skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's easy to forget how bad software was back in the '90s

> Modern software is in fact more reliable than older software.

Putting this as "90s vs now" is borderline strawman IMO.

I genuinely believe the peak in terms of performance and polish was somewhere in the early-mid 2000s; developers of the time had experienced the 90s and true shortage of CPU time and other resources. The mindset was still alive, even if PCs had gotten very powerful by 2005.

Mid-to-late 2000s mark the start of mass webification and mobilification of software. "Mobile eats the world" and "nobody wants to install software." In my experience it's been downhill from there; software started being developed with a completely different mindset and completely different approach.

During the early phase of this transition, your bottleneck was invariably network I/O; so developers didn't really need to give a crap about CPU cycles or RAM. Lack of UI polish could be blamed on the web being what it is, a document platform coerced into becoming an application delivery platform. Most of the early "app web" applications were truly horrific compared to "native" software, but no matter, the web was considered more accessible and a better platform for developers. And users didn't have to INSTALL SOFTWARE! Woohoo.

Of course the constraints are not the same today, but the original mindset that held until early 2000s is long gone. For example, instead of trying to stick to your platform's long established UI conventions as you would if developing Windows software in 2000, designers nowadays are more concerned about branding and making up their own experience; every "web app" looks and feels and behaves different.

Now as for reliability, I can't say whether the mid 2000s were worse or better than today. 90s software definitely had a lot of issues, but I had no trouble running Windows XP SP2 with months of uptime. The nature of software failures has changed, and today you have less crashes (though they're still there), but on the other hand, I regularly see applications being confused about their state, being stuck trying to do something that evidently doesn't succeed, infinite spinners, "whoops, something went wronk", "we can't serve your request at this time" and "please reload and log in again." If we consider all these to be failures, then I think software in general isn't any more reliable than it used to be. Updates are another interesting phenomenon; back in the day, I wasn't forced to update. I never lost work or had to reboot and restart everything because of updates.
Well, thank you, but that error was the result of a quick rephrasing. I modified one aspect of the sentence to maintain parallelism between the two gerunds without making sure it still made grammatical sense. I should have removed the article. I'm more diligent in a professional context than I am in off-the-cuff HN comments.

(To return the favour, "a is predominently singulair, it is grating to see it in collocation..." includes a comma splice and a misspelling — singulair.)
The opening of this piece reminded me of papers showing that retracted peer reviewed papers still get cited (for evidentiary support) at high rates in the scientific literature.

The ivermectin case is interesting too, as it's not exactly like ivermectin hasn't been scrutinized at this point.

I'm not sure peer review as part of the publication process per se matters as much as it's made out to be.
(not an expert in this, just a fan) Always a possibility and RF is generally more prone than visible light to artifacts, in part because its much harder to eliminate from the environment.

However, in this case the brighter filaments have been observed for decades, the wide angle view of this image is from 1989 from the VLA array in New Mexico with some data augmentation from Spitzer space telescope.

https://public.nrao.edu/gallery/the-center-of-our-galaxy-2/

The MeerKAT study just increases the resolution and signal to noise ratio, which has allowed us to see many more of them, but we can see the 'old' ones as well. The emission phenomena is pretty well understood AFAIK, the mystery just being mostly when/why/how they got there.

The other thing to keep in mind is that these filaments are huge in the night sky. The image we see is a mosaic of many observations that spans 3.5 x 2.5 degrees. The moon is ~.5 degrees, or about the same size as that giant bubble on the lower right.

Here's the paper. I just scanned through it and its relatively approachable - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.10541.pdf

Edit: Check out the section 'OBSERVATIONS AND DATA PROCESSING'
>I don't stay with the car during fillups on road trips though, I start the fill and run into the convenience store to stock up on snacks and by the time I'm back 2-3 minutes later the tank is full and I can be back on the road.

That's illegal in many jurisdictions, like Pennsylvania. It's dangerous everywhere. Those click off latches aren't infallible, gasoline filling needs to be supervised. You don't have to stand there -- wash your windows or check your oil.
I agree, and I think this model - centralized democratic open source server for most people + self-hosted version when you need it - is ideal.

Without the centralized server somebody will take over with a proprietary walled garden that offers better user experience.

Without the self-hosted version people with special use-cases will move to proprietary competition that will eventually distrupt the democratic well meaning version.

Most recently I've seen it play out in virtual tabletop rpgs space. There is the proprietary centralized roll20.com that barely works because for the longest time it had no competition. Some of the premium features were broken for months. And there's foundry vtt which is much better, open source and self-hosted, but is hard to setup correctly on your own.

