skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I've been a "geek" since I joined IBM in 1967, I've been primarily a writer for at least 35 years. In that time, I've used Wordstar, WordPerfect, literally every flavour of MS Word up to 2011, vi, iTerm and emacs.

I've converted files of one format to another to another to another, and finally to ASCII text and that is that. No more orphaning as one or another company goes out of business or decides to update their file format.

My editor now is Emacs and, depending on who/what I'm writing for I use plain text, or org or md if I need to include basic formatting. I've published enough to know that I'm a wordsmith, not an artist and going beyond basic formatting is a job for a typographic artist, which I'm not.

I know that makes me a grumpy old fart, as does my refusal to rely on The Cloud (i.e., Somebody Else's Computer) for backups, and so be it. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice (or more), shame on me.
Right I didn’t think about before the internet, but yeah at that time developers were even more subject to distributor’s approval (and cut)!
Prothonotary warbler? At least it's not red.
Amazon's sprawling grocery business has become an 'expensive hobby'
This is a question I want to ask every time I see an ember post; Who uses ember?
Friendly inflation reminder: 50k in, say, 1950 dollars is roughly equivalent to 500k today. But of course one can argue that QoL improvements like you mention are exactly what makes up (some part of) inflation.
Can you share some examples of atrocities CNN has committed that are of the same vein as Nazi Germany and North Korea?
> public transport in general should never be run on a for profit basis

Japan seems to do fine [1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Japan
Isn't it the fate of all programming languages? they start on clean foundation, only to evolve in a bazaar of features.
Maybe something to do with creative control/strings attached/freedom from studio accounting practices?
The tipping point was NASA dropping out of openstack to sign a contract with AWS.

You should checkout Azure presentations from 2012 to find out how nobody saw the "cloud" coming.

Kubernetes was a very effective strategy to make AWS knowledge irrelevant by providing a layer on top/alternative interface and it succeeded. Obviously AWS consultants would hate it for it.
>Capitalism has provided the best outcomes for the most people around the whole world. It’s not utopia but it’s the best we have right now.

Absolutely, that doesn't mean it's great in all forms though. The South's antebellum economic system was capitalist too. The US system can certainly improve.

>It sounds like you’re insinuating that our current economic system is akin to getting lashes for not picking cotton.

The lash and the cotton (mostly) is different, sure.
I think that is not a universally agreed upon statement. Checking my receipts, at that time I paid significant money to 3rd parties to sync my iPods to PC without iTunes. It was massively over bloated for what I needed it to do, UI was behind, and once installed it refused to uninstall itself.

(and same continues today. My wife has recognized the sound coming from my office when, every few months , I try to copy photos from my work-mandated iPhone to my windows pc. It's a few hours of screaming, then I give up)

It's tricky. If they don't provide key software for Windows to work with their hardware devices, they'll be blamed for it and called an evil proprietary company (which, fair enough. Just let me plug it as USB storage if you want to avoid that particular reputation :).

On the other hand, if they make their crucial software on Windows half assed, some people like myself at least, will be wary of touching anything Apple with 10ft pole. It May be that working strictly in Apple ecosystem makes for better experience, but that's not my world so I'm not tempted to dip my toes in any more than I have to).
sure, there are companies that stay on Oracle, and Oracle the company isn't going away any time soon. But other companies that were on Oracle have moved/are moving away to other enterprise-palatable services (e.g. AWS), and new companies rarely pick Oracle.

Self-hosting is certainly not the only choice nowadays, there are many other companies offering managed databases/other cloud products.
Oh yes, I remember these times. I was already into multithreading with OS/2 and Windows NT, before the multi-core days. I remember my first dual-slot Pentium-II's and dual-socket Pentium-III's. The best feature was that you could actually multitask with Netscape/Mozilla open because it used 100% of one of the CPUs leaving one free for everything else.
I'd be a bit skeptical of that. Sounds more like a team under stress and lashing out when someone questions the direction they are going.

In any event though not good.
You can't compare making music and movies.

A talented person can make groundbreaking music using only a guitar or a piano. With a mac, a microphone, a midi-keyboard and enough skill, one person can produce professional level recordings. Technology is not the limiting factor, it has been available for decades.

Movies are different - they require so many more specialized skills and resources. You need actors, sets, lighting, music, sound design, costume design, a script etc. It is great the technology becomes more affordable, but putting your neighbor into a motion-capture suit will not make him a great actor and having Final Cut available on a mac will not make you into a talented movie editor.

Just compare the number of credits on you favorite piece of music compared to you favorite movie.
I agree that every large corporation that uses Oracle software has a unique license with Oracle.

And every one I’ve heard of considers Oracle a predatory vendor and they want to stop using them.

