skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a gap between developer culture and the giant corporate bureaucracies.

The former is focussed on tinkering, nostalgia, tool-building, wheel reinventions, and half-finished build-and-forget spare time projects.

The latter has successfully applied high-friction chokeholds around startup culture which makes the cost of entry for new business ideas far higher than it really needs to be.

There is almost no blue sky development equivalent to the original Internet, the Mother of All Demos, and the desktop computing model - and associated projects - created at PARC in the 70s and early 80s.

It's all very "mature", incremental, slow, and me-too.

And so expensive, both financially and in terms of developer time.

I'd love to see a renewed interest in attacking this from both ends - a movement to really push the imaginative limits of what's possible, while also being implacably humane and user-oriented and indifferent to ad tech, tinker tech, and pre-commercialised cloud tech.
It seems that sometimes the push is external. A few days ago Canonical announced that they would switch Firefox to snap because that's the only way Mozilla will allow them to redistribute it.
I'm sure nothing could be worse. You're welcome to volunteer to get either procedure, both, or neither. I would recommend elective medical procedures stay optional.
It isn't that similar. Most languages actually have solutions that the community are pushing together. Python alone bungled a major version change and then refused to endorse a package management system for so long.
Yeah I can see that Brooklyn has a lot that are very dated (2-5 years old).

I guess I didn't explain well that some of these pianos "no longer exist" but I find it really useful to still have that information because these locations essentially let you know that if there is a piano, it might be in this spot.

New York in general is really a difficult place to map because it changes so fast.
If a company cares about their employees getting to know each other - and they should - and they are distributed, they should budget for travel for them to meet in a central place - not withstanding a worldwide pandemic.

No, cameras and “virtual happy hours” don’t cut it.
I was hired remotely 6/2020 and the rest of my division is remote. I didn’t meet any of my coworkers until 9/2022. I didn’t meet most of my teammates until even later (long story, there is distinction). But this was completely due to Covid not company culture.

It’s made a world of difference. My manager just said that if any of us feel that we need to get together for a few days, he has no problem with us meeting at any of the corporate offices around the US, just give him a heads up.
I know you were joking. I meant my comment in a lighthearted way too. Maybe I should use more emoticons :)
This episode of the lex fridman podcast gives a good overview of how python's scientific computing community developed. https://youtu.be/gFEE3w7F0ww
Oh god, the atrocities I have seen colleagues do with MATLAB scripts…
Sounds like a high school class graduation project. Bring your own shovel.
Yep, depends on the quality of the wiring and how many other noisy things are on the circuit

I've had great several hundred meg connections fall on their face when the microwave was turned on
I would think no. The office doesn't make much sense unless it's multiple days a week. Do we really expect workers to be productive using their home desk setup 4 days, and then some overpriced-but-still-somehow-lackluster office space 1 day? They'll just slack off on the in-office day. Granted, that day can be "the big meeting day" but that just feeds the proliferation of pointless meetings. If you can fill a day full of meetings, something is wrong with your process (and in software, it means you're doing waterfall, btw).
> I honestly don’t know if HR does help in these situations, but I like to think they could schedule grief counseling

This sounds cheesy, but EAP (employee assistance programs) are one benefit. Me and my partner recently did hospice care for my mother-in-law.

Hospice care is physiologically and emotionally draining. After she passed I was in a bad mental health state (I have bipolar that’s well-managed, but long-term, high-stress situations can still trigger problems).

I wound up phoning the EAP hotline and trauma dumping on a random therapist for an hour. Sometimes just having someone to talk to is the difference between spiraling out of control and being able to take care of a mental health situation.
The greatness of Lisp -at least when it comes to end-user empowerment- and (I think) the only differentiating factor that most other languages have still not caught up to, is the cybernetic philosophy with its roots in Licklider (man-computer symbiosis) and Engelbart.

Building an environment that strongly and uncompromisingly expresses this philosophy at its core is a serious undertaking in terms of time investment.
Emacs has been in continuous development for 37 years and while it is still not as good as Genera, it's certainly "good enough" for lots of people and definitely captures the spark of this philosophy.

In the Common Lisp world, we've had plenty of tries (MCL, Hemlock, McCLIM) but they've all failed to get people to coalesce and generate progresss.

Maybe the fact that Emacs exists is a curse in that people realize the barrier they'll have to clear to make something substantially better and decide to devote their energies into more easily realizable efforts.
Already in the 80s the Lisp Machine OS had > 1 MLOC code lines with support for programming in the large. The development environment was networked from the start. A server keeps the definition of things on the network: machines, users, file systems, networks, gateways, printers, databases, mailers, ... The source code and documentation is usually shared in the team and versioned via a common file server.

