skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think your post is key. I would be interested in anyone posting what they think is an economically viable path to challenging Google. Pretty much the one company that has done it at scale (Microsoft) isn't exactly eating Google's lunch (though I think there are a few areas that Bing is better).

It would just take at astronomical amount of capital to challenge Google at generic Internet search, and the few organizations with that capital are pretty clear they don't think it's a good bet. For example, Amazon is quite content just being the place you want to go to first for the things you want to buy, as that is obviously the most lucrative area.

Even in niche areas, I think it's still an enormous task to challenge Google. Despite the fact that 90% of my searches for "WTF does this stacktrace mean?" end up on StackOverflow, I invariably start my search on Google because every now and then it gives me useful non-StackOverflow tidbits, and I know I can always drill in more with specific tags on StackOverflow later.
I'm pretty sure that historically shell is the common influence of PHP, Perl, and Tcl.

PHP also inherits shell's here doc syntax, e.g. <<EOF . Not sure if Perl has that.

Actually PHP started out as a bunch of cgi-bin scripts, if I recall. It was very much "a shell for the web".

It kind of annoys me that they all require $ on the left, whereas shell only requires it on the right, which somehow makes more sense to me, e.g.

a=$b # shell

$a = $b # PHP and I think Perl
You can't implement an outer join with a cross product.
There is evidence that single generation evolution can happen with strong enough shocks. Nothing immediately obvious, just detectable DNA changes that lead to changes in risk for certain conditions.

https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/21/study-of-hol...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96verkalix_study
One thing that irks me with this era is the conflation of "North-America" with "the World". Records, tournaments, and championships were only announced, solicited, and held across USA+Canada, in English.

The same can be observed in the referenced "King of Kong" documentary, the "Nintendo World Championships" (organized only in NA by Nintendo of America), and the "Classic Tetris World Championship".

They should just call it for what it was: North-American records.
To create a script/bot/application/whatever that can access all potential data, you have to give something read privileges to possibly hundreds of backend systems and products. This is horrendously bad idea security wise. If that service account gets compromised (either from an external or internal threat), you have a single account that has access to everything Amazon stores. This is bad for the company and bad for its customers.

There necessarily have to be multiple workflows to maintain the data segregation necessary to protect data at the scale we're talking with Amazon.

And assuming you could securely create this automated workflow, you'd still need a person manually verifying the end result to ensure that all the data scraped is in fact owned by the person who made the request. Within the past couple of years, there was a news story where someone got a different person's Alexa data after asking Amazon for their own data. That can't happen again.
I can really recommend playing through Half Life 2 Lost Coast with the Developer Commentary enabled.
Stupidest thing I heard this week.
I’m more of an anti-Facebook bias person myself
I have to mention that the silver/gold standard was introduced by many authoritarian rulers because they control the gold/silver mines. This includes the Roman empire. As the supply of precious is limited it concentrates at the top and this was very desirable for monarchies.

The only way to get gold is to dig it out (mines owned by monarchs), borrow it with interest (which leads to the usual debt trap) or to sell your products and services to those who already have gold (which is heavily concentrated geographically and in the hands of the rich).

If it is mandated that you must use a certain currency, then this automatically leads to a power imbalance between those who have money and those who don't. If you need to buy food or pay for shelter then you can't wait, but the rich have all their basic needs met, they can afford to wait until you are desperate to accept any offer. This is why Austrian economists are kind of right when it comes to competition among currencies. A terrible currency can ruin an economy. However, they still insist on the gold standard because they love playing the monarchy game, they even admit it themselves.

