skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It’s not about specialization, though. It’s about getting those benefits from standard and existing tooling. You don’t need to be an expert in accessibility to build accessible software (though it helps of course). But you do need to build accessibility support, which is a lot more work when you do it from scratch.

The longer I work in the industry the more I realize the cost of “doing it from scratch”. If you ask a brand new software engineer to estimate the time for a project, they’ll basically give you an estimate for a prototype. A slightly more experienced engineer will include time to get through code review and maybe shake out the egregious bugs. A more advanced one will remember to cost for tests. I have found you have to get a pretty senior engineer if you want them to accurately account for things like telemetry and logging, deployment, live site management, accessibility, localization, etc.

I’ve seen engineers build a “simple” system and then spend 4x as long as they planned to make it actually supportable because they “didn’t need” the existing tooling. So they rewrote it all but worse.
Right. Oculus Rift has been developed in the US, and seeing all the companies that have followed the trend of VR (Valve, Sony, HTC, HP), I guess this could be an example of a revolutionary tech. Tesla while not revolutionary (electric vehicles as an idea and some demo has been around for a long time) has been the first to democratized the vehicle to the masses. Now every car makers are making an electric model. That's revolutionary.

A lot of example from China I'm seeing are good looking and impressing demo (Xiaomi Alpha Mix) but are impractical for general consumers.
Their PI who is legally and morally responsible for everything that happens in their lab.
160mb is indeed relatively tiny compared to a full k8s distribution. The "i have issues distributing a tiny 4mb binary to my severs" sized hole that you've dug yourself doesn't change that.
You can always remove a huge amount of co2 from the air, if you’re willing to burn an even greater amount to do it.

Carbon capture is not going to save us, folks. Once again we must review the laws of conservation of mass and energy.

All forms of negative emissions are a scam. You’re better off just using the solar power than you are burning oil and then using solar power to un-burn the oil, or worse, using other fossil fuels to capture the first fossil fuels.
I mean, I do the exact same (I did it Friday), but I don't think this is counter to my point. It's not because I don't want to fix something so I avoid it, it's because fixing it puts me behind on other tasks (that come down from people writing my paycheck), so I avoid tasks that won't be clearly rewarded unless I can convince them otherwise.

It's because time pressures are designed in a way that incentivizes you not to do maintenance when you see a mess. It's also not sexy on a resume that you altered something from a mess to not a mess vs implementing some new feature.

It takes highly detail oriented and creative people to develop good software and those traits tend to drive one crazy to the point of fixing something when you see a mess. Given no constraints I bet most developers would clean up their code to the best of their ability and fix things as they come across issues they identify. I've been in these no constraint environments, usually on stuff I write myself for myself, and I don't mind going back and doing a significant refactor when it's clearly needed. Once I'm done, I feel genuinely satisfied that I've done something useful and productive because I only need to convince myself and because no real external financial pressures exist in this context.
When I’m in Paris I always try and find time with the Eiffel Tower. I try and put myself in the mind of a person from the 19th century and how this structure must have appeared to them. How it made them feel. It was the beginning of modernism and a new world we are in today. A true line of demarcation from the previous era to a new era. An unbelievably important structure.
Except for the most pressing assassinations, I imagine lag is a feature, not a bug.
Bell has a great historical material just watch the redesign presentation of Saul Basso in the 70s! [0] I had so many marketing meetings with worse presentations just a week ago.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKu2de0yCJI
What is the company moving to for a replacement?
A moderate spread of six story buildings might be optimal for energy usage of just the buildings, but total energy usage/environmental impact are also shaped by other human factors for where people want and need to live and work...eg without tall buildings in Manhattan, you would get a lot of extra energy expended in more people commuting back and forth from further distances. And the a high density of people makes public transit even more viable which brings further environmental and health benefits.

That said, I do agree that there are only a few areas in the country where the main barrier to an ideal density is allowing more skyscrapers instead of mid-rises. Manhattan north of the financial district and south of midtown is one such area, parts of SF are another. But many, many more cities would see more benefits of moving from low density single-family homes and detached lots to mid-rises.
EEVblog is a great YouTube channel for EE information
I wonder how much of this is pragmatism. The current method of growth seems to be acquisition vs. funding in-house R&D. This makes a certain amount of sense because it means ideas have longer to be validated before committing funds to them.
No eInk tablet has Android certification. As far as I understand, one of the issues is that the screen refresh rate is too low to get certified.