What's missing is centralized democratic version of foundry vtt that will make it as easy as roll20 for new players and DMs. It's not like money is the problem - people in this hobby are used to pay for customized dies, figurines, books, maps etc. They could easily charge 100 USD a year for 4-5 person group and that will easily pay for the computing needed and bandwidth. Both of the groups in which I play chipped in for cloud server and a license of foundry no problem. The problem was configuring it and dealing with network issues.
You can, but then you cannot automatically generate a wrapper that can convert language B strings to language A strings disguised as an opaque type C, because there is no way for the wrapper generator to know it is a string type, unless you wrote the wrapper generator yourself for your API specifically.
way less commute expenses

I doubt that, or at least it is very dependent on where you live. Both cars, gas and parking (as most employers in the US seem to offer free parking for employees) is generally much cheaper in the US. And while most places in Europe have (more or less) working public transport it is quite expensive. In the US I've used public transport in New York City, Chicago and Washington DC and they all had significantly cheaper public transport than here in Sweden for example.
Aus defence official was to report ‘good progress’ on French submarine project
I was initially excited by that because I’ve had the misfortune of being given documents where someone basically did an “apply all” with Grammarly, which introduced a large number of significant errors. The author wasn’t a native speaker and assumed they hadn’t learned all of the rules correctly and made the mistake of trusting the tool.
I am not really sure, but I can at least list those that has a good chance (assuming that they weren't beaten over by a startup):

European ISPs with Tier-1 capabilities: Sweden's Arelion (prev. Telia Carrier), Telecom Italia's Sparkle, T-Systems (part of Deustche Telekom), France's Orange, and the business and carrier division of Telefonica.

Webhosting with demonstrated capabilities are another one: I can only name OVH to be frank. Iliad (dba Scaleway) has good European connections but not global, and Hetzner while a capable hoster is not that invested outside of Germany.
It's actually a plot point in The Three-Body Problem.
The noise floor of the measurement receiver is terrible though so you really don’t know what the true performance is here.
Chuck McManis developed NIS+ while he was at Sun Microsystems
I think the greatest preponderance of technical books are written with a useful lifetime of at most 5 years, and frankly probably not that long.
Anyone read the code and find the lack of formatting kind of odd?
https://www.hcaptcha.com/ is a drop-in replacement for recaptcha.

It's not EU based, but at least it's not Google, and the service is privacy oriented...
"Insanely expensive" well, depends on what do you consider insane. Let me look around the websites

Looked around Munich you can find options between 500k and 700k around 20km. I wouldn't be surprised if houses inside the city would cost ~1Mi (but we're talking about suburbs right? and cities grow differently)

Around Dublin you can find for that range or even less, inside the city (in liveable areas)

For comparison, searching around Chicago it's probably a bit less (though with bigger surface area) - excluding the foreclosures or fixer-uppers.

Buying a house in SV is also insanely expensive even with SV salaries, so.
I didn’t get.

Kept the app installed for about two months. Was still waiting for beta access when I uninstalled it.

I never used the app as browser or anything. Neither gave it notification permission. Maybe that was the reason.
So many memories triggered
You regret not jumping ship?
I have the paid version and just use another trash mail service if moZmaiL.com is blocked
How would they know it's an international call unless Apple/FaceTime would leek metadata (like number you're calling) to AT&T?

Sure they could see that the IP you are connecting to is in Africa, but if you call a US number on a regular phone and that person happens to be in Africa you will still get charged like it's a call within the US (the one out traveling will get the extra charge). Since how would you know that person is out traveling? So how could AT&T know you're not calling a US number?
Those were spectral lines.
GP is talking about Patreon and sponsorships. A lot of videos get demonitized too, so some creators stand to see no money from ads in some videos.
So it is not similar at all? I see no relationship one can draw between GDPR and Chines censorship of the internet and how it came to be.
Particularly in technical or STEM related writing I sometimes need to repeat a word more than what Grammarly likes, and can’t replace it with a synonym because it has a specific meaning (eg “training” in the context of AI). I also try to avoid passive voice as much as possible, but sometimes when talking about software, techniques or processes, it’s the clearest way.

Still, I’m quite happy to have Grammarly’s suggestions.
Agree on the alcohol. I am currently wide awake at 1am unable to sleep because I had a “wind down” drink after a long 12 hour workday.

My insomnia tends to correlate with me drinking during the week.
Remember that time Yahoo made Flickr ridiculously slow to access from Europe, to the point where it wasn't actually usable? Lasted near 10 years I believe. Hah, good times.
simply don't have something like "working homeless".

Does the US have "working homeless" among people earning "tech" salaries?

Wonder who's gonna pick up the tab for you once you are in pension.

If you're earning US level take home salaries you should have zero problems financing your own pension plan.
I'd say the ability for anyone to understand and find it a challenge. No need to read the instructions, no need to get the keys - you just get it. Definitely the simplicity & broad engagement factor above all.
I believe that content addressed storage had to be built open-source because it was ultimately not in anyones corporate interest to further it.