Even in modern times the rich benefit from economic crashes because it means desperation and fire sales, in other words, discounts for those who already have more than they need for themselves.
That's like saying "the answer is not to use Android or Apple". Pretty naive.
Could not agree more. Not only that, would be willing to pay, for a domain specific, high quality, ad free search engine. In the same range of prices of a Netflix or Amazon Prime subscription.
If anyone needs a fix of Portal related content and hasn't yet played Portal: Prelude I can't recommend it highly enough. It's been a while (10+ years, oof I'm old now) since I've played it so take my gushing with a grain of salt, but I recall it being well written, not enough to rival Portal, but perhaps enough to rival Portal 2. The puzzles however were the most fun of any portal based game I'd ever played.
The Named Parameters [0] are useful but there are editors that solves the problem in another way. Write a function with a docblock [1] on top of it and then mouse over the function call and it shows you the documentation of the function with every parameters use. Or start typing the function name and autocomplete fills in the rest with parameter names and show the docblock above. Saves my sanity many times per day.

[0] https://dnlytras.com/blog/modern-php/#Named-parameters

[1] https://docs.phpdoc.org/latest/guide/guides/docblocks.html
Ruby also has $ for global variables, which I assume it also got via Perl. And @ for instance variables, and @@ for class variables.
Worst idea ever.

Accurate information about Russia helps everyone, not just Russia, and removing it hurts everyone.
I am using kivy for a small project. Works pretty well for me.

https://kivy.org/
Some registries have a feature called “Registry lock”. This means that a domain cannot be transferred to another registrar without a lot of work to unlock it first.
That's amusing that SwissMicros branched off the work of Free42, a free (as in beer) reproduction of the HP-42S calculator.

https://github.com/swissmicros/free42

The author created and continues to support a build of Free42 for iOS, completely free. It's one of the most useful apps on my phone. My real 42S stays safe on a shelf.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/free42/id337692629
One thing I noticed about my 46" LG 4K monitor, which was "cheap" at $600-ish (edit: looked it up: $720) 3-4 years ago, is that it really isn't designed for viewing at desk distances. On my desk, as far back as it'll go, the viewing angle puts the backlight not exactly behind the pixels, so the left/right have 4-6 pixels and the bottom has ~10-15 pixels that are unlit.

I use it for a bunch of terminals, so part of the left column of text and the entire bottom line, or my status bar, were unreadable. Thankfully my window manager had an unsupported feature that let me "pretend" that those areas didn't exist.

So what I learned is that TV-oriented panels aren't just directly usable on the desktop.

However, I was more recently able to pick up a couple 32" Dell 4K displays for $300-ish each, and they are glorious! That was on a big year-end sale.
I relaunched Portal 2 recently (on the Steam Deck) and the game is as gorgeous as it used to be. It could be a game released today and nobody would notice anything. And this game can run on any nowadays potato.
> police, jails and armies to control human

Yes

> organizations

Extremely rarely relative to their power, and relative to control over individuals.
There is some regulation, and an occasional war to shatter a regime.
It’s hard to untangle the negative aspects from the war on drugs itself. If such substances were integrated into the community in a healthy way it wouldn’t push people into the fringe and into prison.
> Or I guess it’s also like comparing Hemingway to Joyce. Clearly Joyce is on another level as a writer and I enjoy him very much.

Who’s better: the engineer who writes a great program in 10,000 lines of code. Or an engineer that writes a different great program in 1000 lines?

Brevity doesn’t imply less skill. One might argue that Hemingway is “on another level” because he did more with less. Joyce left little to the imagination whilst Hemingway left almost everything to the imagination. Hemingway used white space as a feature.

But then again, here we are, discussing taste — which makes your point. I love a good Hemingway vs Joyce debate. Great fun, thanks for your thoughts.
I am not an astronomer, but it's real good to help you name the stars you see above where you live. It's fun to do that with kids. Free software at its best !
This is a) ten years old, b) fairly out of date, and c) much more passive-aggressive and opinionated than people sharing it seem to think it is.

I mean, in the "stances", just as an example -- "a language must be concise"?

Really? It must? I think this is inappropriately assertive. IMO the better JS I have seen has avoided some of the more unnecessary conciseness. And that is before we discuss the worst example of "conciseness" thinking in a generation: JSX.