It is very easy to set up Google Play on the Onyx Boox tablets. You just press a button in settings, enter your login details, click another button and that's it.
Not only that but Maya already supported custom code. I wrote a few plugins for Maya to export models and animations to our own optimised-for-N64 format. I wrote it in C (BK was all written in C). Maya also had (has?) a scripting language (called MEL I think?) that other teams used. It apparently made it super easy to do even advanced stuff. So given that, the “Lisp advantage” made even less sense. I must admit (again) that I felt really sorry for them. It is hard to watch somebody failing that badly doing a demo. But I will also say that making a sales call without first figuring out what they were up against (Maya) was a bad move. They had no clue what they were competing against. I think you are right that the “Lisp is awesome” thinking let them down the wrong path.
A majority of microcode updates aren't actual code, but are programming large swaths of undocumented registers known as "chicken bits" which turn off functionality and affect system operation. You can see what a rough fix looks like in Linux patches for devices that don't get these microcode updates: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/b4ad7273efbb0c60a6c93ae68f82a44...

No, the details of what these MSR registers do isn't public. But it's far from being code; it's simply rather tweaking a large switchboard of functionality which already existed on your CPU. It is not adding new features or code to the execution pipeline.

Modern process development pipelines are already far too long that a common thing to do is to put an experimental feature in all CPUs and only enable it with the right microcode and chicken bits when it works well enough for general use. It's not uncommon for new processor features to have a 5-6 lag from "first buggy implementation" to "general implementation".
I thought freeganism was a branch off of veganism, but the word "vegan" doesn't appear in the article.

Did I have the wrong definitions in my head?

Vegan: Don't consume or benefit from any animal products if you can help it. (This entails not buying animal products for yourself)

Freegan: Don't pay for any animal products, but consume them if they're free.
> Their job is to say "this software is free, this software is not".

But if they say "this software is free because the hardware is more locked down" then I don't see that as standing for user freedoms.

> People constantly call on them to compromise

It's about being more nuanced, not about making compromises.
This comment is very dense with things I used but haven't thought about in 20+ years.

Loadlin.exe wasn't even a terrible solution for dual boot with win9x... I may have even scripted a boot menu in autoexec.bat at some point.
Steel is stronger than dirt after all.

Rock is also stronger than dirt. In fact, if you like up dirt a km deep, you end up with rock. (Sedimentary rock to be specific.)
Many skyscrapers are novel- there is a certain prestige, and thus premium- to having an office in the Sears tower or the Burj Khalifa.

That is added on to the fact that skyscrapers are also engineering marvels, and the cost per unit goes up quite a bit once you have to start dealing with those problems, compared to the much more standard 6 story building as an example.

An additional novelty factor is that actually supporting the weight of the tower will require different techniques (and significantly higher costs) depending on the type of land the desired build site happens to be on.

All of these things create something of a price floor for rents.
It's bad now. It might not have been bad when it was originally written. Back when Unix was first being developed, you had machines with 64K or 128K of RAM, which is not much, and because of that, software was much simpler, and such design compromises could be kept in mind. And when C was standardized in 1989, it might have been a bad idea at that time, but the standards committee didn't want to obsolete all the existing code (a major concern at the time). But by all means, get a time machine and plead your case.

As an example of coding for size, I recently wrote a copy of strcpy() with similar semantics. I had to, because of constraints on memory. I wrote an MC6809 (an 8-bit CPU) disassembler in MC6809 assembly code, and the prime consideration was code size. Strings ending with a NUL byte? My GOD! that will waste 80 bytes! Waste a byte on size? That's another 80 (or 160 if you insist on 16 bits for size) bytes wasted! Instead, since all the text is ASCII, set the high bit on the last character. That more than makes up for the bit of oddness in my implementation of strcpy() to deal with the last byte, and helped contribute to the code being 2K in size.
Not in the USA. Any mortgage allows repayment without penalty. Banks actually want it that way as their business is underwriting loans and the fees associated with them.
Bookmarking it.
The FSF had to make a compromise, but many people think they drew the line in the wrong place. When no reasonable hardware can meet the "compromise" version of RYF it just causes users to bounce off.
It is an it’s not, too many apps rely on Google Play services these days for most consumers to have a functional device without it.
This is why I don't understand companies who argue that unions just make it harder for people to improve their conditions by making it impossible for employees to communicate directly to management. If the problems employees have could be fixed without unions they would have been fixed already.
The author doesn't say that you don't get the return on reading Moby Dick until you have paid the 16-hour price of reading it. What he actually says is subtly but importantly different:

"Only once the second price is being paid do you see any return on the first one."

So he agrees with you: you start getting the benefits as soon as the "second price" is being paid.

And I don't think it's quite right to say that the sixteen hours are the actual reward. They're the space in which some of the actual reward occurs, so to speak. You pay the price of using 16 hours of your time to read Moby-Dick. You get the reward of 16 enjoyably-spent hours, and also the reward of having your brain reshaped in whatever way reading Moby-Dick does for you -- deepening your ideas about friendship or obsession or sailing or whales, etc.

