skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is it just me, or did old laptops have better keyboards that the new ones have today?

My first laptop was Acer Aspire One (this one [0]). I still have it and I still use it, it's currently running Debian with Xfce. And the keyboard is still the best I've ever used, I genuinely prefer this keyboard over any desktop keyboards that I've tried and I've tried many mechanical including Cherry Brown switches. I get that the very low profile keyboards on modern laptops look nice, but I personally don't use the keyboard for its looks. Not to mention that my cat stepped on the "Enter" key of one of the newer laptops (Acer CB3-431) and she broke the butterfly shaped keycap stabilisation thingy making the button feel very inconsistent. I can't the replacement for just the bit that broke, I have to buy an entire new keyboard for it (~55€). The cat wasn't fat and she has walked over pretty much every keyboard that I've used, but that was the first one that broke...

It is this line of thinking that I personally think is the reason why a good number of people like and still use ThinkPads today.

[0] https://www.globalmediapro.com/dp/A25LT9/Acer-Aspire-One-AOA...
Oh maybe it was that I had just unrolled it. I suppose there’s some setup involved though that I hadn’t accounted for. Either way, it’s a bit slow when it comes to DSP stuff unless you can avoid multiplications.
I think so, but I think the performance gap is a little larger than I was expecting with Nim effectively compiling to C as an intermediary.

https://programming-language-benchmarks.vercel.app/rust-vs-c

https://programming-language-benchmarks.vercel.app/nim-vs-c
> I worked on many greenfield projects in recent year where the conscious choice was made to use PHP.

What kind of greenfield projects were they, and who was making those conscious choices? Without context it's just non-sense.

> For the majority of projects NOT using PHP is basically throwing money in the trash. Best deployment story. Great ecosystem.

What other technologies have you used in your experience, that came to conclusion?

> This is a really big strength. PHP is able to learn from other languages and when implementing features can avoid mistakes that they made.

Name features PHP avoided while copying.
> not only integers and floats, but also strings, lists and dictionaries as mutable value types (copy-on-write)

Lists and dictionaries are also mutable in Python. Strings are not. With CoW, are your referring to garbage collection? (value that is no longer assigned to a name will eventually be purged). That would be independent of (im)mutability, so I'm not sure I understand.
Pro tip: push a brick at a 45 degree angle between the two stuck plates, instant separation.
Screenshots don’t work? They work in vanilla Gnome on Fedora. So do color pickers, from what I’ve seen. Though, maybe I’m only using those with my browser. Not sure what you mean by network transparency, though.
Their patent was bogus anyway.
My old iMac was constantly waking from sleep for online tasks because of the (on by default) Power Nap feature introduced around the same time as InstantGo. By the time I paid any attention to it my HDD had ~500.000 head park cycles which also lead to its early demise. Ended up using it with an external SSD which was a massive boost in performance anyway.
I was curious about this rant since I'm maintaning a number of PHP projects and I haven't had any issues with "count".

In the Changelog section of the "count" docs at https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.count.php we find:

> 7.2.0 - count() will now yield a warning on invalid countable types passed to the value parameter.

So in 7.2.0 they started raising a warning in cases where the application was doing a stupid thing (calling count on a non-countable object). Notice that PHP's warnings won't stop execution by default. The expected side-effect here is that you get a warning in the logs and everything keeps working normally. Of course, many development setups halt execution on warnings, but this is a decision that devs make to "force" them to writte better code, not something enforced by PHP itself.

> 8.0.0 - count() will now throw TypeError on invalid countable types passed to the value parameter.

In the next major version, they turned the warning into an error. Pretty understandable way to improve the language I would say. Of course it would've been better if this was an error from the beginning, but given a mistake was made here, this is definitely the best way to correct it I can think of.