PHP and its community is, if you want a different opinion, more mature, more pragmatic and entirely less screwed up than Node.js, which is, to borrow the terminology, a fractal of indiscipline.

PHP's developers and its wider community have gone about fixing problems while NPM just seems to create new ones.

(The author of that post is in fact a Python fan, which makes it even more chucklesome when looked at over a ten-year timescale. One of the two languages managed to bring developers along for that whole decade with a campaign of carefully planned major improvements and deprecations, without causing major schisms, and it wasn't Python.)
This reminds me of a vivid dream I had in university, where the room I programmed in had source code displayed on the floor and I could scroll or walk around and browse it. The listing on the floor had that wide green-and-white band printer 'paper' look. Don't remember if it went all skeuomorphic with rendered perforated edges and holes. It also had other printer type things that were just sitting there not printing at the time. And for a reason I never understood there was a large pixelated volumetric figure of my housemate Bill also in the room like a 3/4 life-size Lego figure. As I interpreted it at the time, I didn't think the figure was generated in real-time as to be able to instantly into something else. It didn't feel virtual, and augmented reality wasn't a concept at the time. I suppose in theory it could be fully rendered in roomscale VR if my hands and arms looked and moved accurately enough.
Aside, but I hate ligatures in code. If I didn't know what they were, I would have no idea what the blog's representation of a fat arrow => or a triple equals were. As it is, I still have to translate them before I fully get it.
This dead horse again?
To hide all Russian achievements as a penalty for the war and to provide yet another incentive for Russia to end the war sooner..
> We pay them exorbitant costs so that they don't make these mistakes.

The problem with this approach is that, repeated by hundreds of companies at scale, paints such a massive target on the vendor, that a breach becomes fundamentally inevitable.

I expect this sort of thing happens to all big auth providers, from AWS to Google; it's just dealt with more efficiently and discreetly.
All this without discussion of how they’re pronounced?!
Gradle also has the ability to skip things it has already done. It won't recompile code that hasn't changed, won't run tests that haven't changed, etc
The Beatles were obsessed with Pet Sounds. Sgt. Pepper was their response to it.
Fair enough on the distinction between paid advertising and their own YouTube ad pieces. I don't see how this channel is "BS" as the OP's accusation, but I take your point on it being advertising.
People don’t seem to realize how good Google is in regional results. I live in a European country and every other search engine I’ve tried in the past is lacking when searching for local content. I can search for news articles that date back two decades in Google and get results.
It's not just papering over cracks, though. (There's a bit of that, but they do try to avoid it)

It's a slow, deliberative process to properly fix the most widely deployed server-side web programming language. It's not going to be easy, and it is being done by fairly wise heads.
Having tried multiple sizes and resolutions, personally I've found 27" 2560x1440 (2K) to be the sweet spot for desktop computing and gaming.

Very happy with https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B08LCNWQWL
Biggest gripe for me with the curved displays is that 1440px in height is not really that much. Kinda blurry when one's used to a 4k display with 2160px over the same vertical distance.
What would a competitor need to defy Google? – A billion users who have not already chosen a search engine.

I slightly better experience should get a larger portion of new users, but existing users do not say "Today I will develop a methodology to conduct a survey of internet search engines and select the best one for me."

At this point everyone has either chosen a search engine or had one chosen for them.
I've never used i3 but have been intrigued for ages. I'm finding myself more and more "faking" a tiling window system on my work Mac. I generally open a separate zsh/tmux session in a vscode pane for each workspace, which works great. I'm now also adding a split window to the left for note taking, initially Gdocs but more recently just another vscode window for markdown files. I merge all my other coding workspaces into one window on the right, so I can have the same notes on the left but switch projects on the right with ease.

