average values along all those axes.
I've wondered why there's no JSON-based equivalent of SQLite, like "MongoDB but it's just a file and a library."
Have you considered Google Fi? I've used it for the better part of a decade now and its always been great, especially internationally. The plane touched down, I turn off airplane mode, and I get a notification from the Google Fi app, "Welcome to The Netherlands!"

Plus, it's primarily the T-Mobile network anyways with the addition of the US Cellular network and the old Sprint network.
This reply is based on my own biased experience, but I run a small website to share public trail data and I've found that Google (in my opinion) artificially suppresses my site's results on really basic searches. Within Google's search console you can easily check if a page has been indexed. For example, I've published new trails/hikes in the past where Google's index claims it includes the page.. but when I search "myhikes <name of trail>", it sometimes doesn't show up - even after clicking through multiple pages! If I change my search to "site:myhikes.org <name of trail>" it'll show up... weird? I think so.

I understand how keywords can be confused by search engines and "myhikes" is fairly generic as many people might post a blog with the string "my hikes", etc. Now if I search a popular trail that Google likes to serve up regularly (i.e. "myhikes <name of popular-indexed-trail>") it comes up as 1st in the list.

Additionally, what pisses me off even more, is that I've searched for "myhikes <name of trail>" and have been served Google's own map / shitty trail tiles ranked as #1, then my site is ranked #2. Doesn't that last bit feel a bit anti-competitive? It does to me, but maybe I'm biased.
Did he meta-program that infinite loop? I haven't bothered to read the code… like everyone else :-D
> no PHP dev will be think about memory management at all

Not nowadays, for sure. In 2009-2010 it was still something to keep in mind, and careful array handling was common so the it wouldn't baloon hundreds of megabytes for not so large data structures. I wasn't working on big data (tm) at that time, but running database imports via ETL processes in PHP required a few optimization passes.

I really can appreciate nowadays the huge memory and performance improvements that PHP went through from the 5.x days to the recent 8.1 release.

Sidenote: Shout outs to Nikita Popov who came to the scene and revitalized the language for me back then, for his proposals and features implemented in a time when PHP felt stagnant language wise https://www.npopov.com/aboutMe.html#accepted-php-proposals
Siemens is currently building a pilot offshore wind-to-hydrogen plant, with an estimated in-service date of 2024. They're not the first to get a plant into service, but that's a lot quicker than a new nuclear plant. Is Siemens German enough? There are several other European energy and engineering companies also racing to do it, Shell and Total for example, and quite a few in the US and China.

Offshore wind is currently modelled as more expensive per kWh over its lifetime (LCOE) than nuclear, but solar PVs and onshore wind are considerably cheaper. All three (especially PVs!) are reducing in price over time, whereas nuclear is becoming more expensive, primarily due to changes in safety requirements post-Fukushima.

Importing nuclear power from France is especially cheap because the French reactors are already paid off - what Germany is paying is the marginal costs of generation, plus profit margin. New nuclear capacity is far (5-10 times!) more expensive, because nuclear requires such huge capital investments. France's reactors are beginning to come to the end of their lifespan, and as they are shut down, excess capacity will decrease and the price of importing French nuclear energy will increase substantially. France, like everywhere else in the western world, doesn't seem all that keen on replacing the reactors, and even if they do, energy from new reactors would need to be priced to pay off the capital costs.
It is common to use ketamine for anesthesia in animal testing. It's a controlled drug, so you have to keep a pretty good log of it's use.