skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> There are a lot of important numerical algorithms which would have really benefited if Itanium had gone through iteration and growth. A mainstream VLIW could've had it's place, and it's trivial to find parallelism in FFTs, SVDs, matrix multiplies, and so on.

DSPs (which have great perf/watt for the numerical algorithms you mention) have used VLIW for decades, so of course there is a place for it. GPUs have moved in for all of those operations at this point though. The bet with Itanium was that compilers could be made sufficiently smart to make VLIW work for non-numeric workloads, and that bet failed to pay off. Intel and HP had hundreds of smart people trying to solve the "software problem" of Itanium and they did not succeed.

> I think it's a shame Itanium failed, and I think it failed for the wrong reasons. At the time, I remember everyone criticizing it for not running legacy x86 applications very well. As though word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software wasn't fast enough. Saying legacy apps in existing languages don't make it easy to find the ILP seems like a slight generalization of that.

Desktop applications is a red-herring given that Itanium was targeted primarily at the workstation and server market. There was also a bad-timing issue as it was at about the same time that PC hardware was displacing dedicated workstations and server hardware.
Even if the fanciest restaurant in town is "Mom's Heartburn Diner," the waitstaff still expect to be tipped and the grocery clerk still doesn't.
I concur.

All programming languages have their intrinsic features, but they also have a culture that surrounds them.

C++ has a rather odd culture... it's very a very fundamentalist/extremist one, all providing the optimal way to do things with no / little extra runtime overhead, but with no regard at all to compile times, readability, etc. It's not necessarily a bad thing, and it has its uses for games, ultra low latency software, all that stuff.

I am proficient in C++, I've worked in it for a bunch of years and can get stuff done in it and solve problems and ship software. C++ job interviews tend not to pay much regard to that, and focus on the arcane finer points of move semantics, rvalue references, ranges, concepts, all this new stuff... which has its place, but there is a lot of that to learn, and in many cases it just doesn't matter. After all, the language existed without it for a bunch of years.

Compare this with Java, or python or whatever, where the culture and focus is very much about "can you solve a problem / implement a solution using this language <or not>?" rather than "of the dozens of different ways to do this... what are the differences between each one".

For me, I really don't mind using and programming in C++, and I would probably even choose it for many / most projects, but I can do without the C++ people and culture.
> HTML/CSS/JS is literally a 10x improvement in iteration speed versus native.

When you need to release your application across multiple platforms? Yes. Not much else even begins to compare on that front.

Compared to native development on a single platform? Not even close. HTML/CSS/JS development is painfully slow in comparison.
Also, the alcohol people consumed most freely back then had very low ABV. "Small beers" were 0.5% - 2.8% ABV, and "table beers" drank by all ages were were typically under 1% ABV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_beer

Kinda niche, but the closest modern analog I know to table beer that's commonly purchased is some Kombucha brands. Most Kombucha in the US aims for under 0.5% ABV so that it can be sold to people under 21, but some lines, e.g. GT's Classic, are more lax and go up to about 1% ABV. In all but legal classification, these are basically non-alcoholic: you wouldn't substitute a light beer, or even an "extra light" beer, for this. You can't feel the alcohol at such low ABV.
This perspective resonates strongly with me. If I'd read this comment two years ago I would've brushed it aside as an overly cynical take but it rings true to my ears now.

In the last two years I've joined and left a bay area tech company that was operating exactly as you described: a maintenance mode org that lost all its former glory and the execs were happy to sit and see the hamster wheel churn; slowly squeezing out whatever is left of the market. Even with strong quarterly marks and plenty of time to piss away I couldn't endure the overwhelming boredom and purposelessness of it all and had no option but to resign.

I think perhaps I was too hopeful and optimistic back then. If I'd understood early on that it was by design that nothing ever got done, I would've optimized for getting the most time/happiness out of it. Live and learn I guess.
Where is that xkcd about real men use a magnifying glass and butterfly effect to program.

Abstraction is indeed getting heavy but I don’t think it is a problem. Witness the recent enthusiasm for static sites and serverless. Sure that has its own complexities but the desire for clean minimal design is still there in some quarters without reverting to full html only
I truly think it's more craft than engineering, and even that's somewhat generous. It's mostly guesswork, hacks, inter-team politics, and trend chasing.

Imagine an engineering team designing a toaster. They have real constraints to consider, like physically fitting all of the components inside a single package and selecting materials that won't melt during operation. They have to ensure that product won't injure the user or light their house on fire. They have to carefully consider the lifespan of each component and design the product to last for a minimum number of years. The consequences of failing to do these things could potentially result in lawsuits, recalls, injuries, or even death.