It's interesting to reflect on the kinds of technologies which are clearly possible, but never seem to get built because they don't centralise control. Truly offline apps, and actually working device-to-device networking fall in this bucket I think. Yes, there are power and privacy considerations but it's pretty clear none of the big players want those technologies to take off.
It is OK if most EMail user use Google. The important point is that if Google deletes my account or does something else I don't like, I can use another EMail provider, including one I set up on my own. Yes I know these days it still won't work because Google will censor my EMails and make it impossible for me to communicate with its users. But it is the general idea, and I think there are new systems (like Matrix) where censoring stuff would not be as easy.

And if users are frustrated about not getting my EMails, they could also move away from GMail.

Mastodon is also a bad example because it sucks or is weird. In theory users of different servers could communicate with each other, but my impression was that it is too complicated and not really encouraged. It was also invented for the specific purpose of being able to censor things, maybe that shows.
I have read here on HN a comment which said the following : US companies will still be at an advantage as they can still mine their other customers and use this knowledge for their EU operations as well.

EU based companies will not be allowed to mine US customers the same way.
If you look at these games you can see that Wordle is a perfect fit. There is no other way to put it.

If Wordle were already in that games list it wouldn’t stick out at all. Especially the aspect of having a daily puzzle that’s the same for everyone is a great fit. Even the whole design aesthetic is similar (it’s a pleasantly useable experience all around).

The biggest differences are the ads and the registration requirement. Which are, I guess, in a sense both ways to fuck it up.
My recollection of software from the Windows 95 era is different. The reliability of desktop apps varied depending on the type of software but problems were often related to hardware. Today, hardware is much more reliable and adheres to widely adopted standards.

Faster, more capable hardware hasn't necessarily made modern software better. In many cases the opposite: apps are slow and gobble up computer resources with no restraints.
> Or what if they're like the exhaust trails of an FTL vehicle/body?

Thank you for saying it. I desperately want this to be the case.
Decentralization (and federation) is about choice.

Choice to host your own data or delegate to a trusted party, not to have to follow the rules of a single company, with a single culture and within a single jurisdiction. In one word: feodalism.
In general there are a lot of factors, in the example you give I would point out that it relates to cargo cult followers of a poor summarizations of best practices.

TDD/BDD proposes a world where all things work and remain working when investigated by an automated test. The automated test is built up step by step and happy to do everything from start to finish to look at the one feature and the feature may remain and continue to get repairs long after it continues to make any sense in a flow and with very little observation of how broken it might be in natural use.
I see a slippery slope in ML engineering, where to make something “production ready” engineers layer a relatively simple workflow in about 8 different technologies. I sometimes wonder if it’s preferable to just deal with occasional issues as they occur than to anticipate every deployment bug under the Sun.
I agree that section 702 is a bit extreme.

But, at the heart of it, it makes sense. If foreigners can use services in your jurisdiction, you want to see what they do for security purposes.

Nonetheless, it's against the belief of "innocent until proven guilty."
There have been a few high profile security papers come from Graz university of technology and they seem to want to invest in the city as a security hub.

https://cybersecurity-campus.tugraz.at
No, in Denmark at least it is 2 months for Model Y, and 6 months for Enyaq.
Tales From The Interview was always my favourite section.
Yep, the first punch was thrown by the ad industry. Popups, pop-unders and even full window advertisements were rampant before popup blockers became commonplace, to the point of being added directly to browsers.
Maybe we could call this tax a subscription and contrary to nation state that you have to belong to on birth, your could choose your "internet state" by subscribing. You would get some rights to access the infrastructure of this internet state (mail, DNS, micro-blogging, whatever...) and participate to its administration by voting and have some obligations (pay your subscription, vote, validate identity of people, participate to arbitration instances). I think this kind of corporation is called a cooperative, maybe the destiny of the free-internet are cooperatives.

Federation between those virtual states would have a precedent, existing federation of real states.
Is this a real problem?
The adage for software is “fast, cheap, good - pick two”, but it has devolved further into “fast, cheap, good - pick fast”. This is obviously a generalisation, but the reality for most software development is that speed to market, pivot and patch trumps everything else. I expect it will get worse before it gets better.
It can run in-proc and fits the scenarios being given on previous comment.

I remeber Bonobo, DCOP and KPart days, so I know pretty well what D-Bus is capable of.

In micro-kernels the IPC infrastructure is the userspace ABI, as it is the only way to call into OS services, beyond the little glue library to make it possible to do so.
It would be interesting if the ISPs got into this game. Although it doesn't look like they're interested so far - at least not in the non-big-government-contract way. US telcos didn't get involved either at consumer CDN level.