Curious if something like yabai would be even better but just haven't made the time to try it.
firejail is also super super insecure: https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-1619.... the vast majority of these are trivial bypasses, like "what happens if i mount over /etc/shadow". everyone that can access firejail has a one-inch wall between them and full root access. by default, installing firejail gives everyone on the system access, so installing firejail is basically the closest thing to making everybody root unless you manually configure it to only allow certain users access.
I agree. I'm still "pre-money" in my start-up, so not making money at the moment, but I always have an agenda of things I want to accomplish to move the ball forward. Under these conditions, if anything else gets done outside of my agenda, it's got to be scheduled. It does seem off-putting to some people. For instance, I volunteer at some community groups, and people I meet there can sometimes make the assumption that I'm being stand-offish when I whip out a schedule on my smartphone just to have a short chat or to do a volunteer task, especially since it seems to them like I'm "not working". I just have a lot of competing priorities and have learned that I must be true to my own goals first, or risk losing sight of those goals.
True, and the ridiculously easy process to accidentally sign up for a subscription to each of your smallest of purchases.
jQuery's $ and lodash's _ are not prepended to a symbol to denote a variable. Both are objects actually. In the case of jQuery, $ === jQuery (the root jQuery object). The case that the parent is talking about is PHP's requirement that all variables are denoted as such `$variable_name`. (Perl and Bash also do this)
Exactly. Okta has given absolutely zero indication that they will notify us next time they have a security event, either.
That feels like an untenable solution, it wouldn't take much to create a denial of service...
Not just on this project, but I've seen a few more not moving past 3.8 for support and I don't quite get why that's been happening. Did something happen on 3.9 or later that didn't caught my eye?
What really undermines that necessity is this whole thing of having new developers "hit the ground running", meaning they're not just given light tasks for the first few months to help them understand the codebase and philosophy, but full blown important tasks with deadlines. I've had this happen to me more than once and I think it kind of acts to gaslight the new developer into initially thinking that the problem is them and not the codebase. Although I made it through building out a context menu UI from scratch as a first task on a previous project I was hired on to, that probably wasn't the best thing for that reason.

I get that new devs need a mindset to understand the existing approaches, but tossing them right into the middle of the foray actually makes things worse.

And yeah, teams need to be able to respect and respond to the frustrations of new developers. If a new developer, especially a senior developer, needs hours or days and multiple approvals to do something as simple as change a string, for instance, something is seriously wrong and you need to actually re-evaluate what everyone is doing.

Yes, I've experienced that exact phenomenon, and it's amazing how little people are concerned by that kind of thing. I'm not the greatest programmer in the world by any means, but I know how to change a string and when a design is ridiculously inefficient. Yes, there was a project I was on-boarded to where one of the tasks was changing how a string appeared in the UI; it turned out there was a shared library carrying the target string, but it wasn't exactly obvious that was where the string was coming from, and multiple other projects were using that library and so the review process needed to apply to all projects involved. For some reason, although a role was delegated to deploying the app itself, it's up to individual devs to build the library and register it as an NPM package, and there was a tight protocol around. Because of the toolchain, the library was not easy to test with an app locally. So it ended up that changing a string could take several hours or even days, especially if someone wanted to squeeze in another string change into that same task.

As a developer who just joined a team, what are you really supposed to do? Just plow through believing that there's a good reason for the madness?

Maybe the existing approach is actually bad.
Parent may have been referring told older Visual Studio versions, back before MS web-ified it into a slow pile of garbage.
Thanks! That's my mind blown, then :) I can believe that the volume is low enough that manual work is acceptable, but even then I'd have thought that you'd want things entirely automated to eliminate the chance of human error.
I'll present a different data point. I also used to like multiple monitor setups, using up to three monitors. And then I realized that I'd much rather have a single good quality screen, because there is less fussing around with things. A 27" iMac 5k screen got me enough screen real estate to be happy.

These days I am looking for single-monitor solutions, at 27" — anything larger and you need to turn your head.