I'm sorry it took time for you to fix the legacy apps you've inherited. However, calling this out as an example of bad programming language evolution seems very wrong to me. I for one would LOVE that all languages and libraries in my project's dependency chains where as dilligent as in this example.
You don't seem to understand what the previous poster said: all of this can be achieved with a database that allows some open access. You don't need a consensus protocol on a distributed system.
ENS alone should be more than 10% of the market. Using NFTs for decentralized identity and authn is big. Unlock Protocol's is going for authz.

There is a strong selection bias for those that report on crypto for clicks or those that want to create a narrative that we can not live without some big central authority controlling our lives.
The tolerance to which Lego bricks are fabricated is impossible to achieve using affordable gear.
>What can the West do?

Gain the moral authority necessary to actually apply pressure to China - by prosecuting our own war criminals and crimes against humanity.

Until we do that, there is nothing we can do except create more atrocity. We are certainly not prepared to do whats necessary for as long as the criminals responsible for the destruction of Mosul and Raqqa are free to spout their nonsense to the world ..
I gave a TEDx talk in 2009, which was very popular on YouTube back then, and it was chosen by the TED editors to be put as a ‚proper‘ TED talk on the TED.com website. It‘s quite interesting to see how they shortened the video even further down, and what they cut out - half sentences that I repeat for clarification, and so on, cutting out 40 seconds from the 4:39min (already edited) original:

YouTube version (4:39 mins):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCmsvXgxdDY

TED.com version (3:58 mins)
https://www.ted.com/talks/fabian_hemmert_the_shape_shifting_...

Reputation-wise, it was life-changing (literally hundreds of emails coming in) and I am thankful for that. It was also challenging that this is something you can almost certainly never repeat (including the media attention, overnight ‚expertise’ and all the associated dopamine in your blood).

Today (well, in 2018), TED ‚features‘ TEDx YouTube talks on their site, but it doesn‘t seem to edit them like they did back then:

YouTube version of my 2018 TEDx talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LNjVmcVF68

TED.com version (identical):
https://www.ted.com/talks/fabian_hemmert_protecting_our_crea...

Here‘s a 2011 ‚recap‘ of how the talk ended up on TED.com (a plead for blind optimism!):

https://tedx.tumblr.com/post/6981020824/how-ted-impacted-my-...

Ah, well. Good times!
> If you clean up trash in your town, does that mean the trash that replaces it is worse?

Hopefully the new trash wont stink as much.
Same here. I simply cold not get fractional scaling working comfortably on X11 and that's why I've been on Wayland for years now.

The cases where fractional scaling doesn't work on Wayland are when you're running an app through XWayland. In those cases, I'd just find an alternative that works with Wayland. That's also what lead me to switch to Firefox full-time - Chromium's Wayland support lagged behind quite a bit.
Not the op, but I’ve found that Steam + proton is much slower on Wayland. It’s the one thing that makes me log into X every once in a while.
I will just leave these here:

https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

https://software-gunslinger.tumblr.com/post/47131406821/php-...
With Linux 5.17 S0ix maybe works:

https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Other-Linux-Discussions/Linux-S...

With Linux 5.17 AMD should provided also something similar to pstate, which should improve the things further:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-P-St...

But Lenovo is still struggling:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Lenovo-A...

I love ThinkPads. We've four in the family. Reasons:

* Haptic feedback of keyboard
* TrackPoint
* Maintenance Manual and spare part available for at least five years (ten would be better)
* Linux Support and Certification

Sadly the blog reflects some of my findings, I'm using myself an X220 with Linux. I want to buy a new one but Lenovo makes it hard. The old seven row keyboard has a better layout, RJ45 is available, a nice palmrest, the battery is replaceable and the main-memory not soldered. Right when four core CPUs where available, Lenovo decided to remove the card-slot on the side and the RJ45. Luckily there are some improvements, they put a gap between [HOME, END, INSERT, DELETE] on the six row keyboard, X13 Gen2 finally provides a 16:10 display again (Wohoo!) and it is more sturdy then the X220. And finally decent AMD-Models are available.