Nowadays, there are large applications written by groups/teams, which are worked on for three or more decades. For example the ACL2 theorem prover has its roots in the 70s and is used/maintained until today for users in the chip industry.

Common Lisp was especially designed for the development and production use of complex programs. The military at that time wanted to have a single Lisp dialect for those - often applications came with their own Lisp, which made deployment difficult. A standard language for projects was then required.

These were usually developed by teams in the range of 5 - 100 people. Larger teams are rare.
Yeah, it's the bane of written communication: it's hard to convey emotions properly
Perhaps this is true in the hyper-competitive world of silicon valley startups where it's better to ask for forgiveness (from a judge) than permission, but outside of sv I have never, ever experienced a startup actively exploiting a competitor's systems -- I can't think of a single example. Signing up to a competitor to understand what they're doing, and sometimes cribbing ideas, sure, all the time, but hacking?
Had not thought about that! I want to set up my old Lenovo X220 with a minimal distro and was thinking of using Alpine + Sway. Using Flatpak for all the "regular" apps more than makes up for the apps not present in Alpines repos.
Hehe, yes that's a classic.
An unappreciated means of code reuse under *nix is the static and dynamic library. This seems to be the go-to whenever you need something more involved than simply reusing a full binary via pipes.
Except for the lazy. Gaining access to that higher quality streamed source is much more labor intensive (as far as using it for a source to pirate). A DVD is pretty much rippable by a 5th grader doing the math on pencil an paper ;-)
I do want to argue that you should be vegan. The meat industry is very cruel to animals, and it is nearly impossible to source truly "cruelty free" meat despite marketing saying otherwise. Dairy is far worse, with cows kept in small cages, constantly impregnated to keep producing milk, their calves pulled away from them and slaughtered for veal. Eggs are also horrible, with egg chickens living miserable lives, even "free range" ones, and the male chicks being culled by being thrown into a grinder.

Furthermore, water usage, water table pollution, and greenhouses gasses from animal husbandry are a significant chunk of the pie when it comes to climate change.
Spot on with my experience! Much of our work was helping them manage the project and figure out how to work with us. And someone went on sabbatical, and then someone dropped their program, and someone else left for another school, and someone was stuck managing the program for a semester who had literally no time or experience doing that, etc. It's a Dynamic Environment. lol.

There is no other language I have used that makes it as easy to read code from somebody else, especially where that contributor is likely to be a domain expert with very limited programming experience. It's not actually my favourite language anymore (hello Scheme!) but if you want me to do work in that environment, I'll reach for Python first.
Considering the climate in India, I imagine the situation is a bit different there than in western countries. I think raw milk can be safe to drink if it is cooled down immediately during the milking process and kept refrigerated all throughout until it is drunk only a few hours later. Personally though, I think it's natural only for calves and babies to drink milk (in particular of their own mother) and I wouldn't mind a bit if the practice went away.
The average user has little need of function keys. The guys who use keyboards a lot (which is probably the majority of people who will seek out and pay the price for mechanical keyboards) often use software that has stuff mapped to those function keys.
It produces native code. Confusing since GUI and Native usually means controls.
I do most of the service work for a team of 25 - half developers and half non technical product people (art/design). Saas is substantially easier than writing it yourself or even running it yourself.

Github costs $4/user/month, sentry costs $25/month, and 2 digitalocean k8s clusters costs $20/month. For $175/month I can have a decelopment environment with basically 0 maintenance for a team of 25 people, including monitoring and alerting for my app.

Compared to running a local gitlab instance, deploying OpenTelemetry and running my own k8s cluster in aws, it's a complete no brainer to buy SAAS.
Don’t worry too much about this topic. Having sex is a requirement for it to be relevant.
This could have been avoided by not having your entire business be at the mercy of a single company and whether any of its one million agents makes a mistake.
Shredding a pile of evidence is legally actionable. Shredding any documents left laying about after one week every week is a standard security process.
Raygui – A simple and easy-to-use immediate-mode GUI library
Any required, installed software is a red flag for me. I've been working for an all-remote web shop for the last decade. They don't care what software we use to create our deliverables. It's our own software on our own hardware, and as long as we can do the work, it's up to us. The only time a particular browser is required is if we have a browser-specific bug. (I'm not sure there's a choice for the VPN authenticator, but there is for pretty much everything else.)

There are a few SAAS apps that we all use to communicate. But except for sysops we work on our local machines most of the time. I find this to be a wonderful perk, and would probably more than hesitate to lose it. Hopefully this model and the growth of remote work puts a serious crimp in Island's market size.
It's a game of chess, not poker.

What do you do now? What do you show them? There's many win conditions.