They do things like charging you per CPU to run Java and even though you only run it on four CPUs you theoretically could run it on your entire VMWare cluster so they charge you for 10,000 CPUs. Which is ridiculous so they’ll give you a unique license for their software and they’ll bundle it all together so it isn’t a la carte anymore so even if you stop using 40% of their software you pay the same amount.

Oracle’s business model seems to me to be to extract every nickel from their customers until they can figure out how to stop using their software. It’s why there are dozens of open source Java distributions now and it’s why things like MariaDB exist.
Hi HN. Our small and fully remote team is looking for a better way to quickly tap team members for spontaneous meetings throughout the day. We've tried several apps this year but everything has too much friction to join and little visibility.

I'm aware not all teams want to operate this way, but we miss the days when a startup could all in the same room and it was easy to "turn around" and interact with your team. Our team moves quickly and we prefer to discuss things in person to hash them out.

We've tried Google/Teams/Zoom and:

https://around.co

https://usenoor.com

https://presence.so

https://pop.com

https://tandem.chat

Is anyone actually using things like https://gather.town ?
It’s a classic solution-looking-for-a-problem. Async/await is perfectly fine for state reaction, and the learning curve for FRP is enormous, especially for something as straightforward as exponential backoff.

https://github.com/alex-okrushko/backoff-rxjs
I found “the old way” of doing things to be a mess. Despite building one of the first apps in the App Store, NSLayout just never became “second nature.”

Instead of the native app world, I stuck to web front ends and managed that awkward transition from jQuery to Angular to React. These models for UI made increasing amounts of sense — instead of fiddling with weird lines a slop gui, I could just tell the system what I want and get it!

Then SwiftUI came along, and lo, I get all the goodness of React in iOS and even MacOS! My first native app in years is coming along swimmingly, and it’s even cross platform!

(yes, I did do an app in React Native, and found it gross for reasons that I can’t put my finger on)
It depends on the OS/application. My accelerated A500 at 14Mhz is perfect for playing VIRUS, my accelerated A3000 at 25Mhz makes the game almost impossible to play. The A500 is too sluggish for PageStream and PageRender 3D. Both these machines are running SCSI HDDs, so even sequential disk access is a tad slow (ha) compared to what's common these days. But for a lot of things, even running on 35 year old hw, the classic AmigaOS runs just fine compared to Windows 10 on an i7 or XEON CPU, etc. And you really can't beat Autoconfig and Datatypes, and all the other brilliant efficiencies of the OS. How much of today's CPU/RAM/NIC/SSD performance is sucked up by in-your-face advertising and behind-your-back telemetry?
Around 1991

It was the first time the computer was not slowing my workflow. AutoCAD and Turbo Pascal running on a 80286 with a floating point coprocessor and a 50MB HDD.

Previous hardware/software stacks in 8086/Tandy/Osborne/PCjR... were not fast enough.
I tried to use iTunes in 2012(?). iTunes is the most confusing software I have ever used. Maybe it was good in 2009? I wouldn't know.
From the findings: The analysis of the chain of events directly leading to death revealed COVID-19 as the underlying cause of death in 86% of the autopsy cases, whereas in 14% COVID-19 was a concomitant disease. The most common immediate cause of death was diffuse alveolar damage, followed by multi-organ failure.

This means six out of seven died from Covid-19 and not just with it. That's a higher fraction than I would have expected.
True story: my local Chinese food joint's fortune cookies now contain ads for cryptocoin finance bs.
I guess my question is: why is this tolerated? Isn't it just simple harassment so management have to actually do something (even if they don't want to?)
For everyday usage, it's pretty simple and can be traced back to a moment in time: computers without SSDs are not 'fast enough', computers with SSDs are.

For programming, the 2 applications where computers aren't quite fast enough is compiling massive C++ projects and getting julia to first plot. I recently lept from having ~6 cores to having ~32 cores, and this has helped with the C++ but not really with julia - I think that's a programming issue.
> time-limited construction technique

To be fair, almost all buildings, especially residential, are time limited artefacts. Even if FLW knew some of his works would become protected heritage / conservative buildings, they're still private constructions without the budget scoped for institutional buildings designed to last 100+ years. My memory is FLW already had reputation for going over budget more often than not, there was never much resources dedicated to seriously evaluate longevity of the different building systems he was experimenting with.
Others have covered why/why not.

I propose learning Kotlin if you want something syntactically similar but with broader set of usecases or Rust if the lack of runtime with modern syntax is what is appealing to you.
Past threads on this:

H. G. Wells' 1934 interview with Stalin (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17054704 - May 2018 (52 comments)

H. G. Wells’ interview with Stalin (1934) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616566 - April 2014 (137 comments)

It doesn't seem to be possible for an open internet forum to have an intellectually interesting discussion about this kind of thing. The reflexive reactions are so intense that they simply overwhelm anything reflective (
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Intellectual curiosity can't survive that level of activation.
A supernova could light up Milky Way at any time. Astronomers will be watching
I think maybe you should refrain from passing judgement on people you've never even met.

