skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you're pretty much right.

Firstly, I guess we can ask whether Azure is genuinely the Microsoft "stack". Most Azure servers are Linux and the services they provide are mostly web, ML, RDBMS related. I don't think that's what the OP had in mind.

If by the Microsoft stack we mean Windows, SQL Server, .NET etc. Then it's definitely looking more and more dead end. In the past few months I've been working with MS tech a little bit again, getting back into a bit of Windows development. It's a mess. I am constantly left astonished by the state of internal decay that evidently exists inside the Windows divisions. Basic subsystems have serious bugs, even after being pushed for years. Their docs are a mess. Their platform is absurdly complicated - look at the schemas for an AppX manifest for an example [1]. UWP and Windows Phone are deprecated/gone yet references to it can be found everywhere. The recommended way to write Windows apps is still C++. The most exciting things they're doing with Windows are upgrading the command line support to match what Linux was doing 20 years ago. dotNET is some kind of mess with many forked versions, a language that's behind Kotlin and a runtime that's behind the JVM. And the problems just continue.

One thing that becomes clear when you look around is that very few people are really writing Windows apps at all nowadays. They exist, but they're mostly older codebases. Their attempts to move beyond Win32 have mostly tanked for this reason - the people who would once have been writing against the new APIs switched to cross platform tech.

So in this regard I feel it's a dead end stack, yeah.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/schemas/appxpackage/uap...
There's some truth to that, but if we try to mandate N95 masks and no longer allow cloth masks, that'll destroy the mandate altogether. The majority will simply ignore it.
Well, if you are lets say Politically exposed person (PEP) or holder of any kind of significant wealth, power or influence, this applies to pretty much any country definitely including US. For Android/iOS that's +-already covered with NSA and god knows what lurks in firmwares of ie network controllers in laptops.

Smart move is not this kind of (even if well deserved in this case) fearmongering of specific country, but sobering/smarting up and not putting any kind of sensitive data on blackbox devices with free access to internet.

Happy to live my insignificant middle class life and not be even a bit bothered by this kind of crap. And even with full access to my phone there is nothing really bad that can be done to me / my family.
Cannabis Compounds Prevented Covid Infection in Laboratory Study
Wordle copycat creator apologies for ripping off the popular free word game
On an eCommerce site I'm responsible for I changed some links from a GET to a POST. "BingPreview" continued hitting those links with GET requests, polluting my logs with 100s of "method not allowed" entries. So I blocked that UA from those links, nothing changed. Banned the bot all together, still hitting my site. This went on for well over a year.
> and moving utf8 to utf8mb4 a bit more quickly. (good to know that's finally happening).

That happened in 2010 - I'm not sure 12 years counts as "finally happening", or just how much quicker you would like than 12 years ago?

Other than a time machine, I'm not sure what else you would like them to do.
I've found baeldung to be quite helpful actually. What do you not like about it? I understand what you mean though, I don't like the garbage programming-related articles from a lot of these sites you've listed. Even I as a newb developer have seen very poor advice or wrong info on w3schools, for example.
The axis is labelled "relative importance". If you place non-zero value on readability, you must place less than 100% importance on "does it work".
MySQL's adoption of a utf8mb3 limitation for "utf8" was over seven years obsolete when it was adopted. It would have been obsolete in 1996.
Busy area spots hide the map, weather wastes space, „what‘s going on“ wasting lots of bottom space, sights with huge 2D icons, ads, see nearby attractions, “search this area“...

Google Maps has become a user hostile mess.

I just opened Apple Maps for the first time and it‘s almost completely free of bullshit. Guess I will give it a chance.
Apple filesystems are infamous for breaking this convention. IIUC, they will support codepoints which expand to 4 bytes in UTF-8, but their implicit normalization rules can trip up programs which expect behavior closer to POSIX norms.
From Chaos to Calm: Make Your Software Projects Run Smoother in 3 Steps
> Spanking?

Some countries essentially do this (e.g. caning in Singapore).
> 2. the maintainers are surely not the only ones contributing; how to pay all the rest?

This is certainly a problem that I would like to address. It's important to reward/fund contributors as much as maintainers.

Donation schemes defined in code are as modifiable as any other code in the software. I would like to build a bot which will open a pull request on behalf of contributors and propose a share of donations.
Near where I live there is a large underground natural gas storage field using natural caverns.
Sorry for the late reply. I got frustrated trying to figure out how to improve our Bomberland AI and decided to spend the rest of the day building lamps and shadow caster shapes in Lego ^_^

By now, I'm down to 5th place on the Sintel Clean rankings:
http://sintel.is.tue.mpg.de/quant?metric_id=6&selected_pass=...
but my entry H-v3 was 1st place when I submitted it. The algorithm is

Mota C., Stuke I., Aach T., Barth E. Divide-and-Conquer Strategies for Estimating Multiple Transparent Motions. In: Jähne B., Mester R., Barth E., Scharr H. (eds) Complex Motion. IWCM 2004.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69866-1_6

(so I misremembered the year. it was end of 2004 instead of 2005)

I did tweak it in a few details such as using a 5x5px ica instead of the constant brightness assumption but mainly I replaced the gauss seidel iteration (12) with brute forcing (10) so in effect I'm approximating the c* with Monte Carlo sampling on the GPU. Then as the last step, I use LUTs to fill in gaps in the prediction with their maximum likelihood prior as memorized from a large collection of real-world flow maps.