Lenovo seems to follow the bad industry pratices from other manufacturers instead of looking closely why ThinkPads are superior. Internal batteries, solder main-memory, awkwardly placed card-slots, missing RJ45 are problems. They keyboard is still the top of the industry and more comfortable than many desktop keyboards, because of the precise haptic feedback and concave shaped key-caps. The substandard keyboard from Apple on the other side does provides only flat (cheap?) key-caps, no TrackPoint and has a lot of longstanding quality issues.

I'm also happily using and ThinkPad T14 Gen 1 AMD here with Linux. But from systems certificed for usage with Linux I expect more. I therefore also blame the lax requirements of Red Had and Lenovo. IBM (Red Hat), how about enforcing actual good support by Lenovo? I'm aware that all of that awkward, specially patched drivers on Windows are actually workarounds. And Microsoft enforce the sticker/label program. Maybe the complete industry should question there quality standards. I think most of power-management shall not be the duty of the operating-system but the firmware. Broken ACPI-Tables should thing of the past.

I've some Lenovo representative is reading. Most customers wont' tell you why the bought your product. But in long term the will notice the things. The will buy again if it was good. They won't tell you "keyboard has feature x" and "card-slot is placed nicely", they will just like it or not. And the server stats of ThinkVantage will most of the time not tell you anything about the Linux-Users. Most of the time not even for Windows within company networks. It is quality what make a company running for decades and not hoping on the the next industry trend.
This never worked for me. But I agree, there's no reason this functionality couldn't be implemented as an extension protocol to Wayland.
Are there any valid use-cases? For any suggestion I've heard, it always seems that a relational database or PKI would be better.
Fedora defaults to Wayland, and telemetry is opt in.
El Salvador revamps Bitcoin wallet after complaints of theft and fraud
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. Not that the analysis is flawless as there are many critics. The reason to read the book is to understand the how and why different societies have evolved and why there was a massive difference between Western Europe and other parts of the world. From geological impediments to the evolution of the large animals in the region (zebras are quite skittish and harder to tame/ride than horses), the environment is a major contributing factor to these civilizations development.
Are we talking about facebook or tiktok here?
Pretty uncommon at tech companies, but it's entirely based on the company's policy. The company can fire you at any time (as long as it's not one of several specific bad reasons like racial discrimination), but it's the company that employs you, not your manager. So only the company can fire you.

Generally big tech companies don't give your manager the authority to blindly fire you, but only because that's a decision the company made.
Have you done that? How are you so certain?
I think there's problem but it's elsewhere. Sure it's a single file, yes. However in order to run it you need a php interpreter, which I for example, do not have installed and an internet connection. But that would go for just about every scripting language in one form or another. Sure, just about every linux distribution has python for instance and same goes for macos afaik. This isn't the case for windows however(again afaik). Package it into a single binary file and I'd be all up for it: I do love AppImages.
Side note; The CEO of Aterian ($ATER) has tweeted about preliminary data of naked shorts and that they hired a third party company to fight this.

https://twitter.com/yaniv_sarig/status/1455515851541598208

https://twitter.com/yaniv_sarig/status/1448716392656670722
spent 4 decades programming, and everything changes all the time

A half-aged kid here. This is the source of my anxiety, that all I’ve done and learned will age, slip through fingers and become forgotten. I wish our craft could stabilize on something, but it just doesn’t.
Seeing the recent advances in biotech, we might not be that far off from money growing on trees.
> Does anyone have any examples of any other single-file app with a comprehensive interface like Files app that is entirely self-contained?

phpLiteAdmin (https://github.com/phpLiteAdmin/pla) is developed as separate PHP, JS, and CSS files. A "build" script merges all into a single PHP script, which includes compressed resources inlined after a call to `__halt_compiler()`. The same code can run as separate files, or as a single one.

I wrote the original "build", years ago, as we started extracting classes out of a procedural single file.

[edit] Link to the interesting bit: https://github.com/phpLiteAdmin/pla/blob/master/phpliteadmin...
Everyone always harps on the whole white male property owners thing but it misses the entire point.