The 16 hours you have to spend are still a price, even though you enjoy spending those hours. (Some people enjoy spending money. They're still paying when they do.) The 16 hours you spend reading Moby-Dick are 16 hours you aren't spending reading The Brothers Karamazov or sleeping or doing lucrative consultancy or talking with your friends.
Nearly 8 years ago now.
I have a human need to live among skyscrapers. From the time I was a little kid, my favorite thing to do on a weekend was anything downtown. I found it incredibly depressing when we would go back to our postwar-sprawl house at the end of the day. Later we moved to an older inner-ring suburb, and that was a little better, but only some. Day trips to the nearest proper city would be the highlight of a year. New York was one of the best experiences of an entire childhood. It still boggles the mind that people refer to Manhattan like a cautionary tale. To me it's nirvana.

This obsession never went away. I can't really explain it. Maybe the sensory stimulation, maybe the comforting premise of an active hive of other human life, maybe something else, but it remains as important to me as ever. I think the skyscraper city is a little like the symphony orchestra: it has an object-level aesthetic, but on the meta level it's a celebration of civilization itself.

It is incredibly fortunate that my interest in computers translates to one of the few jobs in America that will pay enough to live in a place like this. By the same token, it's distressing that such places are so precious and so rare.
That would cut into MBA bonuses. Open-ended research is a cost center.
How difficult would using sonar be to protect against that?
> Ivan Illich certainly thought so

*Shrug*. When I go to the doctor, I love finding someone who does nothing but the one thing I need. Maybe this person is a generally “less useful” doctor, but if I break my ACL I want the surgeon who does nothing but ACLs all day every day to work on mine.

> I think it makes it easy to scale past our level of competence.

This sounds like an amazing win. This is frankly what software is supposed to do.
The article is not very well informed. It doesn't even make a distinction between os threads and green threads.

> To get this performance out of Java you would need to add threadpools, futures or some other async library.

What Java needs to be as efficient is the work of Project Loom: Fibers and Continuations. Go also has value types (e.g. arrays and nested structs with inline memory layout) that's the work of Java's Project Valhalla.
This was really well written and researched, and I say that as a structural engineer who predominantly designs tall buildings. I’m not at all libertarian with respect to things like building codes which protect life safety, but I do agree that we over scrutinize aesthetics and architectural aspects of buildings.

When I think of neat places I’ve been to, places that really filled my senses, awed, inspired, they were not the sterile developments approved by zoning and urban design panels. They were more organic. Some examples of the places That come to mind include Rhodes, water towns outside of Shanghai, and random plazas in Florence.

I believe we need to trust that people generally want to make the world beautiful, and let them do it in their own way. I certainly won’t have the same eye to beauty as everyone else, but that’s okay. It makes the world quirky and unique.
Whether it's loaded into RAM or ROM is the most useless distinction to make. It's functionally identical. Now whether a driver requires executing proprietary code on the host CPU, that is a useful distinction to make, because it allows independent OS implementations to create free drivers.
Fascinating. I'd love to hear some recent examples about how you manifested food.
Under testimonials:

"It seems to work

Nick Busey

Developer"
I think the centralized Bell Labs approach affords long-term research whereas startups are narrowly focused, interested in exit, strapped up and duct-taped underneath – 'like building an airplane while it is flying', inexperienced, VC-pressured, and less resourceful. Good point though, that's where Big Tech spends cash - acquisition. I was searching a bit more and Big Tech has been doing a bit of stock buybacks as well.
I wasn’t aware he stepped back. I don’t follow it closely because I don’t use it directly, though I have been very impressed by the way it’s managed to become so ubiquitous so rapidly.
> Thiomersal

Also known as Merthiolate, a very popular topical antiseptic when I was younger (very popular as in: at least where I lived, the go-to antiseptic for a small cut or abrasion was either Merthiolate, or Mercurochrome which is another mercury compound, or a hydrogen peroxide solution; every kid from back then is familiar with at least one, if not all, of these antiseptics). It was so popular that, now that it's no longer available, the Merthiolate brand has been repurposed for a completely unrelated antiseptic (Chlorhexidine), to cash on all that popularity.
How does Go handle syscalls which can't be multiplexed? If I call stat() from 500 goroutines, what does the Go runtime do regarding kernel threads?
What about rents? Or do you happen to own a place?

Also, do you manage to be sufficiently independent from others, or is it not a goal au all?
That jumped out at me, too.

I worked at an R&D lab on the East Coast early in my career, and there was such a great mix of young and old engineers. Many of the older engineers were legends and they knew so much. The pay wasn’t great by Silicon Valley standards, but nobody seemed to mind, perhaps because the work was fulfilling and they knew they weren’t viewed as disposable. Of course, costs of living were much lower too.

Fast forward fifteen years and I work at a Silicon Valley software company staffed by a constantly churning roster of 20-somethings. I’m the old man in my late thirties. It really is bizarre.
Techempower benchmarks beg to differ.

https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r20&hw=...