Sign up for their service in return, tell them, may the best man win. Think also that winning is for the benefit of your customers, and for each competitor to be the best possible.

As long as you're not competing directly against yourself ie. stolen IP, it'll be fine. On that note, you ought to conceal some amount of your source in some way.

Don't be completely open source, have some small thing that can't be copied. The intent of being open source counts. One good way to do this is to have a more efficient algorithm than what's available publicly (talk to me) and then your open source offering has the regular algorithm, but your closed source advantage is a much more efficient algorithm that represents a competitive advantage. Like say multiplication, simple example, suppose you're working with crypto and want fast multiplication, if you can do it faster with some hot algo, you aren't forced to share that, users copying your source can use the run-of-the-mill algorithm. It's the same thing, exact same thing, same input same output, just that you happen to have a faster algo you keep to yourself. You don't even have to tell people! Still open source! Anybody can run all the code!

Because it's strictly necessary to have IP, or tech if you want to call it tech, that can't be copied directly and trivially. Mark Lemley at Stanford says so in his IP law class: "Suppose there's two competitors, one does all the work of creating or inventing something new. The other just copies it. Costs nothing, it's a sure thing. I'd love to be that guy!" It's not as unreasonable as the internet makes it seem.

So you just have to know the system because there are gotchas, like with any law that tries to be fair. So for one, for USPTO, deadlines are deadlines. Death. You missed the deadline? You cannot ask forgiveness for your mistake, they're completely unsympathetic (and it's because people try to hack them so hard). So actually becoming familiar with IP law, and then routing your business in the direction of what you can protect.

Analog is another form of protection, that's very common in high-precision manufacturing in Germany, basically you have an industrial Excalibur in your factory that your competitors don't have.

And what I would do is, sign up to your competitor's service in return, and try it out. Also: try to differentiate somehow. I created a theorematic pricing algorithm and the idea was you just can't charge the same price as a bunch of other people, you have to be different, undercut or mark up, whatever it takes to be alone in the price curve. And when you do go up or down, adjust your product accordingly and according to the specific needs of customers who want to pay that price for it.

That algo is also for sale.
YouTube's search experience became so bad that I can't find videos that I watched 10 years or more ago. And I can't tell whether it's because their search algorithm & UI went downhill or because the videos have been removed.
>In the meantime, approximately 793 million people are starving around the world, according to the U.N. That makes up about 11 percent of the population.

https://borgenproject.org/how-many-people-are-starving-aroun...

It's true isn't it?
Yes, it's fun to make fun of people from other disciplines. And it's fun to assume their work is easy. Or rote memorization of muscles when presumably they are similar across mammals (after all, you wouldn't start a physics presentation in grad school by explaining what protons, neutrons and electrons were.) And it's also fun to learn by doing by getting into someone's lab.

However, especially given his "Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you've had four years of biology", it's worth pointing out that in the same story he did work in a lab. And in that same story he fucked up in a lab. And if he hadn't, the professor he was working with would have published first and been the one to get the Nobel Prize instead of Watson and Crick. [Edit: The beating out Watson and Crick was something Feynman wrote in his book.]

Sure, it worked out for Feynman. But his arrogance kinda fucked up the professor who gave him low level lab work.

I still highly recommend the book this is from, and made me really envy his mind and his career.
I think many people have conjectures, such as this one, but I don't think it's a tech problem, or a "Lisp is too powerful for its own good" problem. It's a "people aren't writing software" problem. History has demonstrated umpteen times that developing large, sophisticated, maintained, and maintainable projects in Lisp is entirely and demonstrably possible. Modern Common Lisp coding practices gravitate toward modular, reusable libraries through proper modules via ASDF packages ("systems") and Common Lisp namespaces ("packages").
Yeah, the question is whether google makes sense as a mail provided once you've decided that you needed to pay because of that feature.

If you're a company and don't want to manually handle email provisioning? Sure, why not. If you're an individual, Google isn't great. You could have a decent feature set along with great customer support elsewhere.
In general, the people who write and/or design the code are the ones who knows how to best test the code. These are the people who have thought most deeply about the code that is written, not only in the code itself but also how it fits in the larger context.

Good QA is hard to find, and in general are underpaid. In my opinion, good QA is like good security researchers. They know how to break the system. These people are invaluable.

As a developer, you should want to write tests and encourage people on your team to love it. Good tests let you sleep at night and enjoy your weekends. If you perception is that "writing these tests are a waste of my time", I think that's actually not in your best interest.
Say what you want about systemd, but it is still Free Software.
Rethink Priorities 2021 impact and 2022 strategy
No.

A bribe is a payment to get them to do something improper.

A grease payment is to get them to do what they should have done anyway.