Now take the average web product. There are no real constraints whatsoever - almost everything comes down to opinions over aesthetics. Even the speed and reliability of the application is somewhat unimportant. Planning ahead is explicitly discouraged. Instead, software "engineers" are encouraged to be agile, move fast and break things, iterate based on feedback/complaints, and push out hotfixes when bugs occur. Software is expected to rot and be rewritten every 3-5 years in the latest language du jour. I could go on and on, but anyone who's been in this industry for more than a few years knows what I'm talking about.
Tell them to tip a few tens of millions into funding Matrix. Go back to the good old days and give it another chance.
>A mainstream VLIW could've had it's place, and it's trivial to find parallelism in FFTs, SVDs, matrix multiplies, and so on.

There are already DSPs for this purpose, but typical server workloads don't generally use those algorithms. Perhaps Itanium would have made a good DSP but it wasn't really aimed at that market.
Teamwork is a lot more than "being decent".

If you look at sports for instance a quarterback like Tom Brady is able to throw so many completed passes because (1) somebody was in the right place to receive the pass, (2) other players kept the defense away, and (3) the receiver actually caught the pass.

Being decent is a prerequisite but it's really a matter of defining success in terms of the success of the team as opposed to just yours even if you are labeled an "individual contributor".
In general HN tends to express resentment towards web developers, especially those who make use of JavaScript frameworks. You can find people ranting about web development on this site at least once a week. I mainly chalk it up to those people having no fucking clue what they're talking about because they don't have the relevant experience, like a physicist talking about politics. They are smart and knowledgeable about things I will never understand, but they don't know anything about this and should probably shut up instead.

Whether they are right or not, complaining about the modern web development practices on this website is a waste of keystrokes, because no one is listening.
> Complex games have complex problems that don't reveal themselves until players do weird things.

If you don't think them through they will. Just write it right.
^This.

The hysteria displayed both by the FAA and in this thread is kinda shocking. I work with the military in Japan. Every time a North Korean missile flies into/over Japanese territory we get a warning about it...and then go about our business as usual. We can usually see their flight trajectories on our Common Operational Picture. This one was not significantly different from the dozen or so previous incidents. No idea why people in the States shat a brick and grounded civilian aircraft, especially if NORAD didn't concur with such an action.
T-Mobile says it isn’t widely blocking iCloud Private Relay, blames iOS bug
I live in west germany and they are very comon here….
API Platform is a popular and easy to use semantic web framework:

1. You design your data model as a set of PHP classes, or you generate the class from any RDF vocabulary such as Schema.org

2. API Platform uses the classes to expose a JSON-LD API with with all the typical features (sorting, filtering, pagination…)

3. You use the provided "smart clients" to build a dynamic admin interface or to scaffold Next, Nuxt or React Native apps (these tools rely on the Hydra API description vocabulary, and work with any Hydra-enabled API)

In addition to RDF/JSON-LD/Hydra, API Platform also supports ActivityPub.

https://api-platform.com
Yup, you got it, the content itself will remain only in the device, the hashing is done in-browser, and the only part of the original content that makes it into the system is the hashes. Once a platform that is part of the program downloads those hashes and is able to match content, you need to apply some amount of verification. It’s on the participating companies themselves to review the content that matches the hash, to see if it actually violates their policies on NCII.
I fully agree, and that's one of the problems I was describing. There's very little content free of commercial interests. If this is true, it blocks a lot of potential use cases of a semantic web.
Is the cost of power going down? Jevons paradox only applies if the cost goes down.
I think it's a huge pity that we're so reliant on platforms instead of protocols - there would be native Slack clients for every platform. Few companies even allow proper API access.

Spotify buck the trend, Spot is a fantastic app

https://github.com/xou816/spot
On the contrary - if I want to use sms apple is forcing me to use THEIR app for it. Which means that if I want to use say whatsapp + sms i have to swap back and forth between apps - while if I want to use imessage + sms i can do that all in one app. Sms being the common language for all phone messaging means apple has clearly used their leverage as platform vendor to advantage their app - it’s the only one that also speaks sms.
Stupid question from me: how the hell do they prototype and debug this? It's very far from my EE knowledge. Communication analysers will show the eye diagram and tell you a lot about stray capacitance and inductance, but I know that most 10GSa/s+ devices cost more than a house and have a tendency to live in a lab for a long time. It seems to my mind like there are so many difficulties in driving pci-e fast, from timing to voltage drop and current limitations. All of this must be implemented, somehow, if the spec is finalised. Right? They wouldn't write it up otherwise (right?!).

So -- how do you prove that your infrastructure can blow the socks off everything without building two of them and testing?
Yeah so Don Knuth says if you want a measure of productivity add the amount of code that's written to the amount of code that's deleted. In the same vein, make one to throw away. Final concept from Knuth: 1 in 50 people have the "computer scientist's mindset".
If you want to start with the most controllable representation of a piece of paper, consider that OpenOffice (word processing and drawing) embeds its structured file format into PDFs. Maybe those are the PDFs we scrape first, leaving the bag-of-jpegs for later.
Slack in browser tab user here. Got sick of the app and how slow it was pretty fast. It's just not worth it.
The complaint page for the UK's national data protection authority, ICO: https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/your-personal-informatio...