BTW as luck would have it, we are currently leading Bomberland (team CloudGamepad) with a deep learning AI trained for more than 200 million simulation steps. Yet JFB (the 2nd ranked team) uses handcrafted C++ rules and they beat us every time. It's just that against other opponents our probabilistic AI is random enough to confuse them, which is why we're still barely on the 1st place. But unless we can significantly improve things soon, I expect us to lose the tournament later this month because we will not be able to beat JFB in a fair duel. I bet on deep learning here and I'm already regretting it.

I'll reply about the camera to TaylorAlexander
Prison is fundamentally flawed from a conceptual basis. Is the idea to reform someone? To make them not repeat their crime? Is it to punish? It is to discourage? It does none of these job as well as it could.

Lets take for an example a semi successful drug dealer. Odds are the drug dealer choose that profession because the rewards were higher than the risks. So to discourage that you can 1) make prison so terrible he fears it more than the rewards from dealing 2) teach him something that is of comparable economic utility so he no longer wants to deal drugs.

The problem is that option 2 is arguably a reward. If you create incentives to break rules ("I break the law and sell drugs, my punishment is that i get locked away from X years and be forced to learn a trade or get a degree") then why wouldnt you break rules? We seem to pretend we dont want 1. But I've seen plenty of comments from conservatives about how the criminals deserve what they get, and oddly enough I also hear "dont drop the soap" jokes from liberals when its people they dont like....

Then you have for example murderers. Quite a few murderers will probably never murder again. The man who kills his wife and her lover after catching them in bed, is probably not going to be killing anyone again. It was that set of situations that drove them to that. What more can the person do than classes on impulse control? And your going to get them to learn that by putting them in the place where the impulse stimulus is completely different than the regular world? What does life or a lengthy prison accomplish if punishment/deterrence is not the goal?

Thats not even getting into the fact that prison is the main mental health provider for anyone with serious issues who cant get family to take care of them. (and even people who have family might not be able to afford their particular issues). A person with severe schizophrenia who attacks others can't really be reformed

The only real fix is to be honest about what the goal of "prison" is. And break the concept out into reform, containment, and punishment. At least then you can optimize towards those goals.
Thank you. Calling to shell isn’t really what I’m thinking of doing. But I have used it many times in the past for great effect. I think I have your book’s first edition! Thank you for the link. And the updated edition! I’ll have to check what’s changed.
We have features coming that will make this not a problem for people.
Words are great but why not put a demo video right on the front page? That could help with (some) people who want to try it out without signing up too.
But also on some level why in the world are they more deserving of the job then the potentially better qualified foreigner just because where they happened to be born.
> I don't have anything interesting to say.

It's hard to judge what other people would find interesting about what you have to say. Things you think are obvious are obvious and boring may be illuminating to others, and vice versa.

Anyway, I don't think the author has really given blogging a fair shake.

> On his blog, Aaron Swartz explains how writing things down will help him reflect better on his thoughts.

The author doesn't really investigate this line of thought. The thing about writing a blog post is that good writing requires clear thinking, and clear thinking is useful!

It would be nice if we could tap into that benefit in personal journals without publishing a blog, but as far as I can tell, most people write differently when they write only for themselves. There's a number of benefits of writing for an audience, even if that audience turns out not to exist. When I blog, I feel forced to justify my reasoning and investigate alternatives. I feel the need to explain something a little deeper than whatever literal series of events that I'm talking about.

I think programmers who don't like writing and don't like sharing should at least give blogging a shot... there's a chance that it will help you think better, and there are also plenty of opportunities that will open for you if you are a stronger writer.
One thing Microsoft does that Google does not is persistently push their garbage until it's actually not bad.

Blazr is relatively new compared to Microsoft's other libs but I'm sure in 5-10 years, it will be solid. It took .net core years before it became decent.
KN95 masks are just rebranded PM2.5 masks that Asians wore mostly to avoid pollution particulates.
For something that was fixed 12 years ago?

If Postgres has never bitten you, then you aren't using it much.
A system built like this sounds like a massive failure waiting to happen.