There's a lot of Java above the first occurrence of Go. Also - nobody writes Java web applications using the Sun httpserver. It's verbose and old.
I ran a 486 as an internal web server in the law office I worked at in the early 2000s. Don't remember any of the system details, but it ran very nicely until at least 2006.
Have you tried measuring your oven temp? Maybe it runs cold.
In my experience, I eventually pay for everything three times. Once to get, once to use (to get the return), and once to dispose. I'm continually surprised at the time cost of the last one.
Apple gains market share, as Macs grow twice the rate of PCs in Q4
Google cache, as the site is having trouble for me at the moment:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_QnG_r4...
Have you tried just ordering your steaks medium rare? That's what I do, and I've never had the type of trouble you speak of ordering at steak houses in NYC.
Facebook can do that because they have a homogeneous environment using only MySQL. And they have a strict engineering discipline and strong DBA team to limit the allowed schema structure.

Not so much for other companies.

Disclaimer: I don't work for Facebook, but I used to work at Google and build its Cloud SQL service.
> we'd hear a lot more cases of RSI

I think you dramatically underestimate how many people suffer from RSI and how much it affects their lives. In the US alone, we are talking about millions of people. In some surveys >50% of keyboard workers have complained about wrist pain from typing.

There was some planned OSHA office worker ergonomics enforcement in the late 1990s, carefully studied for a decade before being finally put into place in 2001 just as Clinton was leaving office, but it got killed by GOP congress and the Bush II administration. If not for that we would hear more about this problem, and there would be a lot more options for ergonomic keyboards today. Instead, this became a problem that employers blamed on their workers and left workers to figure out for themselves.

> position of keyboard in 3D space relative to the operator, position of hands on keyboard, typing style, health of the operator, operator's workflow, etc.

Yes of course. And things were to some extent better when almost all of the people using keyboards were trained professional secretaries.

From walking around large offices full of computer programmers, I would speculate that at least 3/4 of current office workers have inappropriately positioned and oriented keyboards; maybe even 90% or more.

The biggest problem (among many) with modern equipment/practice is that people type with unstraight wrists, slouch or lean over in their chairs, and stick their elbows out forward or way out to the side.

The keyboard should be held close to the torso and angled so that its top is parallel to the forearms (what this angle should be depends on relative height of torso and table or keyboard tray). Typists should keep their wrists as straight as possible (not flexed or extended; pronation is unfortunately unavoidable on a standard keyboard), and should have their palms and wrists “floating” above the keyboard while actively typing. The primary goal should be to avoid any nontrivial static load on any muscles throughout the body, and try to keep joint positions neutral.

Splitting the keyboard in half, separating the two halves by at least a few inches, and independently positioning and orienting each half can make a huge improvement.

> [If] QWERTY is as bad as HN commenters make out [...]

There are very few HN commenters who care at all about QWERTY, and even most of those are relatively ambivalent. It’s a design poorly matched to modern hardware, and changing it can make a nontrivial improvement, but it’s also not the main problem.
I really enjoy my Onyx Nova 3. It's a fairly novel device. Your comment is a great summary.

Like most, I wanted an ereader for consuming books without an LCD/OLED screen. I liked the idea of a color reader for the syntactic highlighting of code snippets. I further leaned into color once I realized there was a market for Android based ereaders. This means I can more easily treat it as a second phone to browse books, manga, github, HN, Pocket, Medium etc.

As other commenters pointed out, you probably do want to lock down the device and enable Google play store. I have NetGuard installed since it's constantly phoning home to China.

If you are comfortable with the price and understand the limitations (DPI, ghosting, darker screen) then it's a pretty great device.

The pen is great and responsive but it doesn't replace pen/paper. I primarily use the pen to mark up books/PDFs. The native library app it ships with is pretty great and beats out Moon+ Reader and other apps I've tried.

OneNote is particularly great for note taking and worth calling out. However, I can't find myself integrating it into my work flow.

You can set different options to negate ghosting. It's nice to be able to save these options to a specific app.

My biggest wishes would be higher DPI, brighter screen, and a warmlight option.

I'm not optimistic we will see any drastic innovation in the next few years. Kaleido/Plus isn't anything groundbreaking. I do hope that I'm wrong. There's a clear demand for this technology to improve.
Which part of the example go code looks synchronous? It’s using a callback function. That’s a hallmark of async code, nothing invisible.

I also can’t quite grasp the comparison with Java. It’s passing a class instance to the server handler, and that could be doing anything. Nothing there tells you how async or not the server implementation is, and that `os.write()` call might be using a thread pool underneath.
Are you me? :) Glad to hear someone else with the exact same viewpoint.

Ever since I was a little kid I dreamed of living in a city with skyscrapers, and my partner's demand that we move out to the suburbs nearly ended our relationship.
Youth is wasted on the old.