They look the same on the surface but they're very different underneath. The former is illegal, the latter is legal (but good luck trying to show it's not a bribe when it happens in the US.)
Also lemons, broccoli, and pretty much any modern vegetable or fruit - humans have been selectively growing plants since humans have had the knowledge of how to grow things period.
Serialization doesn't go away because you still need it for network connections. Data formats useful for sending messages over the network can also be useful for saving things to disk. These formats should be OS and language-independent and have rules for backward compatibility.

Consider how hard it would be to replicate a git repository if it's just a bunch of ad-hoc classes defined in one language.

Protobufs are one design that addresses these concerns. There are others. There is an impedence mismatch, but maybe this would be better addressed through languages that have better support for serialization?
Not GP, but I’m using pandas daily to build up a BI platform within a financial institution. Compared to Matlab and even Fortran it has some issues IMO:

* why distinguish between Series and DataFrame? just give me an interface for m x n matrices or even higher dimensions.

* pure vs. in-place operations. not such a big fan of having multiple versions of the same function, e.g. a more pythonic

df[“my_col”] = series

vs. a more functional

df.assign({“my_col”: series})

; I’d rather have everything like the latter to be able to more easily have best practices in place.

That brings me to another point: if we keep everything purely functional, then python’s syntax is making things a bit awkward. Where in something like JS you could just put every function call with its dot on a new line without the need to assign, in Python this requires putting line break characters or wrapping it in round brackets. This is one place where a language with explicit assignment terminators (semicolons) are a bit cleaner to work with.

All that being said scipy is still a great choice to have both system programming and numerical business logic in one language.
You quote "hustle hard, increase velocity, measure and optimize everything", but none of those words even appear in the article. In fact, the culture described seems to be the opposite. Did we read the same article?
I agree it could be part of OSM, but keeping it up-to-date is really tricky. Piano locations are impermanent structures and information can become outdated in just a few weeks. It would take a lot of effort to keep it up-to-date and there are very few people willing to put in that effort (i.e. "few" because the union of groups of people that love public pianos and like editing OSM is small).
bin/publish.sh is better than remembering whether the service is on kubernetes, containers or a raw ec2 box, and "do I need to restart the service after update or just wait"
>clothing with no petroleum based material in it.

That's a far cry from the claim "Clothing is mostly plastic fibre". Having 5%-20% polyester is not the same as being "mostly plastic".
Oh that sucks. Yeah Qt has gotten really aggressive with their licensing headaches. They broke so many of our CI scripts when they made it mandatory for you to log in to use their Qt installer even for online version.

And yep. Relying on just Google can be a death sentence. I was hoping to use Android things for a quick demo last month only to find out that it is discontinued. What made me look at flutter was because companies like Sony are driving forward it's development on embedded space ( https://github.com/sony/flutter-embedded-linux ). Tbh I am still looking for something that was as nice as QtQuick on embedded devices, but with a permissive license.

So other than electron, what options do you see moving forward? All i see is slint ( https://github.com/slint-ui/slint/ ).
What kind of a company doesn't have at least one sysadmin, I feel like that's kind of a critical position for maintaining systems?
It is just the tip of the iceberg. They have FCC approval and plans for nearly 12,000 (as of 2019), and are considering a possible later extension to 42,000.
> That only applies if both the sender and receiver are in the EU.

I'm under the impression that GDPR Article 3 (2) does apply in the case at hand, which is marketing emails sent by a US company to an EU resident.
I'm interested to know when Western nations have punched the Ukraine in the ribs.
It's hidden in /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications/DVD Player.app

on my MacBook Pro 16" M1 Pro
i worked for amazon while the banana stand was a thing. i also own an antique geiger counter. a couple days after it opened, i walked up to the stand, waved the tube around the bananas, made a worried look and walked off.
That being said, I was wondering how many people actually find the Snap system and ecosystem useful. Reverse engineering snapd (which is licensed under GPLv3) and snap app format in order to create a compatible server would be a fun project.
State of OSS Monetization
Hi OSS Developers,
I hope that you can help me understand the state of OSS Monetization better. I’m interested if and how you monetize - or try to monetize - your projects.

To get a better picture of the current state of OSS monetization I’ve set-up a quick survey to evaluate different monetization approaches and what OSS developers would require to work full- or part-time on their OSS projects.

The survey with 16 questions will take about 5 minutes and is aimed at OSS developers / maintainers:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSegX_yKiGtXamKrVfg_1ioVWZ3Xdvtc3usZYn7p20dysHiaGQ/viewform

Best regards,
Joerg

PS: if you want to get the Survey Results you can join an email list at: https://mailchi.mp/8e59bb1c13db/state-of-oss-monetization