For example:

Once upon a time, back around the turn of the century, I worked in animation. Primarily with Flash. After upgrading to Flash 5 we discovered some killer bugs in it related to huge files; when working with the files created by putting everyone's scenes together into one file to do final polish and prep for outputting a .swf, after a few days of that, it would reliably crash within a few minutes of work. And it would crash so hard that it left something behind that made it impossible to just swear, launch Flash again, and get back to work; these crashes could only be remedied by a full reboot. I was the Flash director of the episode we discovered this and I had a very unpleasant week trying to beat that damn thing into a shippable shape.

We'd already worked around some other bugs where Flash slowly trashed its working copies of files; it was standard procedure to regularly save as a new file, close, and re-open, as this seemed to make a lot of cleanup happen that wouldn't happen with a normal save. This had the bonus of giving us a lot of versioned backups to dig through in the event of file corruption or accidental deletion of some important part of it. Which is a thing that can easily happen when you have about a dozen people trying to crank out several minutes of animation on a weekly schedule.

I no longer work with Flash but I have certainly experienced my share of data loss due to my big, complex tools with massive codebases that are older than half the people now working on them getting into weird states. The habits I built back then of saving regularly mean that I rarely lose more than a few minutes of work, instead of potentially losing every hour I spent on a complex file because there is no more distinction between a file 'in memory' and 'on disc'.
> people who normally wouldn’t purchase guns would end up purchasing guns.

But that's not a problem, is it? Because anti-gun groups aren't against guns per se, just against the harms caused by guns, right?

I suppose there is some small percentage of the US population who don't own a gun because they are afraid of their child using it, for example, so they might end up buying one of these smart guns and then, at a later date, using it to commit suicide themselves, whereas without easy access to a gun they might have had a mental health intervention instead. I'm not sure if that group is bigger than the number of lives that would be saved by smart guns replacing non-smart guns (assuming the technology works) though.

Anyway, the really interesting questions are what happens if the federal government tried banning non-smart guns. I think a reasonable objection is that this is a prima facie shift in the balance of power between the federal government and the militia (rather than, say, a consumer safety benefit) unless the mandate also applies to federally procured weapons too.
I'm making the choice for a new tech stack and .NET is winning. For getting the job done reliably it's looking like the strongest contender.

I'm not sure why there isn't more momentum towards using .NET.
Backward compatibility is bridge to whole JS ecosystem. If there was way use “unsafe” old js code within newer language that would be great. But it would bring another set of annoying problems.
Using Git commit message templates to write better commit messages
Let me leap in here to ding Duracell. They used to be my goto battery, but over the past few years (there was a hedge fund takeover, which IME rarely results in improvements to long-standing quality products) they've turned into liabilities - specifically, they are extremely prone to leaking once even a little bit discharged. To this day I open old kit and there can be duracells in there with "use by 2010" or even earlier dates which are fine, yet far newer batteries (e.g. bought in 2016 with expiries in 2022) leak like there's no tomorrow for the buyout team.

Interested to hear of others experiences, or I've just been amazingly unlucky.
What makes you think that corporations can’t pay developers of open source code? You may not be able to characterize it as a “donation” but I don’t think you have to in order to get the money to flow.

Corporations make all kinds of “ordinary and necessary” business expenditures. (See IRS publication 535.)

Note that “necessary” in that phrase is more like “helpful” than “absolutely required and unavoidable” in definition.

If the dev wants the money and the company wants to pay it, I’m sure they can make it happen.
Yeah, it’s sad. I can get not peering with the world but it’s not like they couldn’t do something like an open CA-style agreement to follow certain standards as a condition to peering. If they’d done that, they’d be in a much better position to ask governments to require federation with an open protocol.
Ok. Thank you for the hints. And your work on IPython. It is very much appreciated.
Yes. Take in clean devices, and dispose of them when you leave. And don't do anything sensitive while you are there.
Fun story: When I was working at one of the FAANG companies, I have placed the (Night with stars, it does not seem to render here [0]) character in my preferred name. Some time later, I was notified by HR that I must change my preferred name and I can only use UTF-8 characters with maximum length of 3 bytes. I was quite confused why such specific demand, I am pretty sure it was exactly this issue. I replaced it with ᗧ···ᗣ···

[0] https://emojipedia.org/night-with-stars/
That is why I have a NO JAVA Gmail template that tells the recruiter to learn to properly use their search engine
https://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/20-tips-use-goo...
https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/topics/googleapps/

Since it is a template it takes 20 - 30 seconds to respond
yeah agree, but with the help of real time notification you can move really quickly i think.
Practicing a ton can reduce anxiety, since you'll have confidence that you can most likely solve the problem. Plus, if you practice enough, you'll see so many problems that you might get the exact same problems in the interview. If you do something everyday, it becomes less of a big deal.