The contact page for the California Privacy Protection Agency: https://cppa.ca.gov/about_us/contact.html

The contact info for the national data protection authorities in the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway is linked at [2] in the comment above.
I still can't believe they had Hangouts doing IM, SMS/MMS via Google Voice, SMS/MMS locally, voice/video calls, groups, integration with previous Google Talk users, and integration into native Fi calling all from your choice of web page, browser extension, browser app, or mobile app... and decided the best way to move forward was to deprecate it and break it into half a dozen apps over 7 years to be left with only some features migrated into an enterprise slack clone that had to be fed back to normal users because all of the other one off apps failed.

One of the apps they broke off, Allo, literally used phone numbers as IM identifiers but didn't support Google Voice integration and they simultaneously launched a second app, Duo, for video calls instead of just putting it in Allo. How could someone higher up not say "this is the dumbest thing ever, merge the teams or reassign one to something else"???

I was farther in the future of converged communication in 2015 than now.
> If corporate greed could cause inflation, it would have caused inflation 5 years ago, or 10, or whatever.

The same could be said of government or central bank spending, but the past 15 years in the U.S. and the past 30 years in Japan show that the relationship isn't quite so simple. Yet few people deny that government spending can induce consumer price inflation, so why conclude from effectively the exact same longitudinal data set that corporate pricing power cannot induce consumer price inflation?

In both cases the devil is clearly in the details. If macroeconomics were a solved problem we wouldn't even be having this conversation.
> How many messaging systems has Google had over the years?

many, but also, Gmail
Yes R&D is cost. Sales is profit.
Tell that to my parents' meighbour who thought it a good idea to decorate his garden as if it were a plane landing strip. Anecdata of course, but also a perfect illustration of Jevons' paradox.
In my country, the certs are required to enter businesses.
This is known as Wirth's law, which the page links to as well as to the ancient quip "what Andy giveth, Bill taketh away."

A less cynical take would shift towards the perspective of Gustafson's law. Modern systems attend to more stuff and have more capabilities and affordancies than older trimmer but also simpler software.

On Jevon's paradox, a countervailing force is ephemeralization or dematerialization, of which a large aspect is pushing away from resource intensive builds to more energy and information processing intense arrangements.
What’s that sound? Frost Quake! [video]
Does Linux? OSX? There's a hundred and one different ways to get Windows to run something at boot, even as an unpriviliged user. So it's not as simple as just monitoring HKCU\..\Run. With Linux at least it's somewhat more limited: Unpriviliged users typeically only have access to cron for running things at boot.
Which is why we ought to be building webs with Assembly.

Seriously though, there is an equilibrium somewhere, and on top of that a lot of stuff that is more about business and work than programming.

I may be getting out of my depth here but, am I wrong to say that a good deal as to why webdev in Java is even a thing is because there were people around who knew Java to begin with? That a good deal of people learning PHP did it just because Wordpress is a thing? That react native for desktop is about people with expertise in react native being able to develop for desktop?

Workers want paychecks. Society wants products. Workers will learn to make products so they earn paychecks and if they can spend less time learning they will, obviously, do so.
> “All general-purpose communications platforms with over 10mil users must allow and enable open access to 3rd party client developers and inter-platform communications gateways” - problem solved

This is frankly delusion.

What is the SLA for a feature? Who decides? How fast can they be deprecated? In the face of security bugs? In the face of active exploitation? Who controls feature additions? What if the operator doesn't want to build the feature? What about abuse? Are they allowed to remove encryption guarantees? Strip e2e encryption?

etc etc etc.

It's nothing like a trivial problem.
A third good book is Vaka Moana, Voyages of the Ancestors: The Discovery and Settlement of the Pacific

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3182068-vaka-moana-voyag...
apparently he used an argon beam machine that otherwise seals blood vessels

https://www.itv.com/news/central/2022-01-11/surgeon-who-bran...

> "borne out of a degree of professional arrogance,"

that's not arrogance, it's one of the ultimate forms of vanity, narcissism and possibly psychopathy
It's always been the unofficially accepted way things are done in the music business. Short samples are tolerated, but some people are sensitive and try to sue and then I believe it can go either way depending on the details. If you lose, you'll have to license it.