The fucking internet, man, sometimes...
Do you knew him?

How is it possible that you catalog a person as a "sexual predator" without any proof?
Except that's not what I argue, at all. I have seen people in gaming who put in a lot less effort than I did, yet are far better. I've seen people adapt to new mechanics quickly. That's productive, in a way. I've also seen the opposite of that.

I never said that my own gameplay is the way to go though. Just that I observed people who put in less effort being better, and people put in more effort being worse. Its why I went with a more casual approach, which meant half of what was the standard as structured group play... except for one thing: they added M+ dungeons in that expansion, and that forced players to play more structured group play than raiding.

Also, there's this thing where you give up. There's no shame in such, either. Its just that you decide to not spend time trying. As the saying goes: Quitters never win. Winners never quit. But those who never quit, and never win, are losers.
I referenced 70 because I checked & that's the age at which you withdraw max social security benefits.

Looks like actual average in the US is ~64 y/o:

https://crr.bc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/IB_18-10.pdf

I would worry more about age-ism, but I earnestly see very few "senior" candidates period (i.e. >35 y/o+) at all.

It may speak to where I've worked, but I think it also speaks to how young the field still is.

Once engineers hit their 30s I think the job-hopping rapidly slows down.
There are more, see comment of sneak.
A lot of people knew, that he was a "problematic" guy. He was kicked out of a hackerspace in Berlin after he harassed a young girl. The fact that she is still affected by this incident after 10 years shows that this wasn't a minor issue.
You may be able to tell I am not much of a fan of FRP ;)

But to be fair, the comment you linked is not a prophecy it was a lamentation
I bought my boy a basic gamer rig in 2012. I'm using now it because I can do everything I need to do on it.
There are no applications I can think of where crypto-heating works, but a heat pump doesn't. Miners are a lot more difficult to deploy than a heat pump - they need an internet connection, they can break down, they will eventually need to be upgraded, etc..., whereas a heat pump is pretty much once-and-done, and you'll maintain it once every few years.

As for your second paragraph, will it ever be cheaper to do a computation twice independently than once in a trusted party? I'm sure there are a few situations where that's the case, but I struggle to think of them.
As a consumer I much prefer most app’s web version than polluting my phone with their native stuff.

The lack of notifications is actually one of the biggest reasons. Many app developers abuse notifications so much that I’d rather check uber eats tracking screen every 3 minutes than enable notifications for that app
The donations go to the Foundation (woke activism), not the Corporation (Firefox etc. development) anyway.
They're not. I have a 2017 Macbook Air and gmail frequently takes many seconds to display an email when I click to open it. I used to use Mozilla Thunderbird and emails loaded basically instantly. I encounter minor annoyances like this almost every time I use a computer. Mostly I don't even consciously notice them anymore since these things happen so frequently, but if they magically disappeared I'm sure the change would feel incredible.
Intent? Someone who’s evil probably can’t be convinced what they are doing is harmful, since they did it out of greed and selfishness. Someone who’s just incompetent can get better.

Not that I think apple falls particularly in either category but there’s a difference, the ability to realize and change.
GW Basic
The interesting thing is that it's not a financial question of blame for the CTO, it's a reputation problem.

It's unlikely that even Oracle would pay to make someone whole after a data loss incident. But the reality is that the ability to blame Oracle or another black-box product from some vendor instead of your in-house instance of some open-source project (that no one outside of engineering has heard of) has real career-altering value to stakeholders. Maybe unjustified, but the effect exists nonetheless.
It’s really hard to understand what they are delivering from their home page.
> In a company as big as Apple do they not have procedures in place to stop this behaviour?

In my own experience… Apple is a large company, with a huge variety of teams with different accepted standards of conduct.

But the Swift language is also an open source project, so this is a pseudo-open dev community so I’m not sure if Apple’s internal corporate culture even has a strong hold over this mailing list and those WebEx meetings that probably include volunteers, not just Apple employees.
Idea:

Show me product price history over time. Period.

Seriously ; show me what this product cost over the last ~20 years.

Let me dig into data.

Period.
I agree - clumsy is a great way to describe their approach. In my many negative experiences with the review process, I never got the sense that there was evil intent. In the end, it's clear the business as a whole doesn't care about third-party developers - they fulfilled their goals of commoditizing their complements and rode that wave to enduring success.

I do wonder how many amazing products and companies never got started or failed because of their fickle and Kafkaesque review process and their 15-30% revenue cut. For me personally, I've had to nix several business ideas and product features because it was too dependent on Apple's whims.