Doing other activities that induce this sort of anxiety can help too. I've been a combat athlete my whole life, and the anxiety you get before a match is like no other. Not being able to sleep the night before is the norm, and I've seen people vomit before matches. Plus, it's not a few engineers watching you, but rather a whole crowd of people watching you, with half of them cheering for you to lose. After this experience, live coding interviews are a cake-walk. I get nervous as well with a pounding heart and nervous sweats, etc. But I tell myself I've been here before, and perform as best as I can in spite of it, like I've done before. I generally don't perform quite as well in the interview or match as I do when no one's watching, but that's just how it goes. Learning to perform under pressure like that is a skill that needs to be cultivated.
is that feature called - automatic query optimization?
Oh man that was terrible. I graduated in late 2004, got a job in 2005 and I literally got 10 e-mails from linked in per week to all of my e-mail addresses.

It's why, to this day, I do not have a linked in profile. Obviously if my family were starving I'd do what it takes to get a job, but given that programming jobs are fairly easy to find, I am not signing up.
That sounds fun. Do you provide the tractor?
(side business - little booth, with sign:
Tows 50£ or a bottle of scotch.)
How hard is it to read a "for" loop? Even when programming in python, half the time I find myself switching to a simple loop over an index because I realize I need the index. Often it's for debugging, because that index has a real meaning I can interpret when I see it.

Along those lines, I think the real disconnect in the argument here is in terms of what kind of problem people are programming for. For many applications, advanced C++ is solving problems they don't have. The above poster mentioned audio. The data there is in single (or perhaps few) big buffers with a very simple and regular structure determined by international standards. They only need a few simple pointers. Or maybe just std::vector. Similarly just a few types also with real-world meanings. Debugging may require them to check the processing in ways that abstraction, type-checking, etc. will only get in the way of. And new features may not work within whatever abstractions had been put into place for previous features anyway, because the features relate to the underlying data.
Just seems like GGP is trying to avoid being hired by a string of people not detail oriented.
It's blocking our React Native builds... is there any work-around?
And in the long-long run we'll always have a latency of at least 2r/c to randomly access memory elements within a radius r of our compute elements!
Jupyter notebooks are a favorite among our data scientists. However, we have gone back to plain python scripts for our bigger projects due to a simple reason - one must keep alive the notebook page while running lengthy experiments on a remote server. Due to some rogue windows updates we had a couple of destroyed experiments, which (as these things go), happened at a very inopportune moment.

OTOH for quick experiments notebooks are great, although I feel like the more modern the GUI the farther back we go in terms of experience. The latest updates to visual studio code's Jupyter extension for example have turned this into a thoroughly frustrating experience for the visually impaired - gray-on-gray-on-gray text and even more gray and transparent thin lines that are supposed to clearly mark where a cell ends and where the output begins. Unfortunately no amount of fiddling with the color scheme could fix these 'design' choices...
Been there, done that, with a phpbb installation. I manually converted all the non-UTF data in the database to UTF8, and updated the PHP code and database settings.

It worked fine, no major issues, just some work.
I'm not sure about the quality. But the interface is bloated by default. I switched to HERE
Yes, the mandates as they currently stand are lame. But the anti-maskers are using that senselessness to argue for rejecting the whole idea of wearing any respiratory projection, which they demonstrate by personally choosing to not wear respirators. As I said, their argument is not akin to "respirators protect against the spread of Covid but the government shouldn't be mandating specific personal behavior", but is rather rejection of the whole subject.

For an illustration of the difference, I recently had some trouble entering a hospital due to their mask mandate - they seriously insisted that I take off my P100 respirator and wear just their cosplay mask instead. I was able to escalate to someone higher up and find a (more but still not entirely sensible) compromise that they'd let me wear my own N95 under a cosplay mask. Where is the political group that represents my predicament, which was caused by a broken centralized mandate? It's certainly not in the unmasked people berating customer service people for enforcing some basic pandemic etiquette!

> nobody really expects the public to be able to wear the good mask the correct way.

IMO this was a terrible groupthink counterargument (aka straw man) led by the other political team of ersatz maskplayers and condescending healthcare workers, following from the early central authority lie that respirators are ineffective (in order to reduce consumer demand for them). The red herring that wearing a mask primarily protects others also followed from this rationalization of ersatz cloth masks.

The open society / freedom approach is that you treat people like adults, assume they can understand a mildly complex thing, and then increase education to help everyone do better. Instead two years later we've still got the two political teams arguing over which stupid approach is better, while mostly looking at anyone who wears more effective respiratory projection as some aberration.

If I had been in charge of pandemic response, I would have sent everybody a kit including a N95 mask as soon as possible, and made it clear that the primary reason to wear a respirator is to protect yourself and your family. Then I would have ramped up production of elastomeric half face masks (which are more comfortable and thus more sustainable), and perhaps just given those out as well - their (pre-pandemic) cost of $30 per person is peanuts compared to what we've lost. These utterly backwards post-reality memes spread by both political teams have caused so much needless death and suffering.