It's probably more productive to think about it in terms of "the usual people who were given a voice back then, but only the subset of them who couldn't f-off without leaving behind a ton of their wealth if things went bad."

In effect they limited voting to people who had settled down and had substantial skin in the game.

Why did they do this?
It runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/dotnet/what-is-dotn...
> no one will be able to verify

Except the Credit Card Firm, my bank, and the artists bank. All of which are required, by law, to keep records.

And of course the entire transaction is a simple buyers contract, thus making it legally binding and enforceable.

So if the artist tries to go back on the agreement, he can be sued. If he claims he never received funds, the court orders the banks to hand over the records.
Building Car Dependency: The Tarmac Suburbs of the Future
Framework's modular laptop has been well received. They are working on a LAN module, https://community.frame.work/t/what-about-an-rj45-ethernet-p... & https://frame.work

Another option is to upgrade the motherboard and/or LCD in an older Thinkpad chassis.

Right-to-repair legislation is slowly progressing in the US.
What a naive piece.

No exploration of the underlying technology, just "he said, she said".

I'm not even angry. I'm just sad that I have to watch my friends lose a lot of money on obvious scams.
Thank you for the recommendation.

Please don't think it's irrelevant.

I will read it tonight after work.
Not by calling VirtualAlloc and friends, though. At least that part of the code has to be rewritten per platform.
It's not just looks - newer keys likely use less plastic, because the market is inevitably obsessed with cost-shaving. Less plastic -> increased fragility -> more faults.
>> My hatred is based on failing projects, missed deadlines, burnouts, money stolen, severe downtime, and companies going bankrupt.

One can find example of this in almost all the languages. Most of the time mismanaged requirements, bad project planing, bad financial management are the issues for most of the things you have listed rather than the choice of programming language.
It's not invalid in the least, I've just not seen it make the impact I thought it would, it didn't become the ambient computing device it was somewhat set up to be.

I'm not against it at all, it just seem to me that all the initial trouble are still there, the lack of tactility, the lack of good input (maybe the apple pen and s-pens are a move in the right direction, but the problem remains largely unsolved).
I assume then that you disqualify Python for the same reason?

Python 3.x has decided that breaking changes in minor releases is fine. My favourite: string prefixes (eg s'foo', u'foo') were legal in 2.x, removed in 3.0, added back in 3.3. There are other subtle breakages (eg open() flags).

Hating on PHP is a tired cliche at this point.
Do your homework before ordering that battery, there is a ton of trash out there that is unsafe to use. Make sure there are quality cells in there (Samsung, Sanyo, LG) and that the original BMS is in there with all of the protections enabled. This is not something you want to take any chances with, and aftermarket counterfeit batteries with incredibly dangerous guts abound.
Blockchain is really just an accounting system.

So ignore blockchain; take it out of the picture, and what do you have left with crypto?

People inventing/printing an endless supply of money for their own benefit. In what way is this *not* a scam?

But, but, but central banks do the same? Yes, they do --- but with a very different purpose and understanding. They try to maximize the positive effects on the entire, overall economy --- realizing this is the best way to maximize their own. If they fail in this, they can be replaced. Checks and balances.

"Digital" currency is a good idea that can and will eventually happen. But "crypto" currency is really just a system of misguided and misplaced trust --- you trust that unregulated "exchanges" are fair and honest and reasonable and acting in the public interest without any checks and balances.

And if they are not, you have no recourse.
My brother (1 year my junior) and I did exactly this!
> Fortunately, though, there are solutions to each of these problems, and the solutions have been formulated by extremely smart, tech-adjacent people. For their ideas to become realities, they merely need to be articulated and spread as widely as possible.

This doesn't seem right. The Gates Foundation funnels billions into research. I think there are people who think that them complaining is what changes things, and perhaps that does need addressing, but personally I've observed that less from the extremely smart, tech-adjacent crowd.
Why should a Linux user care whether the display uses X11 or Wayland?