(incidentally, 5K vs 4K makes a huge practical difference for me: in my full-screen Emacs I can comfortably fit three columns of code on a 5K screen, but on 4K this is problematic)
I’m applauding the article to give you this tldr right away as its subtitle.

They could provide a cheat sheet?
But it doesn’t even seem likely to work on non Apple apps, so is it really worth knowing?

If all apps had to use the same UI toolkit, that would be much more consistent!
llvm/clang does not cross-compile "without a lot of problems". See this post from Zig's creator: https://andrewkelley.me/post/zig-cc-powerful-drop-in-replace...

zig cc uses clang under the hood, and Zig the language is also mostly based on LLVM, but zig cc ships a lot of versions of libc to ensure that it can properly compile to all platforms without weird linker errors.
I'll take another stab at it.

OP's critique seems to be that TikTok caused engagement with their preferred content for a longer duration than desired. That's not an interesting distinction from what happened back in the day with people going down Wikipedia rabbit holes. "Digital crack" is hyperbole if all it means is spending longer on the topics one already likes.

My question: is the TikTok algo consistently steering users toward/away from categories of content they would have otherwise had an interest in consuming? E.g., are there pro-unionization users who accidentally spend 2 hours watching pro-unionization TikToks? Or is the recommendation engine steering those users to 2 hours of some less contentious category?
> really long SQL

Some systems generate really long SQL queries; I'm thinking of you, Drupal! I haven't worked with D8, and only a little with D7. But D6 would routinely produce SELECT queries with 20 tables joined.

Drupal is notorious for caching nearly everything, including the results of SQL queries, because those queries were essentially untunable (and the "cache" was usually yet another database table). "Flush all of the caches" was the first advice to anyone struggling with a D6 issue.
> trivially add extensions using CGI

Can you elaborate on this please?
We shall see whether that was BS or not. The unbreakable windows part, yeah probably a bit of BS, but it doesn't rise nearly to the level of what other car companies put out. I mean… VW…

And Mercedes promised self driving taxis "in three years from now" back in 2017 so… Tesla is not alone is delivering this later than expected.

https://www.wired.com/2017/04/mercedes-promises-self-driving...
https://youtu.be/3Kx-BGzyXH8
Ronja – Reasonable Optical Near Joint Access [pdf]
You mean this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Wilson_is_a_genius
> they do not have the resources to do that.

Good - the aim is for them to not store personal data in the first place, much less build business models that rely upon it. Rather than allowing the population to take on the negative externality of surveillance capitalism, it is absolutely right that the burden must fall on those creating the problem.

I don't see this as any different to the complain that small restaurants cannot afford to pay their workers - if they can't afford to comply, they can't afford to be in business at all. It's simply a margin problem.
> It kind of annoys me that they all require $ on the left, whereas shell only requires it on the right

Interesting - it makes it look like Bash uses $ to “read” from the variable, while in PHP/Perl $ only indicates that the rest of the symbol _is_ a variable.
A human on a bicycle is only more efficient than a wildebeest if the course being traveled is paved. If you had to bike the path a wildebeest roams you might not make it.
> each and every point in an article just feels "fabricated" or over the top.

What I thought were valid points from the article:

- Unclear data: "cryptic strings of numbers like '26,444,740,832,600,000” for various search queries." This is easily the worst offender IMO.

- A wait time of 19 days

- Separating the download into 74 buttons
I heartily agree. Ligature fonts and the word "performant" belong in the same circular filing cabinet, marked "not as clever as it seems".
DDG also lost the plot when they started censoring results based on geopolitical opinion.
Me as a kid discovering Wipeout soundtrack was truly mind-bending: Photek, Future Sound of London, Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk, Orbital and so many other gems in one go. It was overwhelmingly cool!
Back to the original argument of this article: it does feel sometimes that there are as many stars in that patch as stupidity in our human friends in the current world we live in. Sigh.