Caveat Emptor: I am a software engineer who loves music and about 20 years ago I read a book about how the music biz works. (spoiler: it was mostly quite ugly behind the scenes!)
> Slack, Spotify, Discord

All those examples could or do work just as well as web apps, right? I don't think that's the authors message, but I'd rather have those type of apps be web-based instead of electron-based or native.
>I’ll rephrase to clear misunderstandings. A legal warrant was obtained and federal agents attempted to exercise that warrant. Whilst attempting to carry out the warrant a gun battle ensued in which 4 federal agents were killed and 7 or so members of the cult were killed. After 51 days federal agents stormed the compound and quite a few people including children died.

I take this as basically accurate.

>All of the blame rests on the people in charge of the cult. Nothing they did was moral or justifiable. A government should have the power to exercise legally obtained warrants. Otherwise it is a useless government.

You make a lot of presumptions about what I've said about Waco. ALL I said was DoJ should start with the 'domestic terror organization' that fired upon civilians at Waco and Ruby Ridge. I said nothing about morality, whether the WARRANT was justified, or even who the blame for Waco rests on.

This is starting to look like your own rabbit-hole we're going down where you think something you say about who is to blame at Waco discredits the ONLY assertion I made about Waco (which was civilians were fired upon.) It's starting to look like your own personal vendetta, one I'm very confused of the reason behind.

>All of the blame rests on the people in charge of the cult.

Even I don't have this level of confidence as to what proportion of blame to assign to who at Waco. The fact that you've reached such confidence about an event where we still lack full accuracy of details, is one of the most stunning and clear cases of Dunning-Kruger-esque effect I've seen on HN.

Regarding a useless government? Nah I think the government can still maintain functional ability to execute a search warrant without executing in in the way the fatal siege was executed in Waco.
Every well written app has multiple processes that can offload work to them and simply restart that single process if it crashes. Even Slack is running a number of processes so even if one does crash it simply restarts without affecting the main UI process.
Lest I come across as a glass half-empty person, let me mention a few things about this country that I genuinely like and which rare (if not unique) throughout the world:

(1) Genuine ethnic diversity (simply unmatched in its breadth and scale), and a genuine, bedrock belief that (at least in principle) if you're a citizen you have a right to be here and to live your own life, dammit whatever your ancestry, religious belief, however you dress, etc. The fact that the racism which does exist is so virulent comes in part from the fact that it is a minority view.

(2) Truly awesome natural beauty, also very diverse (what's left of it anyways)

(3) Pioneering in LGBTO and abortion rights while much of the world remains a frightening place indeed in these respects.

(4) A away of looking at life in the large and as full of possibility which has brought many bad things but also Jazz, Rock'n'Roll, amazing cinema, etc.
Practical Engineering is a fantastic channel, but it's fascinating seeing the news citing an analysis from a youtuber instead of doing the research themselves. I wonder if they interviewed him directly, or are just quoting his video.
"Slow is smooth and smooth is quick"--US Army widsom against rushing matters.
It is better to implement it at front end. Actually it is not better it is kinda has to be that way. Because page will be already lagging and if you implement it at front at there won't be any lags.
And it is better to have limits about update frequency at the back-end. If reactor temperature already announced 100 ms ago and it went to 1051K from 1050K maybe it is better to delay it for a second.
I think people vastly undervalue static linking when it comes to compile times. If every file in a project changes every minute then yea - you're hooped... But usually certain groups will work in certain areas with those changes being synced only so often. If you examine the dependency tree and manage to split up the codebase into modules that you compile into .a files - then have a final step where you whip together any overly broad files along with just extracting the .o files from the archives[1] you'll live a happy life.

This can terribly fail if you have header files depended on by everything that constantly change - but honestly... that's a pretty bad code smell so either make an archive that's a dependency of all those others (and occasionally feel real pain when the header file actually gets updated) or else refactor things for sanity's sake.

A year and a half into my first job I was tasked with revising the build system and there are some really effective things you can do there without very much training. You want to lean on `make` a lot - no seriously, a lot - but if you do you can make some amazing things happen. You've also got a lot of cross platform tooling if you need to compile on different architectures - though scripting how those interact does get progressively more difficult in those cases.

1. Just in case you're unfamiliar - linux static libraries are essentially just an archive of a bunch of object files... so you can freely use ar to manipulate them in all sorts of ways https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Program-Library-HOWTO/static-librarie...
How is this as a privacy oriented solution? Using in-browser bookmarks is, in my opinion, like creating a perfect fingerprint of who you are in so many ways (aside from the obvious of being traceable based on the same bookmarks being transferred to new browsers). Any suggestions?
A US dryer is 240V at 30A (actual usage is 24A - 80% of rating), which is 5.7kW.
I love Server-Sent Events, but just as a heads up in case anyone doesn't know there are some limitations to SSE:

* Doesn't natively support binary data.

* If you're using HTTP/1.1 in the browser, you'll be severely limited in the number of SSE connections you can have going at a time. If you're on HTTP/2 then it's not a problem.
A person stole Wordle and put it on the App Store