Is there a summary somewhere that explains why, or if, it would benefit me to put any effort into switching?
Gnome supports those independently of Wayland. Wayland itself sadly deems those and other essential features out-of-scope.
I almost always welcome such initiatives because the new team member brings a fresh perspective and is unencumbered by our existing knowledge. And they don't have that many responsibilities yet, thus they can focus on the code itself. But good test coverage and thorough reviews are necessary to do this.
Wayland is the new IPv6
I think the UN is already doing way too much. I don't want to live in a world where the concept of trust is nullified in the name of equality.

I decide who I want to welcome in my home. I believe Thailand, Russia, Brazil, Germany are completely free to do the same and fix their own rules.
You can make Duplo blocks. I printed some nice adapters that let you build a bridge for wooden Brio railroad tracks, with Duplo stands. And it think you could make specialty parts, like it excavator arms. But for regular Lego pieces, printing is too expensive and not accurate enough (don't know about resin, but I can imagine it is not flexible enough or too toxic?).

What's really holding us back is copyright. I wish there were high quality Ninjago or especially Star Wars clones.
The supporter could ask bank to mail him a receipt from the transfer. And then show this transfer or have it notarized in most extreme case. Thus proofing he made it. We already have solutions for this.

And then there are court system to be involved if the artist were to commit fraud in this case and for example not provide services. Maybe even discrimination case.
Apologies for arguing the analogy, but the Benjamin Button car buyer would lose horsepower and weight (=safety and convenience features) to continue to make mandated fuel economy standards. You could buy a 50 mpg CRX HF from Honda over 30 years ago, but you'd probably be very unhappy with its performance today.

Small relative increases in fuel economy don't save you that much money, either
> Smart contracts offer revolutionary new to transact gloablly.

They certainly do that.
* duct-tape style of arrays that Just Work(tm) as arrays, hash maps, etc. without having to use any boilerplate code.

It's the main reason why I still prefer PHP for quick&dirty scripting and data processing.
Ok, that's interesting to hear. The december update really did seem to be a big screwup. Hopefully they will learn some lessons for the QA processes.

I think I'm going to keep my current phone going until the iPhone 14 and Pixel 7 are out. I think it's got about another year before the battery doesn't last the day and it's _fine_ most of the time. I'm hoping that once Google get comfortable with their new architecture that they start extending the guarenteed support period, which is one of the big things pushing me towards an iPhone.

I'm also not sure about the size of the 6, I'm hoping they expand the range a bit and produce a smaller one at some point.
I think the hope of Bitcoin is for countries where regulation and corruption impact one's ability to transfer and manage their money through banks, they have a separate, isolated system not vulnerable to that.

But cryptocurrency doesn't fix this, it just pretends to by throwing everything out of the window. I think what would ultimately work is a global 'bank' that implements all the safeguards the current system has without governments being able to touch them. That means it has to work within their legal frameworks, but also have high integrity and security to avoid the corruption... Which is probably fanciful, much like the idea crypto will fix it.
The Apple Aluminum Keyboard is pretty silent.
All five characters of the Lego Friends line are female.
Show HN: Turn a Notion page into a website (in 10 SEC)
But how will the corporate elites bribe people into compliance with their agenda without crypto?
Case Studies: Issues with Consumer-Driven Contract Testing?
Ask HN: Does your company's Reward and Recognition program work for you?
Is it just me or does the letter from 1974 look like it was typeset in Microsoft Word?
#2: Strict Programming lang's. I often seen frustrate new programmers, specially young new programmers making them want to give up on programming all together so I don't know if I would call that beginner friendly, I certainly would not call rust beginner friendly

I guess however we would need to define what a "beginner" target is, are we talking adults that want to learn programmed to change fields, or children wanting to inspire them to peruse programming as a career, or someone between the 2 groups
> Using NFTs for decentralized identity and authn is big.

Tell me more? What problem does this solve that you can't do with centralized auth?