But that's just Apple being Apple. What really blows my mind is how Google blindly followed Apple. Google could have carved out such a valuable market. No developer fees! Clear and consistent review process! No taking 30%! Instead they blindly walked into the ditch with Apple. Talk about a lack of vision...
2002 after the release of Windows XP
I want to be exited, I want to love the news they are considering moving in this direction… but I can’t because I’ve slowly internalised the reality that Apple would be the only company crazy enough to release a foldable all screen laptop that somehow didn’t support touchscreen operation. Like the touchscreen would only operate in the area of the virtual keyboard and trackpad… or something equally crazy.

I want a 12 inch iPad form factor running a touch capable macOS so damn much. But Apple seems genuinely allergic to touch on macOS.
I understand why Apple has a vested interest in maintaining control over the language. What I'm saying is that this puts Swift at a disadvantage in terms of broad adoption and the odds of the language surviving its creator leaving when compared to a language like Rust that has real community involvement and is perceived by everyone as more neutral.
> there's so much natural immunity in so many people that this particular concern is just laughable.
It sounds like glioblastoma multiforme maybe. Life expectancy used to be 6 months average post diagnosis...
That's what should have happened, if only to rule out that something bad is happening. Time is everything with stuff like this.
Last year, when I got a MacBook Air M1.
I cant tell if this is a joke. Have you ever looked at a production java codebase once
Afghan Veteran here, military experiences will vary.

Possible some people are having the issues this veteran is describing. Most military folks are taught, trained, and live “adapt and overcome” - even if they are never specifically told that.

I don’t know, anecdotally, any military people who always had the exact supplies, funding, and office space they were told they would have. The missions never go as planned, and sometimes you don’t even have food.

My point is, veterans coming home after a deployment have other mental health issues that perhaps are aggravated by lack of control. The entire military experience is a lack of control.

Perhaps it bothers some more than others, but veterans returning from war aren’t really 75 year old “get off my lawn” Vietnam vets, usually.
You snuck the word negligent in there
Computers felt pretty fast for me around 2010-2014 era.

That's around the time when quad-cores become cheap/ubiquitous, SSDs were a huge performance improvement and Windows was in its good era (W7/W8.1) and wasn't a dumbed down yet bloated tablet OS that we have now.

Also, our ISP was doing multiple free speed upgrades and we went from 25/25 to 100/100 while paying the same amount.
In enterprise Java code is filled annotations from some random half-assed framework. While talking to developers I feel they think annotations automatically reduce code. E.g @Validation annotation somehow magically validate input data whereas right in front of their eyes code is still if/else conditions and strings manipulations.

Of course one can't make them understand as they are just following "best practices" enforced at employers.
SMT (currently) provides the telemetry for NASCAR, including 100Hz GPS location data, and those are regularly going >190mph at super speedways. It's not typically erratic but it works very well in any case.
Russia Will Recognize 2 Separatist Regions in Ukraine, Kremlin Says
Yep, Google completely ignored why platforms like the PC beat the Macintosh to begin with
Japan is a special case in many ways.
Not just medieval. that practice continued in the 1800s, up until photography. The rich would hire a painter to do everything, but those with less wealth - or the more frugal rich - would hire a painter to just do the face and hands. Hands are important, not just the face. Everything else about the body is covered by clothing (notice long sleeves - avoids having to paint the arms), and so can be done in a more convenient location. I wouldn't be surprised if the practice predates writing as is is really obvious and some people have more a talent for painting.

In Iowa painters would spend all winter (when snow made it hard to get around) painting bodies. then in summer when getting around was easy they would travel around, whenever someone hired them for a picture they would select a pre-painted portrait and add the face and hands. In the Iowa governors mansion there is such a picture where the guides point out the the boy in some picture was holding a club (probably for croquette) in an impossible way because the club was already in the picture. (the picture is from the second owner of the mansion, long before the state bought it)
Smart people recognize that the base premise is simply unworkable.

The idea that anyone can create money out of electrons is really no better than the idea that anyone can create money out of paper. There is no real reason to believe the first will be any more successful than the second.

There are close to 10,000 different cryptocurrencies currently in use. And the number is increasing all the time. You don't have to be really smart to see that over time, these are all likely to tend toward the same value. The essential elements that will seal their fate --- trust and consensus --- or the lack thereof.

The part of the idea that does have some merit is "digital" currency. The Fed is working on it. And when it arrives, crypto will likely vanish back into the electronic ether from whence it sprang.
Hope RISC-V will displace 8051 over time. It's such an absurd thing to extend this architecture in myriad non-interoperable (although backwards-compatible with OG 8051) ways. And don't forget about the XRAM nonsense. Yuck.
Just this weekend I needed to run both a FreeDOS and Linux ISO in order to reflash the Dell PERC in an R520 to support IT mode to use it with ZFS. I wondered the same thing - why can't it all be done from Linux - and found this recent issue where the maintainer says it just doesn't seem to be possible: https://github.com/Fohdeesha/lab-docu/issues/18