Hetzner has only a handful of locations - they'd have to massively scale up to be a viable CDN and add all the needed tech.
Grammarly ads say that they will help you to appear more articulate than you are, so that you can land jobs where articulacy is required. It stumps me a bit, always.
You mentioned nautical miles. Originally, the nautical mile was defined as 1/60th of a degree of longitude (aka one minute) along the surface of the sea, and so it is a pretty natural unit from a navigational standpoint.

It has since been redefined based on that original definition, as 1852 meters.

So it’s a goofy measure in that it uses base-60, but is otherwise more in the SI family both in terms of original derivation from natural measurements and in terms of its current SI-based definition.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautical_mile

There are other things out there called a “mile” that aren’t imperial, too. Take care when asking for directions in the Norwegian countryside, for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_mile
Regulations. Dealing with explosives. Capital costs with uncertainty of payback.
Wild Romania: Europe’s Hidden Wildlife Paradise
My current biases lead me to agree with your perspective.
I'm sorry, maybe I'm not making myself clear and we're talking in circles. Yes the C interface is the problem.

Lets say I'm developing an API in Rust that I want everyone to be able to use. I wrap this API in some C functions. I use fat pointers (slices), strings with length, etc. all custom struct types. I choose to signal errors in some my_err* parameter.

Then someone developing in Java wants to use my library. If they use an automatic wrapper generator (which knows nothing of my API), all the semantic information on slices, strings and errors is lost. They need to make an additional wrapper on top of the stuff the automatic wrapper generator did.

If C had better builtin types, the slices exposed by the "extern C" API in Rust would just be standard C slices. The strings just standard C strings, the errors just standard C errors. The semantic information would be preserved at the C level, and therefore the automatic wrapper generator could add code to automatically translate slices, strings and errors into the appropriate types in the host language.

You seem entirely focused on the fact that the C ABI can be used to implement stuff like COM or SWIG for language interoperability. True, but not really relevant.
TikTok donated $15 million to the CDC in 2020, when the pandemic was in full effect

https://www.cdcfoundation.org/blog/public-health-week-tiktok...
> Now is this useful? The short answer is no. The long answer is also no. I can think of exactly zero uses of this experiment (and I must be pretty crazy for doing it).

Well, at the very least it's a very computationally expensive test that managed to catch a few packaging bugs.
It's a Mega ACn 16/15/4. Permanent magnet inrunner with 2200kV. Made in Czechia.

Officially specced for 25A, commonly run from 4S LiPo = 14V, but the current can go higher with good cooling or in bursts.
I need this for my Miata. I’ve been thinking that the area where the fuel tank is and behind the seats could hold batteries. The range with gas is like 200mi anyway so if I could get 100 out of electric With this performance I would go for it
This is very nicely done.

From the weird idea (why would that be interesting) to optimal solutions, np hard, disk issues and then an interesting result.
For me the biggest advantage is the relative equality. Not that there are no billionaires but if I go to a restaurant I don't have to feel bad for the waiter because they are getting a fair salary not that much lower than mine. And they don't have to feel super envious of my tech salary. And it's nice that if something bad happens to them (or me!) they will be taken care of - with healthcare or social housing as needed.

From over here, US seems constantly at an edge of civil war/revolution. Lots of desperate people that jump at the first opportunity to riot and loot stuff.
Indeed, which prompts me to mention one of the most annoying things about Grammarly. It irritates me no end when I deliver technical writing for a client and they respond with a list of "errors" of that sort after they have run it through Grammarly.
It’s entirely possible there are none.
Summary: Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
If I compare Python docs and Haskell docs even the official python docs are completely terrible. For example let's take the regex library and want to look up how to get match groups: https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html

99 out of 100 times someone will land on this page and already know what regexes are. So basically 1/3 of the page is useless. After a while you find you need to use the `match` method. Great! Now I see I get a match object. How do I deal with those? There is not a clickable link here. In the example it's an opaque object. So I scroll further maybe ctrl+F to find match object. Here I find what I'm looking for. So this take me pages of scrolling and then manually searching for the object a method returns. That SUCKS. Everytime I use the re library and need to refresh my knowledge I'm in pain.

Compare this to Haskell: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/regex-compat-0.95.2.1/do...

Great. I instantly see how to construct a regex. The next thing I see is the `matchRegex` function. The bread and butter of using regexes. And what does it return? "Maybe [String]". Literally couldn't be easier then that.

Of course this doesn't hold for every Haskell library and Python library. But this is my general experience.
That make me curious to look up the Koenigsegg's power. It would seem they are metric horsepower:

>Two common definitions used today are the mechanical horsepower (or imperial horsepower), which is about 745.7 watts and the metric horsepower, which is approximately 735.5 watts.

I guess speaking as a Brit the foreigners just didn't have proper horses.